Lenny Gray on door-to-door sales, Black Friday offers and the six-step sales flow

In 2003, Lenny Gray knocked doors 6 days a week while his business partner serviced the new accounts on the same schedule. By July, after about 3 months of 10 starts a day, his partner asked for an extra day off. Lenny put on about half a million dollars of business that year, and today he teaches his system to home service companies through Door-to-Door Millionaire.

I’m mostly a digital guy. Even so, when pest control owners ask me about lead generation, I tell them to look into door-to-door and read Lenny’s books.

This was my second time interviewing him, and I wanted the practical version for owners doing $10K to $30K a month. There are no secrets with Lenny. He puts it all out there in his books, webinars and newsletters.

Who is Lenny Gray?

Lenny Gray is one of the top names in door-to-door sales. He started his consulting company, Door-to-Door Millionaire, over 15 years ago, and he teaches home service companies how to recruit, hire, pay and train their own door-to-door teams. He has clients in 33 home service verticals. He’s the best-selling author of Door-to-Door Millionaire and MORE Door-to-Door Millionaire, and a few months before we recorded, he released two books written only for pest control.

When we recorded, Lenny also owned Rove Pest Control, which he co-founded in 2003, built through door-to-door and grew to be worth eight figures. Before he ever sold pest control, he served a 2-year church mission knocking doors 7 days a week. A friend from his high school football team made $25,000 in one summer and talked a skeptical Lenny into joining his team in Birmingham, Alabama.

One salesman, then 4 reps, then 35

Lenny and his partner had both essentially worked for Orkin, his partner running a franchise in Albuquerque and Lenny building training programs. One knew operations and the other knew sales, so they went out on their own with no team and no debt in year one. Lenny would sell, and his partner would spray.

With 5 summers on the doors behind him, Lenny knew he’d sell an account about every 36 minutes. He worked about 50 hours a week, and by his math that first year’s half a million would be close to $1M now.

In year two they added 4 reps. In year three they brought in 35 and broke every record they knew of for accounts sold in a summer. By year five, Lenny says, they were the largest residential pest control company in Utah, and ServiceMaster came asking what it would take to buy them out.

When they sold, they barely had a website. Around that time they had also started operations in Minnesota, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Nebraska and Iowa, and they began adding SEO, billboards, radio and mailers. As Lenny put it, nobody should depend on one arrow in their quiver to take down a bear. By the time we recorded, his company could keep growing without a single rep on the doors.

Pick a zip code and fill it

Lenny pictures a ticker running all day. While technicians drive across town, the fuel, the tires and the value of your vehicles all tick against you. A tech who spends half the day on one block gets a lot more done.

So if your customers are scattered across the metro, plug a door-to-door team into one zip code with a target, like 86 new quarterly accounts to max out your techs there. Then move to the next zip code that needs 37. Adam Coffey made the same point about route density when I had him on Local Marketing Secrets, and Greg Young told me Natura has put door-to-door teams on top of acquisitions to tighten up routes.

Plenty of owners tell me door-to-door costs way too much. Lenny’s answer is to build your own team, because hiring it out to a company in Utah or Idaho can leave you in the hole on those accounts for years. Build the training before you recruit, too. Reps who get results stay, and they bring in their friends. Lenny went deeper on hiring reps and keeping customers with my partner Jonas Olson in a PCM conversation about why door-to-door isn’t dead.

Let technicians be technicians

Some owners want their techs to cloverleaf, knocking a few doors around each service. Lenny figures 99.9% of technicians just want to be technicians. A real sales conversation takes 15 to 20 minutes, and a tech has a next appointment. Push them to sell and they’ll hate the job and start dragging their feet on services. His company has asked techs to talk to neighbors out in their yards, and they didn’t want to.

“I don’t care what the incentive was. I could have said, ‘Here’s $5,000 if you go talk to five people this week and sell one of them.’ And they wouldn’t do it.”

A salesperson knocking near a house the truck is servicing is a different story. You have a reason to be on that street, which Lenny says makes you the anti-door-to-door sales rep. When he started his company, he’d sell one side of a street and wait to knock the other side until the truck was there the next day. He doesn’t want reps thinking they need a truck nearby to sell, though.

Your customers’ neighbors come first

If Lenny were starting over with 100 customers at about $10K a month, he’d knock on the next-door neighbors of every one of them first. You’ll close more of those doors, because you already take care of the house next door.

Mentioning the neighbor only works if it’s true. As a first-year rep, Lenny watched a team leader keep bringing up “the Johnsons down the street,” and when Lenny asked where they lived, the guy said there’s a Johnsons out here somewhere. It turned Lenny off. Everything he teaches is built on integrity.

“I learned the power of name-dropping is when somebody knows that you know who they know.”

“Amy next door, we’ve been taking care of them for the last year or so” lands differently than pointing to someone a block away. Lenny calls it relevant name-dropping.

After the neighbors, he follows a three-door rule. If 3 doors in a row don’t answer and someone is mowing a block away, go talk to that person. Knocking on a door has never sold an account for Lenny. Talking to people has, so he thinks tracking doors knocked per day wastes everybody’s time.

Bring Black Friday to the doorstep

Lenny always wondered why people would wait in the November cold to save $100 on a TV. Door-to-Door Millionaire has a chapter called Black Friday, and he boils it down to a limited time, a limited supply and a discount. At the door, he might say his truck will be in the neighborhood the next couple of days and he’s filling a few spots with the neighbors at a big discount.

The size of the discount barely matters. One summer, five groups of his reps each pitched one offer, “big discount,” $100 off, $50 off the initial service, half off or 75% off, to see which got more homeowners to ask how much it was.

“It didn’t matter which one of the five, it mattered what the energy of the rep was and the excitement that the rep had about what they were going to be able to offer.”

Most homeowners have no idea what pest control costs anyway. Lenny just makes sure the offer belongs only to the door-to-door team, even if it’s a $5 difference, so the rep believes in it.

The six-step sales flow

Lenny’s sales flow process runs from the second a door opens until you walk away with a signed agreement and a scheduled service.

1. Initial approach. The first 20 to 30 seconds: who you are, why you’re there, what you’re offering, a common concern and a conversational close.
2. Qualify. Lenny reverse engineered every sale he’d made and found 5 qualifiers, including people who already have pest control and DIYers, whose hobby you shouldn’t try to take away.
3. Value build. No more than 2 minutes, built around their house, kids, dogs or bugs.
4. Close.
5. Overcome concerns. He calls the 7 big ones the magnificent seven, including “leave me your card” and “I need to talk to my wife.” Then you close again.
6. Solidify the sale. A 13-step process so the accounts you sell get serviced and stay.

Lenny used those 13 steps in his third year selling for Orkin, in Jacksonville, Florida. He sold 674 accounts, and when the back-end payments came out about 6 months later, he got paid for 668 of them.

His orange pest control book has the scripts, word for word, and the blue one covers tactics like time management, knocking after dark and weather. Lenny would hand them to anyone who touches sales. For more on the concerns step, Jonas wrote PCM’s guide to door-to-door pest control objections.

A sticker by the garage door button

About four and a half years before we recorded, Tommy Mello wanted to try door-to-door for A1 Garage Door Service and asked Paul Giannamore of The Potomac Company who to call. Paul, who wrote the foreword to Lenny’s second book, told him there was only one guy.

Tommy’s idea was to have reps put a sticker by the garage door button. A homeowner pushes that button maybe 8 times a day, so when the door breaks, they call the sticker. Lenny thought it was genius. For a year, he flew from Salt Lake to Phoenix every week to build the program. It started in 2 or 3 offices and was doing seven figures. When we talked, it had 80-some reps, and A1’s private equity group wanted as many as possible in every market.

My take

I’m a big believer in relevant name-dropping. It’s part of why I do podcasts, because they let me build relationships with the top people in this industry. When I told Allan Draper on Local Marketing Secrets that I’d interviewed Lenny, his whole demeanor changed. The A1 deal worked the same way. Tommy trusted Paul, so he trusted Lenny.

Lenny’s zip-code approach also lines up with how I look at local search. A Google Business Profile ranks differently from one neighborhood to the next, and a 5x5 heatmap shows where you rank and where you don’t. I’d send a door-to-door team to the weak spots.

Near the end, Lenny was kind enough to call me the new kid on the block making some serious splashes. He said people who elevate the industry help everyone in it, the way a high tide raises all ships. Lenny has been doing that for door-to-door for almost 3 decades.

Where to find Lenny

“If you like free, go to lennygray.com,” Lenny told me. He runs a monthly webinar for owners on building a door-to-door team, sends a weekly sales tip newsletter and offers a free 15-minute consult call. His Ask Lenny app is free on the App Store and Google Play.

• Website: lennygray.com
• Books: Lenny’s books on Amazon
• Pest control book: Door-to-Door Pest Control Sales
• LinkedIn: Lenny Gray
• Instagram: @thelennygray