What Digital Marketers Can Learn from the Door-to-Door Salesperson

By David H. Khalili, Founder of DentalLabSupport.com

Here’s something you might not know about me: Before I went digital, I spent a couple years working as a door-to-door salesman. I sold my way through dental offices, hitting the pavement, 

Now here’s the weird part: I loved it. Our team met for daily sales training's, swapped tips, and practiced for every possible scenario with role playing. I was constantly picking up new techniques to try on my customers, learning from experience, and getting better. It was live, on the ground A/B testing, and it’s how I cut my teeth in conversion optimization. Make no mistake, door-to-door sales is a high pressure game, and it’s where many successful start-ups catch a break.

Okay, But I’m Not a Door-to-Door Salesperson…

What drives dental lab digital marketing today? What are the most powerful conversion techniques at our disposal? Most of us could probably agree on something like the following:

1. Testing and Analytics
2. Personalization and Targeting
3. Content Marketing
4. Customer Engagement
5. Cross-sell/Recommendations
6. Responsive Experiences

Door-to-door sales offers unique lessons that apply to each of these six areas. And they’ve been tested on real humans, in person, over and over and over again. Isn’t that every CROs dream?

The Extraordinary Salesperson

A door-to-door salesperson stands face-to-face with a prospect and assesses, in the moment, any objections, obstacles, or discomforts that person may have. The salesperson then turns each negative into a positive, putting the prospect at ease, gaining their trust, and helping them find value in the product.

The extraordinary salesperson knows how to weave a personalized story for their customer, drawing them in and forming an emotional connection to the product. The extraordinary salesperson also knows how to create urgency and necessity around the sale—not by being pushy or intimidating, but by adding real value and incentive to close the deal right now.

I don’t think you should quit your desk job and become a door-to-door salesperson. I do think you can take the best techniques from the face-to-face sell and apply to them to your visitor interactions in digital. You can improve every visitor touch point by better understanding what language, behavior, signals, and incentives motivate people to buy (or subscribe, download, share, and engage).

Bringing Offline Sales Techniques Online

That was just the tip of the iceberg for optimization lessons that can be gleaned from the world of door-to-door sales. Look out for my upcoming blog posts on lessons learned from the face-to-face sell and how they apply to your digital marketing strategy. I’m excited to share the techniques and insights I gathered over four years of making daily sales calls and relate them to my current bread-and-butter: conversion rate optimization and digital personalization.