People occasionally ask me where I come up with the ideas for my blogs. Well, like most people, it is usually something I experience that gets the blog juices flowing. Today, that “something” landed, quite literally, on my doorstep.

I was working in my home office overlooking the snowy, gray landscape with the junior-high kids dispersing from the bus stop, when my doorbell rang. “Who could that be in the middle of the day?” I wondered aloud. There wasn’t a UPS or FedEx truck in sight.

I welcomed the break so I shrugged and ventured downstairs to see who was there. It was a nice-looking 40-something gentleman with a briefcase. I figured he was with the census bureau or something so I opened the door and asked him to come in “so the cats wouldn’t go out”.

It turns out he was a Financial Advisor with a local investment firm and that he was “new in town” and looking to determine what people in our neighborhood were most concerned about when it came to their finances. A-hah! A sales guy.

I was smiling as I listened and relished the pure irony of the situation when I could no longer refrain from interjecting. “That’s funny,” I said. “You know what I do for a living?” “I teach financial services professionals to more effectively use the telephone to prospect, set appointments, and leverage referrals to build their businesses. There was a somewhat awkward pause. Then he said, “Oh, well…I do that sometimes but I find that people will sometimes open up and share if I come to their doorstep unannounced.

While I appreciate his trying something out of the ordinary as a sales approach to stand out from the masses and avoid the complexity of the “do not call” regulations, I wonder how long he will keep up this practice when in light of the current economy, more and more households are empty while everyone is at work or school. His knock-to-answer ratio has to be dismal and his knock-to-close even worse. When I asked him how many doorbells he had to ring to find someone home, and when he did, how often he closed some business, he said he didn’t really know.

I listened politely, took his information, and very genuinely wished him luck, promising to keep him in mind.

Whatever your sales approach: social media, email, telephone call, direct mail, or door-knocking, it is critical that you measure the effectiveness by documenting how many attempts, how many connects, and how many appointments and/or sales come from a particular approach.

Do you measure your “knock-to-win” activity? If not, how do you know how many “knocks” you will need to make every day, week, month or year to reach your sales goals?

Copyright Telemasters, Inc. 2010