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The Knock-to-Contact Ratio, Measured Properly

Why borrowed canvassing ratios are useless, and how to measure your own knock-to-contact and contact-to-set numbers.

Ask around a roofing or solar sales floor and someone will hand you a ratio. One knock in four opens the door. One in three. One in ten sets an appointment. These numbers get repeated at every sales meeting in the country and almost none of them are traceable to anything.

They are also not very useful even when they are true, because a canvassing ratio is not a property of door-to-door selling. It is a property of a specific neighborhood, at a specific hour, in a specific week, worked by a specific rep. Change any of those four and the number moves.

So the honest version of this article is not a benchmark. It is a measurement method.

Three ratios, not one

"Knock-to-contact" gets used as a catch-all, which hides the thing you actually need to know. Split it into three.

Knock to contact. Doors knocked divided by doors where a human answered. This measures the neighborhood and the clock, almost entirely. A rep has very little influence over it.

Contact to pitch. Of the people who answered, how many stayed at the door long enough to hear the offer? This measures the rep's first fifteen seconds and nothing else.

Pitch to set. Of the people who heard the offer, how many booked an inspection or an appointment? This measures the offer and the rep's close.

Teams that track one blended number cannot tell a bad neighborhood from a bad opener. Teams that track all three can. If contact rate is 25 percent and pitch rate is 80 percent and set rate is 5 percent, your reps are fine and your offer is weak. If contact rate is 25 percent and pitch rate is 20 percent, your reps are getting the door closed on them and no amount of territory work will fix it.

Why the contact ratio moves, and what moves it

The three biggest drivers of whether anybody answers:

Hour of day. The Bureau of Labor Statistics' American Time Use Survey for 2025 reports that 81 percent of employed people worked on an average weekday, against 30 percent on an average weekend day. In a subdivision full of working-age commuters, that gap is most of your contact ratio. The same survey found 35 percent of employed people did some or all of their work at home on days they worked, which is why daytime knocking is no longer a dead loss the way it was fifteen years ago. It is not as good as 6pm. It is also not zero.

Housing stock and household composition. A retiree neighborhood answers the door at 10am. A new-build subdivision full of dual-income households does not. The Census Bureau's American Housing Survey publishes owner and household characteristics by metro area, which is a cheap way to form an expectation before you spend a week finding out.

Season and weather. Shorter days compress the evening window. A week of rain shifts who is home and who is in a mood to talk.

None of these are things a rep controls. That matters for how you manage, which is a separate article, but it also matters for measurement: if you compare two reps' contact ratios without controlling for territory and hour, you are comparing neighborhoods and calling it performance.

How to measure it without lying to yourself

Four rules make the number real.

1. Log every door, including the ones nobody answered. This is the rule teams break. A rep who only logs the interesting doors produces a contact ratio near 100 percent and a set rate that looks like genius. The denominator is the whole job. If a knock is not logged, the ratio is fiction.

2. Timestamp it. A knock without a time cannot be sliced by hour, and hour is the single biggest driver. The timestamp also lets you detect a rep who logged forty doors in nine minutes from the truck.

3. Define "contact" once and write it down. Does a kid answering the door count? Does a voice through the door that says "not interested" count? Does a Ring doorbell conversation count? There is no universally right answer. There is a very wrong outcome, which is two reps using two definitions.

4. Separate "not home" from "refused." They look the same in a blended number and they mean opposite things. Not home is inventory, worth returning to. Refused is a decision. Mixing them means your callback list is full of people who already said no.

Sample size, honestly

A single day of knocking tells you almost nothing about a ratio. A rep who knocks 70 doors and contacts 14 has a 20 percent contact rate with a confidence interval wide enough to drive a truck through. Two days later the same rep on the same street gets 28 percent and the manager declares a trend.

Rough guidance that will keep you out of trouble:

• Do not draw a conclusion about a rep from fewer than several hundred logged doors.
• Do not draw a conclusion about a territory from fewer than one full pass.
• Compare like to like: same territory, same hour band, or do not compare.

If that feels slow, it is. The alternative is making staffing and territory decisions off noise, which is slower.

The number that actually pays

Contact ratio is diagnostic. It is not the number to run the business on. The number to run the business on is doors per set, or better, doors per closed job, because that is the one that converts into cost per acquisition.

Work it backwards. If you know your doors-per-set and your set-to-close rate and your average job value, you know what a knock is worth, and therefore what you can pay for one. That calculation is the entire economics of a canvassing team, and it is the reason the logging discipline above is worth enforcing. You cannot price a knock you did not count.

Two ratios worth tracking that most teams skip

Doors per do-not-knock. How often does your team generate a hard refusal that permanently removes a door from inventory? A high rate means an aggressive pitch is burning territory. This is a real cost, and it compounds, because a do-not-knock door has to be respected on every future pass. The Supreme Court noted in Martin v. City of Struthers that a city "can punish those who call at a home in defiance of the previously expressed will of the occupant," and plenty of cities have done exactly that. Burning a door can be more expensive than losing a sale at it.

Second-pass contact lift. Take the doors that were not home on pass one and knock them in a different hour band. The lift tells you whether your not-home pile is genuinely empty houses or just badly timed knocks. Most teams find it is the second thing, which means their not-home pile is the most underworked asset they own.

What to do with all of this on Monday

Pick one territory. Have one rep log every door with a timestamp and a disposition for a full pass, with no exceptions and no cherry-picking. Then slice contact rate by hour band and compare the morning, afternoon, and evening numbers.

That single exercise usually changes the schedule more than a year of sales meetings, because it replaces the ratio someone heard at a conference with the ratio from your own streets.

Canvass Pro logs every knock with a timestamp and a disposition on the device, offline, so the denominator survives a dead zone.