An Open Discussion Answering Your Most Pressing Canvassing Questions
Working in harmony for the attainment of a definite purpose. Borrowing the education, influences and experiences of other like-minded people to attain your own plans in life. Being able to accomplish more in one year than most will do in a lifetime. This is the definition of Napoleon Hill’s mastermind principle, as he described in his book “Think and Grow Rich.”
Everyone in my Canvass King membership carries one thing in common and that is that we all canvass for leads, appointments and sales. Despite the product or service you represent and sell, you’re acquiring leads via the same source, face to face marketing and I created this group, this movement as you will, modeled around Napoleon Hill’s mastermind concept.
We all deal with the same obstacles and challenges, getting people’s attention and being able to give a presentation. It also involves recruiting, hiring and training people to canvass and market face to face. In this article I’m going to address questions I’ve received through my www.AskTheCanvassKing.com website and/or questions I’ve gotten on live trainings and emails.
Many of the questions I’ll address in this article are similar to what I’ve dealt with on past calls and in articles you can find in the archive collection at www.CanvassKing.com However, Silver, Gold and Platinum Canvass King Members have access to all of the achieved call recordings and membership newsletters. I’m going to approach these questions as if we were having a live question and answer session. Keep in mind I’m working without a safety net here, in addressing these, as I don’t have the opportunity to probe deeper into the questions, as I normally would in a live setting. So the answers I provide here will be a good starting point, though I recommend you also refer to my article and call recordings archive for more in depth explanation.
How do I recruit and maintain an appointment with the ideal canvasser?
One of the things you have to do is identify whom it is you are really wanting to recruit. I find most don’t clearly create a picture of whom they want to attract. When you don’t do this you take the position of a beggar willing to accept and interview every person who walks through the door looking for a job. In many cases it’s converse to what you do as canvassers. Canvassing is an outbound medium, meaning you go out and find leads, whereas in recruiting I’m a believer to attract people. Make them come to you. This is a matter of positioning yourself and your company in a way that is attractive to a very narrow, well-defined targeted recruit candidate.
Another question with regard to recruiting was “Where do I find the competent candidates?”
Success leaves footprints. If you have experience in canvassing and you’ve had the good fortune of hiring good candidates then I would ask you about where you found those people. The ‘where’ is not necessarily a geographically definable area, but rather, also, the location they were found (online/offline, Monster.com/newspaper, college campus etc.)
You also want to look at the characteristics of the successful hires you’ve made. What are their demographics, geography, past work experiences, etc.? This also goes to further answering the first question I addressed, regarding the ideal canvassing candidate. As I said, success leaves footprints. When you look at and analyze past successful recruits you’re often able to define your ideal candidate from it. One of the key characteristics of successful people is ‘attitude’. What’s their attitude toward the type of work you’re going to ask them to do and what’s their attitude when on the job doing the work?
When I’m asked how to find the people I always ask ‘who are you looking for?’ because when you’re able to define that you can make it so that your ideal people will find you; and it takes you out of the beggar role, seeming desperate to interview every Tom, Dick or Harry.
Here are 2 questions I received that are a subset of one another. “What’s the best proven strategy to recruit canvassers that are trainable and money driven?” and, “What’s the best comp plan to attract canvassers?”
The key word is again, ‘attract’. You want to be able to attract candidates in a way that makes them self qualify and self disqualify them. The easiest way to address these questions is in the ‘ads’ you’re using to recruit people. The language you use in your recruiting ads, either on or offline is important in communicating not only what the job is, but also what and who you’re looking to hire. I see so many recruiting ads that work so hard at selling what the job is and no matter how you sugar-coat it people can’t be fooled for too long on what the work really is, so don’t try to disguise it. Celebrate it and tell people because when you get the language in your ads correct, it will attract the right kinds of people.
“What’s the best pay plan?”
Part time, full time, hourly, salary, hourly with bonus, salary with bonus, full commission; The canvasser’s pay and/or bonus should not be based off the sale being made (unless you canvass and sell). The canvasser only postion has no control over the sale being made, that’s the salesperson’s responsibility. It also shouldn’t be based entirely on the canvasser getting the lead either. There are a variety of options for compensating canvassers and I would suggest you go into the archive for my more extensive conversation on the subject, or, schedule an Ultimate Jump-Start Canvassing Success Program with me to discuss this and other related subjects on a one on one basis with me.
One of the questions asked specifically about a compensation plan, “What motivates the canvasser?” It’s a subset of what I briefly discussed above, though I will say that money does motivate people, but the reality is that it is 4th or 5th on the list of most important job factors for canvassers when you get them to identify their personal priorities. Money is an important motivator when recruiting, though once they’re hired and working it drops to a lower position on their priorities.
Next, “What’s the canvassing introduction that gets the most people to say yes?”
The days of the objection and rebuttal canvassing is over! When you walk up to a door or approach someone at a show or event you’re the same as every other salesperson that’s approaching them cold. And every other sales person is to ‘sell’ that prospect something. This situation creates the objection rebuttal scenario. The prospect’s guard is up so they’re going to give you objection and the traditional response to an objection is a rebuttal and this creates and adversarial situation; one the canvasser is going to lose more times than not.
The problem with the traditional canvassing or face-to-face approach is in the offer. Most marketers jump to selling the product or service too soon. Most offers are for an appointment for a free estimate. This is selling a poorly qualified prospect too soon. It’s not that the prospect isn’t a good candidate for the product or service, it’s they’re not properly prepared, at that point, to be sold. To accomplish this you have to lower the prospect’s threshold for the offer and to do this you have to change the offer. The new canvassing approach I’ve created is rather than offering ‘free estimate’ offer I now teach my students to offer an information guide for the product or service. I have spoken at great length on the benefits of this offer so I won’t take the time or space to go into that detail here, but you can find it in the archives. I will however tell you the benefits of an information offer over an estimate offer are significant. The biggest is that it lowers the prospects threshold to the offer and helps the prospect self-qualify to you. Once they self-qualify it makes it significantly easier to capture them as a lead. The other benefit of this new offer approach is that my private clients who’ve adopted this offer are selling leads 2-3 years out from when they originally captured them. Don’t get me wrong, they’re still getting the same number of immediately pitch-able leads (higher in fact), but they’re also capturing 50-80% more leads they’re able to nurture and sell. This has a major impact on the long-term stability of lead flow and cash flow. The key is in the offer and not jumping so quickly to ‘sell’ the prospect the product or service.
I received several questions that I would categorize under, “How do I get more leads on a specific product or service.”
Several of the questions I received stated their companies were putting more emphasis on canvassers to produce leads specific to products or services the companies were wanting to promote. Unfortunately we cannot get prospects to fit their buying needs around the products and services we wish to sell. Like it or not, that’s the hard truth. My introduction (described earlier) where you provide information to their needs gives you the tool to let the prospect identify ‘what’s next’ for them. They may not be ready to buy right now, but they will tell you what their priorities are.
I think it is important to state that though I’m providing what may be perceived as superficial answers to very complex questions the real value in this article for you is the answer to a lot of questions is much simpler than most are able to see because, as a great philosopher once said, “You’re too close to the forest to see the trees.” That’s what I want you to take away from this article. The 3 big areas of questions I’ve received lately, and historically for that matter, apply to the same areas, “Recruiting good people”, “Getting the good leads” and “Good compensation programs”. The consistency is in the system. If you really dig down into the answers I’ve provide here (and in past, more in depth conversations) the answer is in attraction. Attraction of the right people as canvassers, attraction of the prospects and the answer to each of those is in a proven system. Yes I’m tooting my own horn a bit here, but I have the proven system that has outperformed all others. I’ve developed it from being where you are right now, in the trenches and struggling through the same challenges you face. I’m in the trenches almost every day with my private clients testing and tweaking the system against real scenarios my private client’s canvassers encounter constantly. Everything is interconnected and most companies approach each of the subjects I’ve discussed as independent challenges, but as I’ve discovered they’re connected in the circle of canvassing.
If you’re reading this and you’re a member (or aren’t presently a member), the best place to start in understanding how all my systems are interconnected and can be adapted to your company, to your products or to your service is my Ultimate Jump Start Canvassing Success Program. This is a month long program where I lay out my entire system and work with you to incorporate it into your company and culture. If you think your present process is suppressing your success, check out this program.
In the live Silver Telecoaching call where I addressed many of these questions and more can be heard on the audio CD members received. In closing, I highly recommend you listen to this recording from the live call (June 24, 2015) as well as dig into the archived articles on my Canvass King website.
If you have questions specific to your business, you can submit them to me at www.AskTheCanvassKing.com or email me directly at cthompson@canvassking.com. If you’d like to take a more immediate approach and fast track your results then go to http://www.canvassking.com/JumpStartProgram.html and complete the online application to the Jump Start program.
Thank you for meeting me here each month because, like you, I’m committed to your canvassing success.
Chris Thompson
The Canvass King