Canvassing: Love It, Hate It
As contractors try to retrieve some of the business they have lost from Do Not Call tele-marketing restrictions, many have turned to canvassing.
Metropolitan Siding & Windows, in Maryland, for instance, fields 56 canvassers out of its two sales offices and canvassing is its most effective lead source. And Virginia-based Melani Bros. did canvassing “poorly” until it hired a new canvassing manager, who now has Melani’s 7 canvassers finding leads that produce $400,000 in monthly sales. American Home Design budgeted $100,000 for canvassing in 2005, and owner Don Bruce expects to have a 10-person team in place by the year’s end.
But Bruce, like other contractors, is ambivalent about this practice. “I hate to do it, but we have to,” he says.
They have good reason to be wary, based on the recent experience of Patterson Home Improvement, in Jacksonville, Fla., where success with canvassing has been decidedly mixed.
Owner Rex Patterson notes that for 10 years he has used a husband-and-wife canvassing team, whom he describes as “seasoned pros that don’t need any managing.” The team brings in $800,000 in sales annually. For a while Patterson also employed a second team, comprised of 10 to 15 high school kids, that was far less successful. He recalls these canvassers as difficult to manage, and the leads they brought in as difficult to convert to sales. More problematic, the group’s constant turnover affected the experience modification rate for the company’s unemployment insurance. “We wound up paying $10,000 in unemployment taxes because of that,” he says.
Patterson says that he’s since eliminated that team and hasn’t needed to rely on canvassing as much because sales from other lead sources have been strong. Were he to go back to canvassing, though, he says he’d set up a marketing division that was separate from the rest of his operation.