You are relentlessly dialing hundreds of numbers every day. When you’re directed to voicemail, you’re religiously following up. You pull your chin up and keep calling even when you get rejected because you know it’s a numbers game.
However, you wish you could pinpoint why you’re failing to connect with the decision-makers who authorize the purchase. Only if you had more information than relying on your prospects' tones and verbal cues!
That’s where cold canvassing comes into the picture. Instead of picking up the phone, it entails approaching potential customers on the field and knocking on their doors.
The tactic is extremely effective for collecting valuable info about your prospects and can help you differentiate between suspects, prospects, leads, and opportunities. It’s a great addition to your sales skills and paves the way for closing more business and becoming a top-performing sales rep.
In this article, I’ll show you a step-by-step process to execute your first cold canvassing campaign. Let’s begin with the basics.
What is Cold Canvassing in Sales?
Generally, the goal of a canvassing campaign is to introduce your company, collect information about your consumers, and understand their needs. However, you also engage them in your sales process and open opportunities for selling down the road.
Here are the top three benefits of cold canvassing over cold calling.
Psst... Need more leads in your pipeline? Dive into our article on real estate prospecting.
1. Establish Rapport
If you like meeting people, cold canvassing is a great opportunity to ease your prospects. It relieves you of the stigma that’s attached to cold calls: “What are they trying to sell me?”
After a casual conversation with your prospects and their guards are down, they might share their requirements and objections to buying your product.
Even if you don’t find a selling opportunity right now, meeting people lets you build relationships that can later materialize. If they like you, you might even get referrals!
2. You Can Learn More About Your Prospects
Telephone prospecting is limited to verbal communication, and prospects expect being sold products on cold calls. However cold canvassing is an indirect approach that relies on face to face interaction. It means you get to observe the body language of your prospects.
Office visits are also a great opportunity to learn about the environment of companies that you can later use for framing personalized sales pitches.
3. More Revenue
If many of your target prospects are concentrated in a specific region, then you can walk/drive and connect with more prospects deeply in a day. As you hit up more companies and establish long-term relationships, you might make more revenue than if you only relied on cold calling.
Are you convinced that cold canvassing is a legitimate sales tactic and can help you sell more? Thought so. But you might have additional objections: does it work for your kind of business? When should you prefer it over cold calling? The next section tackles such queries.
Frequently Asked Questions About Cold Canvassing
Here are the answers to the most common concerns regarding cold canvassing.
Will cold canvassing work for your kind of business?
If you locate your prospects in high concentration in a territory, cold canvassing will work well. If your prospects are spread out, walking or driving will become time-consuming, and the tactic won’t be as effective. Of course, the size of an opportunity plays a role, too. Generally, cold canvassing is used for selling insurance policies or other financial instruments.
What are the disadvantages of cold canvassing prospecting methods?
Depending on the temperament and work schedule, dropping by your prospects' offices might come across as aggressive and turn them off. Also, if you’re visiting residential areas, you might be denied entry in gated societies. Your cold canvassing campaigns can also unexpectedly fail if the weather plays spoilsport.
What’s the difference between cold calling and cold canvassing?
Cold calling involves prospecting individuals over the phone and selling your products/services to them even when they haven’t expressed an interest. Cold canvassing is also a prospecting tactic but entails approaching your prospects door-to-door at their office or place of residence. Canvassing campaigns can also aim to collect information about prospects rather than direct selling.
Is cold canvassing legal?
In the US, there are no laws to prevent doorstep selling. A salesperson is entitled to free speech for commercial purposes. However, you might need to apply for permits and licenses for your business here. You must also adhere to the Federal Trade Commission’s three-day cooling-off rule applicable for sales over $25.
What is “no solicitation?”
If a business or residential area has posted a “no solicitation” sign (generally on their windows, doors, trees, or property entrance), they do not accept walk-ins from salespeople. You should respect the privacy request such prospects pose, or you might face trespassing charges.
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Are there any alternatives to cold canvassing?
If dropping by your prospects’ offices sounds scary, you can try the following prospecting alternatives for generating sales.
- Answer the questions of your prospects in online communities,
- Offer free consultation sessions in your area of expertise,
- Cold email your prospects with proven cold email templates,
- Ask for referrals from existing clients,
- Launch your content marketing machine,
- Inbound market,
- Speak at industry conferences,
- Upsell to your current customers,
- Warm call prospects who have completed your lead generation form.
I hope that all your doubts regarding cold canvassing are now cleared. In the next section, we will discuss how to execute the tactic.
How to Execute a Cold Canvassing Campaign: 5 Simple Steps
If you’re a sales leader, here are the five simple steps to launch a cold canvassing campaign.
Step 1: Assess the Areas that Have a High Concentration of Prospects
Sales technology has allowed SDRs to sell to anyone located anywhere. However, for cold canvassing, it makes sense to allocate geographies and ensure that your reps are spread out to ensure they cover more ground.
Do you want to target new geography and expand your business? Then, take help from this Wikipedia list of companies categorized by state by Wikipedia or this compilation of the top SaaS companies in the US by Crunchbase.
Monroe Systems for Business built a personalized system using Smart Views in Close to examine their territory-level data granularly.
To build a highly productive local sales machine, research and assess the areas where you plan to send your sales reps. Then prequalify the prospects by looking at their similarities with your existing customers and choose the areas where you find a decent number of companies.
Step 2: Calculate the Costs, Set Goals, and Prepare Your Team
Once you’ve performed an initial assessment of geographies where you want to execute cold canvassing, it’s time to calculate the approximate cost to the company. Here are the aspects you should take into account:
- Salary and commission: Assuming your sales reps are on fixed pay, consider their monthly payment and other incentives for touching stretch goals.
- Travel costs: Does your territory require traveling by air or commuting by car? If you’re covering these costs, consider the cost of fuel, food, driving, and airfare (if required).
- Miscellaneous: If your team member meets with a prospect in a cafe, they might have to pay for the coffee. Also, consider whether your team will use sales ops, CRM, or other technology tools to organize the workflow and take such costs into account.
Once you know the cost, you can involve your team members and get a realistic estimate of the number of visits possible in their respective territories in a day.
Considering the average closing rate from last month’s cold calls/emails, set realistic sales goals for your whole team. Besides offering commissions for generating sales, incentivize your sales reps to collect valuable information and label suspects vs. leads vs. prospects. It will save you time down the road.
Sales leaderboards can be a great way to incentivize your reps to perform the actions that ultimately drive revenue.
Our inside sales CRM has built-in customizable leaderboards that are automatically updated in real-time. You can easily create leaderboards for your sales teams, whether the activities you want to incentivize are calls made, emails sent, text messages received, leads created, opportunities won, or many other factors.
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Also, instruct your team members to research their prospects, practice their sales scripts, and structure compelling product demos. Let your SDRs solicit appointments in their territories and plan the order of their visits.
Remember, canvassing is a physical meeting, and body language plays a crucial role. If your sales reps are inexperienced, remind them to harness their strengths. Even if they get nervous, they can turn it into empowering excitement. Remind your team to focus on powerfully delivering their message instead of worrying about the exact words.
Step 3: Decide the Information You’ll Document in Your Cold Canvassing Campaigns
If you’re doing many cold calls, you can record cold calls, get external feedback, and even review your sales call recordings regularly. However, you can’t have a replica of your face-to-face interactions when you're physically meeting your prospects. So, you need to document your conversations manually.
Making mental notes of the info you would like to collect from canvassing is useful. Here are a few valuable things:
- Current organizational challenges and objections in buying your product: Ask your prospects questions and establish some basic context. What’s the size and kind of their organization? How will they evaluate your offerings? What are the current needs and pain points of the organization? Also, try soft pitching your product to gauge their awareness level and note down any sales objections (and address them).
- Key decision-makers: Identifying your influencers, blockers, and buyers can prove useful in closing the deal, especially for large organizations. If possible, meet these decision-makers and establish rapport with them.
- Highlights of your conversations and contact details: Whoever you meet at the prospect’s premise, you should write down the key points from all of your interactions (with some context on their roles at the organization). It would also help to note down the contact information of every individual you meet.
If anyone requests a follow-up appointment to discuss the product in more detail, ask them for a convenient date/time and mark it on your calendars.
- Order details: Managed to close a deal on the spot? Awesome! Don’t forget to note down the company's requirements thoroughly.
- Other essential info: As you visit your prospects, keenly observe the intricacies of their work culture, technology tools, other products they use, and anything related to what you sell. Collect any information that might be helpful in your sales process and help you personalize your pitch later.
Close lets you quickly organize information about your prospects, leads, and customers.
Once you finalize the info you plan to collect during canvassing, move on to the next step: get out there!
Step 4: Go Out on the Field, Interact with Your Prospects, and Collect Valuable Information
Now that you’ve prepped your SDRs, laid out clear sales goals, and established the qualitative data they need to collect, it’s time to mobilize your team in their respective territories.
If you’ve allocated adequate resources to your team (including sanctioning a few tools that we will examine in the next section) and your team members have put in the work, then your sales plan should execute smoothly.
Close lets you manage your team seamlessly. You can maintain a live document of the lead status, communicate internally about them, integrate with Slack, send email reports, and much more.
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Once your sales reps gain intel about the companies they meet, it’s time to put it to use.
Step 5: Weave Information Gathered from Cold Canvassing in Your Sales
During canvassing, SDRs might come up with valuable insights about your prospects and customers. Did a prospect express interest in your product/service, but your team member could not close the deal? Then, drop them an email and build a deeper relationship. Try drafting a personalized proposal that matches their budget and meets their current needs.
Maybe you cracked a relationship dynamic that could lead to cross-selling opportunities. Then, follow up with your contact person and request an introduction to decision-makers to secure the sale.
What if you built a decent rapport with the contact person at a company, but they aren’t a fit right now? Drop them a line saying hello and request them to refer you to their network. Don’t let your efforts go to waste!
Five Handy Tools for Successful Cold Canvassing
Before we conclude, here are five tools to facilitate smooth cold canvassing.
1. Close
Our all-in-one sales CRM will let you manage your leads and prospects lists, call/email them, and organize important information about them in a single place. It’s a great way to communicate internally with your team and manage the cold canvassing campaign smoothly.
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2. Google Maps
If the territory allocated to your SDRs is new or unfamiliar to them, you don’t want them to waste their time. Tell them to pin the locations of the businesses they plan to visit during the day and have them ready the night before so that they can quickly navigate using Google Maps.
3. Spotio
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The tool streamlines appointment booking and combines sales intelligence with territory management. It also easily allows you to access your territory sales plan.
4. Fullcast
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This is a tremendous end-to-end operation tool for sales planning. It lets you build your go-to-market plan, design segments and territories, and track the performance of your sales team.
5. Evernote
If you're in the very early stages of building out your sales teams, SDRs can use Evernote to make text notes during meetings on their smartphones. If they build a repeatable process for what they will do and how they will conduct themselves, Evernote also lets them create checklists and templates. The app can also save pictures and audio clips.
Once your team member collects information, they can organize it using tags, notebooks, hashtags, and more.
However, once your sales process matures, you will want to switch to a more sophisticated system. Any decent sales CRM will allow you to add notes and interaction history directly alongside a prospect's contact information.
Alternative: Small Notebook
If your team members prefer to keep the classic notebook with them, then it will work just as well. However, they will have to rely on their memory a lot for recollecting visual info.
Feel free to use more sales management tools if you’ve specialized requirements.
Transform Your Sales Strategy with Cold Canvassing
Think cold canvassing is a dinosaur sales tactic on the brink of extinction? Think again. While surely not a suitable sales channel for every business, many companies are succeeding because their sales team is knocking on doors.
It's worth remembering the adage when everyone zigs, zag! This can undoubtedly be true regarding cold canvassing in B2B sales.
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