I can atest that what Glenn has described as a method works for getting sales.

While my business developed customers through our own telemarketing room, we also employed point of sale (as Glenn describes), as well as confusion tactics for company awareness promotion to aid in acquiring telemarketing leads.

My sales force would receive the phone generated leads each day, but one fortunate salesperson for each truck (on a rotating basis) would be assigned to follow each of our trucks into neighborhoods rather than persue leads.

Once the truck was onsite and up and running, then the sales person would call on surrounding homes - generally 2 - 4 homes on each side of the job and 4 -6 homes across the street.

As the truck equipment was powered by a separate Volkwagon motor and high speed wind turbines, it was rather noisy.

The sales person would call on adjacent home owners and apologize for the noise levels...and also explain that the job that was being done was necessary (explaining briefly the reasons for it, and then offer an on the spot inspection of their home to see if the problem existed in their home also...if the salesperson did their inspection correctly a sale would result and the job scheduled....while most days the trucks were fully booked, we did run into occasional last minute booking problems of a time slot, and an idle truck was not an income producer....

....as such the sales person would offer these neighboring homes a special discount incentive if they were flexible on having their job done (meaning they would be scheduled for a date, but if we had a short notice opening and they were willing to have the job done on short notice they would receive the special incentive - as our scheduler arrived a half hour before the truck crews did, the scheduler called and verified appointment times for each time slot for the day - so therefore we knew at the start of the day if there were any jobs for that day that had to be moved due to circumstances with the customer, and thus the scheduler would contact one of these special incentive customers to fill the vacant time slot).

The only drawback to this method was the fact that in some of the neighboring homes no one was at home, but even so, the success rate was excellent for those that were. It was a much easier sale for the salesman than going out on a lead from the telemarketers.