The sheer brute force approach to making sales should be the only approach associated with a hard-working salesperson because every other approach requires a lot less pure graft. It isn’t necessarily the most elegant or graceful approach, but when your livelihood depends on making those sales then does it even matter?

A game of pure numbers

So the brute force approach to making sales is that of simply going on the knowledge that whatever it is you have to offer as a salesperson is already proven to convert and so all you have to do now is knock on enough doors to rack up the number of conversions which would equate to your success. If you want to make a thousand dollars in a day and the product you’re selling converts at a certain rate, all you have to do is aim for the number of conversions that will earn you your $1,000 commission by working out how many doors in total you have to knock on.

For example, if one sale lands you a commission of $100 and the product or service you’re promoting converts at a rate of 20%, that means if you want to hit your target of $1,000 per day you’ll have to knock on 50 doors per day with your offer and sales pitch. 20% is admittedly an unrealistically high conversion rate, but I’m just using these numbers as an example to drive the point home.

Now of course if 10 out of 50 people buy into your door-to-door sales pitch that means 40 of them will say no to you, right? Some of those “NOs” are so resounding that they take the form of doors getting slammed in your face, so that’s the other side of the coin you have to deal with.

Chasing rejections

Don’t take it personally. The person whom you approached with your sales offer might walk right past you at the convenience store and perhaps even say hello without connecting your face with a door-to-door sales pitch. Make it a game to chase those rejections and tell yourself that it is indeed all part of the process. Try to approach it with the expectation that the door is indeed going to get slammed in your face and if that happens, simply move on to the next door.

Tilting the numbers in your favor

Now of course there are indeed more modern ways of trying to earn sales commissions than going door-to-door to make a physical sales pitch of whatever you’re offering, but in some instances this still proves to be the best approach. If you’re selling a new magic stain remover for example, is a middle-aged housewife likely to see your Google AdWords ad on the internet? No, but they might just order or buy on the spot if for example as soon as they opened the door you came at them with the claim that the demo sample you have in your hands could remove the rather stubborn-looking stain they have on their front doorframe.

This is how you tilt the numbers in your favor – by targeting your sales pitch to a demographic that’s most likely to buy.