There is no right or wrong answer to the door knocking DM leads vs calling to set an appt., in fact if you had to choose and could only do one or the other, then door knocking would obviously win out. I disagree with anyone that thinks that door knocking is always inefficient. It certainly can be if you are in a rural area, or happen to have a rough day of finding people at home, but you can always have a shitty day of appts also with no shows or running back and forth trying to accommodate someone else's schedule.
Many times agents who have only door knocked the "leftovers" just have a skewed opinion of what results door knocking can produce. ie; they have already cherry picked the "good" prospects who willing pickup the phone, so the door knocks they are left with are inevitably lesser prospects. If you have already wrote 3/10 via appointments, what else could you possibly expect out of the remaining leads?
I suppose the efficiency argument comes down to whether you are talking about income/time, or PPL. I firmly believe that most agents will come out with a higher PPL at the end of the week by strictly door knocking. Will they have to invest a little more time? Possibly, but that would most likely be negligible unless the leads are spread all over the county. Anyone that has done some door knocking, knows of sales you closed, but you know full well that the same lady would have MF'd you on the phone and told you to go to hell.
I think a big thing with the time efficiency (income/time) just comes from experience. Learning how to quickly tell if someone is full of shit is a skill that you develop, and allows you to quickly move on to the next door. Eventually, if an agent is trained well and motivated, there is no reason they cannot door knock 10-12 leads/day as long as the geography allows. Is that inefficient?
I know many agents that routinely write over 200k and are deathly afraid of the phone and have no desire to ever pick it up. I know another agent who writes 300k+ every year for the last 15 years, and has never, ever set an appt. It would be a pretty tough sell to tell any of them that they are inefficient in what they do, or that they are doing it all wrong. That's not to say that door knocking is the reason for their stellar production; they are great salesman who are driven to be successful. I am confident they would find success no matter the method they chose.
I have done my fair share of both through the years, and they both work and are both efficient. My biggest single day ever in the field was without any appointments at all, just straight door knocking DM leads. I don't say all of that to shit on or discourage setting appointments. Currently, when I am in the field I usually set appointments off of as many leads that I can, and then go pound on the door on the rest of them. There is definitely a lot of willing prospects left in the leads that won't answer the phone.
The good thing is that you don't have to choose. An agent can do whatever they enjoy more (despise less). If you hate the phone then go door knock them. If you hate door knocking then burn the phone up or hire someone else to do it for you. In the end, whatever works for you and provides results will definitely be more "efficient".
