Doors and Hangtags, Slings and Arrows

[maxburton]

I started putting door hangers out today. I'd appreciate hearing from all y'all about your experiences with them. How well do they work? How long does it take to put them out? Do people chase you off their property with firearms? How do you pick which streets to canvass, and which to skip?

So far, I've only actually run into a couple people. One wanted a hangtag, one didn't. I wonder if I should actually be knocking on doors and selling, but I'm shy! What do you think?

 

[ATH]

I have not done it, but talked with a friend who is very good with marketing. He suggested door hangers.

I think just haning and leaving is better for 2 reasons:
*Most people will feel bothered if you knock on the door. They can easily look at the door hanger. You might get a sale from the folks you don't annoy, but the rest will always remember you as the annoying guy. If they save the door hanger, they will have your name w/o negative conatation
*Time. You can get MANY more door hangers out in the same amount of time compared to knocking on doors. Either one is a low percentage sale. The door hangers are likely a lower percentage sale, but I would rather have 2% of 100 contacts (2 sales) than 5% of 20 contacts (1 sale)...

As an aside, I think "door to door" salesmen have a bad reputation at times. Door hangers don't leave that flavor.

 

[M.D. Vaden]

It will work.

And put them on doors where "no soliciting" signs are anyhow - just don't knock.

I get a lot of work from flyers, and notice that those included homes with the signs by the door.

Put it at every house you can.

IMPORTANT - learn fast how to recognize rental neighborhoods, from those with a lot of owners living in the homes.

There are clues, like number and cost of cars, how the yards are cared for, etc..

 

[Sunrise Guy]

Yep! Put 'em out. I get a good deal of business from them. I don't leave them at "No Soliciting" homes only because I once got a call from one that was kind of intense. Your hit rate will be around 2-3% if the areas you go to are like ones I've done. On days that are slow, one of the fellows I work with and I try to put out one hundred on a given street. We usually get 2-3 calls and book most of 'em. Good luck!

 

[rfwoodvt]

Definitely worth the effort.

We lined up a whole bunch of work that way one winter.

For us the formula was simple. Find a neighborhood with lots of trees (not always easy in former farm land) then walk the streets and go to a door that had obvious tree work needs.

We'd knock and if someone answered we gave them an introduction hanger. And basically said we'll be doing work in the surrounding neighborhood over the next few weeks and wanted to let them know who we were and to please call us if they would like someone to check out their XXXXXXX (or whatever it was that made us stop)

If nobody answered we left a generic flyer referring to the fact that it had been brought to our attention that they have some tree issues they'd want us to check.

We ended up with a 1% to 4% response rate and closed better than half the sales. Of course once we started a job a lot of neighbors "remembered" us and either called or stopped by. Out of every 100 flyers we'd end up with 2 to 4 actual jobs within the week and up to 6 within the month.

Since we were "vacationing" out of state and working to support our Vacation this worked well...we'd put out 300-400 flyers every other week and had enough jobs for the 3 months we were there to pay for everything. It also allowed us to "commute" home every couple of weeks to take care of business here.

We tried several other direct methods including windsheild surveys with mailings to the addresses we saw and we tried putting a flyer on every door. both of these were time consuming, the windsheild survey resulted in 2 calls per 1000 and no sales and the everydoor resulted in less than 1 per 100.

the last method we tried was to blanket mail a neighborhood. This was marginallly more effective than the "every door" campaign. Far less time consuming but way more $$$.

Still to do it again, I'd probably do the blanket mailing letting them know we are coming then do a focused door to door.

Its good way to kill a day but a great way to learn a neighborhood and make your presence known.

A smart approach may be to identify those neighborhoods you want to target, do a blanket mailing letting them know you are coming and then schedule a day about a week later to go door to door.

BTW violation of a no solicitation notice might lead to a tresspass issue or other legal hassles. Not to mention bad WOM. If you think you want to risk bad WOM by ignoring a no-solicit notice then have at it...