How Would You Like To Make Your Canvassers More ‘Lead” Productive?
You Can Hit The Streets With Them… Everyday!
To build a successful canvassing team you have to capture, track and measure your front-end numbers. The front-end numbers are more important to the canvasser than the business’ back-end numbers, plus, they’re more useful to you in managing every individual canvasser.
This month I’m providing you with a powerful, yet simple, tool you can use to tally and track your canvasser’s activities… it’s the next best thing to you being on the streets with them at every front door.
The purpose of this form is to get the canvassers to tally their activities and give you something tangible to measure those activities against. Once you can see each canvasser’s numbers you can begin to manage them by those numbers. You’ll find out in the first night how well or how poorly your canvassers are doing purely based on the numbers they tally. It truly is a numbers game and these numbers never lie; best of all, these numbers cannot be manipulated.
I designed the “Canvasser’s Street Tally Sheet” for canvassers to use with their clipboard, though it can be used by anyone canvassing. As you’ll see, the portion of the sheet your canvasser uses while they’re canvassing is placed at the bottom of the form. They can place the form beneath the paperwork they carry on their clipboard and easily flip it up to make quick ‘tallies’.
The form has 4 sections: (from top to bottom)
1. Manager’s notes:
The top box is for the manager to complete. It’s a place to make notations based on the numbers and what actions he or she thinks needs to be taken to help the canvasser improve their numbers, or, can identify what they may be doing right and share it with others on the team.
2. Canvasser’s name:
This is an obvious one, though important for tracking.
3. Description of the neighborhood:
The canvasser should fill this portion out once they reach the neighborhood, but before they begin canvassing. This will give you a feeling for the conditions of the neighborhood they’re canvassing. The walking, lighting and weather conditions can affect the pace at which your canvasser can get from one door to the next; as can the distance between homes. Every neighborhood will be different, as will every day’s conditions. If the canvasser has further to walk between homes and/or the weather conditions slow the canvasser then the number of doors they knock on will be reflected proportionately. It’s also a convenient way for you to compare each canvasser’s interpretation of the canvassing conditions.
4. Canvasser’s tallies:
At the beginning of their shift, the canvasser should complete the day, date and start time. The start and end times they tally should measure their entire shift, without breaks. Including breaks will not be a true measure of their canvassing efforts. You want an accounting and productivity of his or her actual canvassing time (I’ll get into interpreting the numbers next month).
In the ‘Homes reached’, ‘Contacts’ and ‘Results of contact with homeowners’ the canvasser need only add a tally or hash mark to indicate each (see the completed form below for an example of tallying).
‘Homes reached’ indicates how many actual homes they got in front of and knocked on doors during their shift. It doesn’t matter if someone answered the door or not, you want to know how many total homes they were able to physically reach during their entire shift.
‘Contacts’ indicates if and who they made contact with at a home when and if the door was answered. The total of these three sections (homeowner, not homeowner and no one home should match the total number of homes reached).
‘Results of contact with homeowner’ indicates how many leads they captured, potential leads that need to be followed up on to set, or, no lead was captured (again, the total of these three should matched the total of homes reached).
‘Total your tallies’ is where the canvasser will add up all their tallies or hash marks and enter a corresponding number. The tally sections are for the canvasser to quickly mark as they walk from one home to the next. The total section has two purposes; one, it forces the canvasser to see and recognize their numbers, and two it’s a quick reference for you after the shift. It also gives your canvassers a source of comparison. Canvassers, at least good canvassers, are competitive by nature. Seeing each other’s numbers can bread increased activity. As long as they’re following your program then increased activity can result in capturing more leads.
Here’s what a properly completed tally sheet should look like after a canvassing shift.
Next month I’ll discuss how you can interpret and manage your canvassers based on the numbers you see from this sheet. At this point though, I’d suggest you download my ‘Canvasser’s Street Tally Worksheet’ and implement it with your canvassing teams. It’s important to start capturing the data now and you can interpret it later. I guarantee if you start using this sheet you’ll see some very telling signs of what your canvassers are and are not doing.