Sell! Sell! Sell!: Selling Door-to-Door's No Joke

Cable World, July 25, 2005

By Mavis Scanlon

As MSOs have matured, so have their marketing methods. Operators can precisely target direct mail, for instance, and in-house sales teams of all stripes handle acquisition, bundles and retention.

Even door-to-door sales--one of the oldest marketing tactics in the book- -has evolved. Door-to-door sales is "very old, very traditional and still very effective," says Bob Halgas, president of RCH Cable Outsourcing Services, one of just a few companies specializing in door-to-door. "There's a lot of moving pieces to some of the services, there's a lot of features that are not understood. If we have the opportunity to talk to a customer face-to-face we can educate them and then ask them to make the buying decision."

Halgas should know. In 1974, while in college, he started knocking on doors, selling cable. Three years later, after working for TelePrompTer, he founded RCH "with one other guy and a phone on the wall." Today, RCH has about 1,200 field reps working with 174 cable systems doing sales, audits and collections, a new line of business for RCH that has grown steadily over the past five years.

In fact, customer saves and collections are booming. The retention side of the business, including collections, generated more than half the company's revenue in 2004, the first time it outpaced acquisitions, Halgas says. One Monday in June, Halgas showed me the "war room," an open area in the center of the company headquarters dominated by more than half a dozen large white boards that track RCH activity. Dozens of systems were performing collections activity that particular day.

A map in Halgas' office is dotted with pins representing systems where RCH field reps are stationed: The pins were concentrated along the Northeast Boston-Washington, D.C., corridor, up and down the West Coast and around the cities of Detroit and St. Louis. Comcast, Adelphia and Charter are RCH's largest customers.

Door-to-door--or direct--marketing brings in a significant percentage of Comcast's sales, according to Dave Watson, EVP, operations. In an e-mailed comment, Watson said that while the majority of Comcast's field activity is conducted by in-house sales professionals, "RCH has proven to be a reliable vendor partner to our systems."

A Charter rep could not be reached by press time.

RCH's success on behalf of its cable clients is due in large part to Gerry Dash, SVP, training and new business development. His copyrighted sales system, APS (appointment presentation sales method), was honed over his 30 years in sales.

Dash tells his trainees that a sale other than an impulse buy will never take place on the front step of someone's home. Therefore it's crucial to get an appointment with a homeowner to discuss the client's products when the homeowner is more comfortable. Turning a "no" into an appointment is the basic building block of his system; he says a good field rep can generate a sale 80-90% of the time at scheduled appointments.

The challenge is to convince a homeowner during a 15-to-20-minute presentation that he or she needs or will be better off with the client's services. That's where training and product knowledge come in. Dash makes sure his reps are well versed in competitive products from satellite distributors and telcos as well as the products they're selling.

Some of the company's stats speak to how much cable leans on door-to-door as a marketing tool. RCH will make between 8 and 10 million customer contacts this year for its cable clients. Halgas says his team is saving or acquiring between 12,000 and 15,000 subs a week, and collecting more than a million dollars a week from customers who owe money to operators. In fact, Adelphia currently is using RCH solely for collections. Those numbers provide proof enough that old-fashioned door-to-door methods work, even with all the other marketing tools and new technology at their disposal.

[Copyright 2005 Access Intelligence, LLC. All rights reserved.]