Transcript of a YouTube video by Mike Andes (Augusta Lawn Care) explaining door-to-door sales and door-hanger marketing tactics for generating leads in lawn care. Covers pros/cons of door knocking vs door hangers, expected contact rates, throughput (houses per hour), cost math for hiring door-hanger distributors, seasonality of services, and using instant-quote pricing on hangers to increase response.
If you got a lot of guts, you can do door knocking. Now, door knocking is not for the faint heart. It's very difficult to walk up to strangers, houses knock on their door, know that you are interrupting them and try to sell them your services. But ultimately you're going to have the highest amount of response because they cannot not respond to you. Keep in mind, when you're doing door knocking, only about 40, 50% of people are actually going to be home. And so I recommend keeping something like very least, keep in mind you're only probably going to be able to get to 15, 20 houses per hour when it comes to actually them on something. And at the door you could also just go a little more low key and just introduce yourself. Hey, it's Mike here. I started Augusta Lawn Care, do lawn care landscaping here. If you ever need anything, just want to give you my card. I'd love to be of service to you. That's great. They can close the door. Thank you, bye. And you're gone. It's not high pressure. Another way you can use door to door sales is simply introducing yourself when you have a customer in the local area in their neighborhood. So for example, hey, we're just down at Mr. Jones house down the street doing a property cleanup. You might have seen us driving by the last couple of days. Just want to introduce myself. If you ever need a property cleanup like Mr. Jones did, just reach out, let us know. And a lot of times if customer needs a service, they're just gonna be like, oh, actually, yeah, like why are you here? Could you give me a quote? Like, what would it charge to do my property? And so that was a nice easier way to do it. If you want to go high pressure sales, you can have a price and you can ask for the sale right then and there. Most people that I encounter with, it's just too much social anxiety and I don't blame them. It's very, very difficult. But ultimately it costs you one thing as literally the soles on your shoes. Like when people say boots on the ground, let me say, you know, got to do pound pavement. It's walking on these, this pavement right here on this sidewalk and going through the rejection that comes along with door to door sale. Now if you don't have the guts to go and knock on people's door and actually talk to them, a way around that is to simply use door hangers. So for a door hanger, I just come up to the property that right on there and move right on to the next one. Now there's a few hacks that you can use to make sure you get as many door hangers as possible. Because ultimately it's all about the math. So being in a more dense area and neighborhood is going to allow you to hit more like 60, 70, 80, 100 hundred plus different addresses per hour. If you're really spread out where you've got to walk two or three minutes between every single property, you might only get out 15 or 20 door hangers in an entire hour. So the math on that, once you know how many door hangers you got to put out per hour, you can actually run the math on is if you actually hired someone to just do these door hangers themselves. So if you paid someone $20 an hour, then you got maybe these cost like 10 or 15 cents a pop. So maybe a 10 to $10 in printing costs. Now, if you can get like one lead per hour, $20 in labor, $10 in printing costs, $30 cost per lead is fantastic. So it's all about the math. How many door hangers can you put out per hour? And how many door hangers you have to put out in order to get one new lead. Once you figured that math out, you can completely scale this across your city. So let's go and assume that you do get $30 cost per lead when you're doing door hangers. Now, if we come to blue collar summit for $800, what that means is we literally just need to have about 30 leads next year to pay off coming to an awesome event for three days, meeting myself, John Taffer, and hundreds of other home service business owners. Go to blue collarsummit.com and book your tickets today. Now remember, door hangers are going to be super seasonal, which means they might work today, but next month not work if the demand for that service is no longer there. For example, I did core aeration right here. But I know for a fact that if I do core aeration any time other than early spring or late fall, I'm just not going to get a good return. It's very seasonal. Same thing with direct mail and a lot of other services. Because people usually aren't going to want to use your services unless they have actual pain. So if the grass is growing, lawn mowing might be the one they want to think about. But if the grass is dormant, doing door hangers for any sort of lawn mowing is just not going to have a great return. Now, one way that we really like at Augusta Lawn Care to improve the chances of someone actually reaching out over these door hangers is you have the actual prices. We call this the instant quote on the back of the door hanger. So in addition to it having the front that's a little more design friendly on the back end, they can actually get the instant quote for bush trimming, leaf cleanup, weeds in the beds. If this is a property cleanup one. And then also we put any notes and a total actual dollar amount in order to do this one. For property cleanup specifically, you would have to have a marker or a pen and actually fill this in as you walk up to the front door. So this is going to slow you down, but your response rate is going to be higher. If we look at it from this purely this perspective is like if we're knocking on the door and talking to people, that's going to be our highest response rate. But we're going to have less deliveries per hour, less contacts per hour, less impressions. And then if we move down a little further, well, if we do instant pricing, it's going to take us a little longer to fill this out on every property as we walk up in terms of our property cleanup or a mowing estimate for their weekly and bi weekly price, any notes, etc. It's going to take us a little longer. So, so we're going to have greater impact, higher response rate, but also less per hour that we're going to be able to deliver. And then you really want to go to the max. You would not have instant pricing and you just hit every single door as fast as possible. You use a scooter to just go as fast as possible and that's going to be a lowest response rate. But it's you're going to have your highest volume, the number of people that you can actually go out and reach. So door hangers, great strategy. We've built massive businesses inside of Augusta Lawn Care just off the back of door hangers. Just keep in mind you'll want to test different areas as well because one neighborhood might have no response door hangers and another area might have massive response. Keep in mind when you're hitting every single door with door hangers, you can also get around most no trespassing laws because you're canvassing, you are not soliciting. If you're knocking on doors, that's soliciting. And in a lot of hoas and neighborhoods they're going to have no soliciting allowed. But you can canvas which is hitting every single door with a door hanger. Do you struggle to get more leads and more customers to your home service business? Watch this video right here where I give a complete, complete masterclass of exactly how to do it.
