4-Steps to Identify and Pre-qualify Leads with In-person Brand Ambassadors

Lead generation feeds your sales pipeline and keeps your revenue flowing with new customers. 

In theory. 

In reality though, your sales teams often end up battling with cold leads, non-buyers, and prospects who have no interest whatsoever. 

That’s where an in-person lead qualification process comes into play. Added to your broader marketing mix, you can boost the performance of the entire program. It bridges the gap between exposure to your messaging and a readiness to take action.

The result? 

Your reps connect with warm leads at the right households at the right time for maximum efficiency. 

Qualify leads in person

Traditional marketing campaigns generate awareness and traffic, but they don’t always translate into conversions. That’s why high-performing sales teams combine marketing with in-person engagement to validate interest, start real conversations, and support sales in the field. 

With in-person lead qualification, you can interact with potential customers right at the front door of their homes. Or you can do it in other public places, depending on where your ideal customers tend to congregate. 

After qualifying your leads with in-person interactions, your sales team can follow up only with the households that expressed interest in your products or services. 

And the best news of all about using this front door sales funnel approach? You can let someone else handle the opening round! 

This is the step that costs the most if your team does it because of the number of households you need to engage with. But with the right partner, the cost is dramatically reduced, and none of your team has to devote any time to that opening round of engagement.

Furthermore, you can quickly launch programs in any city in the country. With outsourced front door lead generation, you save money, get more warm leads, and send quality leads to your sales team.

4-step process for a front door sales funnel

Here’s how to plan your in-person lead generation strategy using Power Direct’s brand ambassador teams:

Step 1: Identify potential household leads

First, you can use your customer data and other information you’ve collected over the years to identify households who are potential leads for your product or service. You can also utilize Power Direct’s extensive customer data resources including a dedicated in-house, California-based data science team.

In fact, our targeting capabilities are so powerful that they’re highly sought after as a standalone service. 

We pinpoint neighborhoods with the highest potential — using hundreds of demographic, behavioral, and competitive data points mixed with custom manual analysis — so you don’t waste resources knocking on the wrong doors. 

With this data, you can choose a city, a town, a neighborhood, or some other part of the location you want to target. Within that area, you’ll identify the specific streets or households you want to approach.

Step 2: Send brand ambassadors

Once we’ve defined your target area, our trained brand ambassadors activate your campaign — engaging households with tailored offers, giveaways, QR codes, surveys, and more.

Every interaction is tracked and categorized by interest level, so you know exactly which households showed high, moderate, or low engagement.

Approaches to engage your potential leads include (we can build nearly any program):

• Free samples
• Giveaways
• Contests and prizes
• Surveys
• Polls
• In-store or online coupons
• QR codes with access to lead generation materials online

Whichever methods you use, the goal is to explain your service or product to potential leads and then assess their level of interest. The brand ambassadors will note the households that express the most interest, as well as those with moderate, low, or zero interest. 

Step 3: Leave behind front door media

For all households — even the ones who don’t answer the door — the brand ambassadors will leave behind some of our bold, tactile, oversized front door media.

Unlike digital ads that disappear when ignored, front door media stays top-of-mind — giving your follow-up team a visual touchpoint to reference when re-engaging leads.

This is something online marketing cannot do when people don’t click or engage with your digital marketing efforts. If they don’t click, you get nothing.

What does a campaign cost?

Get a custom-built sample campaign with real targeting data, ad creative, cost estimates, and distribution plans.

Use the Project Estimator

But with brand ambassadors, our teams will leave behind front door marketing materials that support the secondary sales cycle. In other words, after the in-person conversation has ended, the door hanger keeps working and selling. The prospect looks at it, thinks about it, and continues considering the offer. It is on their mind from that point until your sales team follows up.

Step 4: Follow up with the best leads first

Last, your sales team now has a list of warm leads to reach out to first. They’ll also have the list of households that didn’t answer the door but received the front door media. 

For all these leads, your team can follow up in person, or they can call or use other methods of communication, depending on how you conduct your brand ambassador campaign. For example, they might collect phone numbers, emails, or text messaging permission that your sales team can use to reach out.

When they reach out, they can refer to the notes from the brand ambassador so they aren’t coming across like a total stranger. They know these people met someone and talked about your products and services. They know front door media was left behind.

As long as you follow up in a timely manner, the prospects will remember the interaction and the leave-behind.

Relationship marketing is more effective than impersonal marketing. 

With this front door sales funnel approach, you get the benefits of in-person marketing without having to devote time and staff resources to the most difficult step in the process. Our brand ambassadors will do that part for you.

Why household leads are so strong 

Don’t get us wrong — a healthy marketing mix is key to long-term success. Digital, out of home, mass media — they all have their place. 

But household and direct, in-person leads offer several advantages over leads generated online. Here are some of the main ones:

Known location

Addresses aren’t always accurate online. People obscure their true location. And people move. With in-person lead generation, you know the address, and you know where it is. There’s no uncertainty about the authenticity of the location.

Verified residents

You also get to verify who lives there. If it’s a rental, the actual residents can change frequently. For owned homes, people move. Family structures change. With front door lead generation, you can confirm who actually lives at each residence.

Face to face interactions

You’ve (the person representing your company) had a valuable face-to-fact conversation. The prospect feels like they know you better and you absolutely know more about them. A real relationship has started.

The authenticity of meeting actual people immediately vaults your company ahead of competition because there’s a face to the company, not just a logo or a website. 

They met you. They talked to you. The value of this simply cannot be overstated.

Documented conversation details 

The brand ambassador can also document important details from the conversation with each prospect. This is real information, direct from the source, and you can use it in your sales follow-up process. 

You can gauge each prospect’s interest based on the interaction, and use other information obtained by the brand ambassador for future campaigns.

Filtered prospects

It’s a waste of everyone’s time and money to try to sell someone who has no chance of buying. With in-person lead generation, you can remove non-buyers from your list.

For example, if you’re marketing a product or service to families with kids, and you’ve learned some households on your list are childless, you can remove them from that list. 

And there are many other ways certain households will make it clear they have no interest in or need for what you’re selling. With online marketing, you never really know for sure what’s going on with non-buyers.

In-person lead generation is certain. 

Update your customer database

Last, you can use everything you learn from these interactions to update your customer database. You can refresh basic things like contact information, who lives there, and details like the car they drive. And you can also update more personal information such as interests, stage of life, openness to your products, and occupation. 

Marketing depends on having accurate information. There’s no better way to get up-to-date information on prospects and leads than with in-person lead generation.

With Power Direct’s brand ambassadors, you can enjoy all these benefits of a front door sales funnel without having to devote any time or resources from your sales team to the first round of interaction with potential customers and leads.

Reach out with questions about your custom brand ambassador campaign