1. Enroll all stakeholders early in your planning process. Develop your strategy in collaboration with all stakeholders right from the start and before you get into design and activation mode. In events, ideas seem to pop up all along the way towards execution. There’s no hope of staying on target without full agreement to the strategy because otherwise, there’s no way to evaluate the ideas that arise. Consequently, decisions will be made by executive privilege, not strategic fit. People take apart things created by others and protect what they’ve had a role in creating.

2. Clarify objectives and goals. If you don’t know why you are doing an experience marketing campaign or an event, why do it? Write out your objectives and express them with numerical goals so you will know what success looks like. Not knowing what success looks like to all stakeholders is a recipe for failure.

3. Develop not just a strategy, but a power strategy. There are lots of ways to achieve a goal, but developing a statement of how you will achieve your aim with the greatest amount of power at the lowest possible cost means you will hit the twin targets of efficacy and efficiency. Hitting them makes you a hero. Getting a lot done at too high a cost invites discussion of how the money might have been better spent. Getting nothing done at low cost is an invitation to find a new job.

4. Align all creative decisions to strategy. Think of experiences and events as millions of details taking place over thousands of seconds, all of which are either opportunities to stay on target or to stray off strategy. A well-developed strategy without a sound creative plan that brings it to life yields a failed event. So evaluate every detail of your creative plan in the development phase against the strategy before approving it. If any detail isn’t tightly aligned, kill it before it has the chance to kill your event.

5. Design to the culture and needs of the audience. Think of yourself as a bridge builder, building a connection between organizational objectives/goals and audience needs. What does your audience need in the way of an experience to be motivated and enabled to act on your objectives? Run a focus group work session, or if you can’t, put yourself in the shoes of your audience when developing creative ideas. Aim to give them an experience that will help them see themselves as potentially bigger heroes in their own stories—if they heed your call to action. If you do that successfully, they will move mountains for you.

6. Focus on interaction design first, environment design second. Sure the environment is important, but since “for every action there is a reaction,” the design process has to start not with what the experience will look like, but what will the action be like. That’s the center point. Let that drive your process, and the look, feel, sound, pace, taste, etc. will naturally follow.

7. Measure the outcome. How else are you going to know how well you have done? This is different than measuring the output. Satisfaction of the attendees is measuring the output; they either liked or didn’t like the event. You need to know that—but more importantly, you need to know whether the experience moved the audience to the perception or action that satisfies your objectives and goals.

8. Sell your results back to your stakeholders. Create a presentation that starts with the success results, and then remind them at the end that this all happened because of three things they enabled: clear objectives and goals, a powerful strategy, and fidelity to that strategy in creative development and execution. This will build the right habits with your group of stakeholders for future endeavors. If you’ve approached executing these rules with the right amount of diplomacy, you’ll be in high demand.

Door-to-door marketing is a canvassing technique that is generally used for sales, marketing, advertising, or campaigning, in which the person or persons walk from the door of one house to the door of another, trying to sell or advertise a product or service to the general public or gather information. People who use this sales approach are often called traveling salesmen, or the archaic name drummer, to “drum up” business. This technique is also sometimes called direct sales. A variant of this involves cold calling first, when another sales representative attempts to gain agreement that a salesperson should visit.

With the realization of telephone “Do Not Call” lists it is becoming increasingly more difficult to connect with consumers and business people. An emerging trend is the deployment of very professional, highly skilled door-to-door canvassers to drive product sales and brand awareness.

Coordinating, training and motivating these teams to produce results are at the very core of Fulcrum’s proven capabilities. Fulcrum has the knowledge and experience required to implement these programs, such as best days and times to canvass, who will sell the most product; male, female, young or mature and what geographics and demographics respond best to door-to-door marketing. Put Fulcrum’s experience to work for you and avoid the costly mistakes of trying to manage these programs in-house.

Hire and Train Door-to-Door Marketing Team

If you’re in charge of hiring people, that typically means that you’ve found success in Door To Door Marketing yourself. You know what it takes to be great, but now you’re stuck with an entirely new problem. How do you find others who will be just as good (if not better) and will stick around and grow into important influencers invested in the long term growth of the company? A great D2D sales company is a great recruiting company. So what does that greatness look like?

First off, you need to realize that you’re not going to hire a superstar every time. If you think you have found one, be careful. It’s not hard for someone to seem golden during one interview and you don’t want to be fooled.

Even if you think the candidate does have a lot of great experience working in the field for other companies, you have to realize that success doesn’t always translate. What worked for them at previous companies probably won’t work as well for you. In fact, their success will probably make them stubborn; after all, what reason do they have to follow your approach when they’ve figured out their own?

It’s also possible that the rep’s previous company might have had much better-developed training and selling systems than you do, and that system was the key reason they killed it. If you’re not developing a competitive system, what does that communicate about your company? The more dialed-in you are about a rep’s success, the more likely you are to attract and keep strong performers.