The Challenges
Door-to-door sales is an essential prospecting method for certain types of businesses looking to increase their visibility. However, this old prospecting method is time-consuming, and its conversion rate can be low considering the time spent. While a phone call lasts about 30 seconds, knocking on each door takes around 2 minutes, resulting in contacting 4 times fewer prospects by the end of the day.
To compensate for this loss of time, it’s crucial to improve efficiency by pre-qualifying leads through effective preliminary work, thus maximizing the prospecting route. This requires a good understanding of the target customer base and the area to be prospected. A sales representative typically has no trouble identifying their customer profile.
Generally, the challenge is to identify demographic and economic data to geographically locate their clientele. In the context of selling materials for interior renovations, this sales representative targets new homeowners moving into older properties. Ideally, they should know if these properties have been identified as needing renovations. Given that they sell materials for interior renovations, it can be inferred that these new homeowners would be more interested if they work in trades or if they are young with modest incomes.
Having analyzed the customer profile through data groups, how can these data be found?
The Solution
CIV.GEO: Supporting Door-to-Door Sales Prospecting
To find this data, there are several accessible and free solutions available today.
Statistics Canada freely publishes demographic data about the Canadian population. Through the Canadian census, conducted every four years, you can access precise data down to the street level. Census data is the most reliable information available.
The downside of Statistics Canada is that the website is difficult to navigate. Additionally, comparing several geographical areas can be challenging due to the vast amount of data available. In our sales representative’s case, they needed to cover an area of 50,000 residents in Laval, which translates to over 80 geographical zones to compare!
Another free solution for this commercial activity would be to visit real estate websites. Often, buildings on the same street were constructed in the same years, with similar standards and likely similar renovation issues. Real estate websites provide data on the construction dates of properties and show where the most properties for sale are located.
However, this work can be time-consuming, and you may not necessarily have access to up-to-date demographic data when it’s provided by these websites.
At Civision, we offer with CivGEO a map that can cover all of Canada, allowing users to view demographic, real estate, and economic data down to the street level. The sales representative logged onto our platform and only needed a map once to identify the streets to prospect within their area of 50,000 residents.
To tailor the price to their needs, they opted for a one-time package and targeted only the dissemination areas corresponding to their prospecting zone. They then examined the areas where properties are most dilapidated and oldest. They further detailed this initial exploration by looking at where homeowners and individuals working in trades are located. Since the main challenge of door-to-door sales is the number of doors that open, they finalized their research by examining the age of these homeowners and the foot traffic per hour. This way, they could estimate the most likely hours to meet their prospects.
Result
In just 5 minutes, the sales representative was able to define priority areas for their prospecting, export their map, and establish a route according to the time of day.
The goal of a field prospector is to maximize qualified leads and sales. To achieve this, knowing their territory will undoubtedly save them time and increase efficiency.
If you delegate this work to a trusted third party who can quickly provide the necessary information, our advice is to carefully consider the gain/cost ratio.
Technology companies often argue that they can save you time. However, ensure that the tool is simple and intuitive enough to genuinely save you money.
Let’s consider a theoretical example: A sales representative spent 35 hours preparing for their door-to-door prospecting to find the necessary information, compile it, and analyze it. If they are paid $40 an hour, this results in a direct cost of $1,400 and indirect costs likely three times greater due to missed opportunities: $4,200.
A trusted third party charging $250 for their service might seem like a good deal: a potential $4,000 saving. However, if the tool is not intuitive, the sales representative will take time retrieving their valuable information. If they don’t give up in frustration, the tool must save the sales representative at least 7 hours of work for it to be profitable for the company.
Building simple and intuitive data analysis tools to assist decision-makers is an intensive task. Digital tools are generally not designed with the user experience in mind. At Civision, our goal is to create intuitive data analysis tools accessible to everyone, without the need for technical skills or prior training.
