The Complete Guide to Door-to-Door Roofing Sales in 2026

It is 4:47 PM on a Tuesday in a Plano subdivision and a rep named Marcus is standing on his 62nd porch of the day. He has had 14 real conversations, booked 3 inspections, and watched two homeowners slam the door before he finished saying his name. His shirt is soaked through. His phone is at 18 percent. He has driven past the same yellow Lab three times. And tomorrow he will do it again, because the hailstorm that rolled through Collin County eight days ago dropped 1.75-inch stones across roughly 40,000 homes, and his company has about 60 days before every other roofer in north Texas finishes chewing through the same list.

This is door-to-door roofing sales in 2026. It is not glamorous, it is not dying, and it is not what the LinkedIn thought leaders tell you it is. Meta ads do not knock doors. Google LSAs do not walk a homeowner around their yard and point at bruised shingles. Referral programs work, but they work slowly, and a storm does not wait for your referral engine to warm up.

We have watched thousands of reps work territories across Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, Kansas, Florida, and the Carolinas, and the pattern is always the same. The companies that win the next decade of roofing sales are the ones that treat canvassing like a real operation instead of a desperate hustle. This guide is what we have learned about how that works.

Why door-to-door still wins in roofing

The roofing industry runs on urgency and trust, and no channel delivers both at the same time the way a knock does. A homeowner who just sat through a hailstorm is scanning the sky, their neighbors, their yard, and their insurance app in that order. When a rep in a clean shirt walks up the driveway with a ladder in the truck and says, "I pulled the hail map for your street, can I show you what I am seeing on your neighbors' roofs?", that homeowner is hearing the first credible voice in a very loud week.

Digital acquisition costs in roofing have roughly doubled since 2021. Cost per lead on Google Ads for storm-keyword terms now routinely runs $180 to $340 in competitive DMAs, and closed-deal CAC climbs past $1,200 for the average shop that cannot close over the phone. Meanwhile a well-run door-knocking team still acquires signed contingency agreements for $90 to $160 in fully loaded labor, and in a fresh storm the number can drop below $60.

The second reason door-to-door still wins is that insurance-eligible roof replacements are a neighborhood product. Hail does not hit one house. It hits a zip code. If you sell a roof on Oak Terrace, the two houses next to you probably have the same damage, the same carrier distribution, and the same adjuster pool. No other channel lets you compound density the way canvassing does, and density is what turns a $297 per month tool into a six-figure week.

The third reason is that homeowners still buy from humans they can see. Trust collapses fast on a website. It builds in 90 seconds on a porch.

The four types of door knocks every rep runs

Reps who treat every door the same underperform. The motion, the opener, the goal, and the follow-up all change based on why you are standing there. There are really four kinds of knocks, and a good rep knows which one they are running before they ring the bell.

Cold post-storm canvass

This is the high-leverage work. A storm hit, a hail map exists, and you are walking streets where damage is probable but unconfirmed. Contact rates on fresh storm canvass run 35 to 48 percent on a weekday evening, because homeowners are already thinking about their roof. Inspection booking rates off a contacted door run 22 to 34 percent when the rep has a real script and a tablet with neighborhood data. The kill shot here is specificity. Name the storm date, name the street, reference the carrier list if you have pulled it, and offer a free inspection tied to the claim deadline.

Cold canvass without a storm

Harder. Contact rates are similar but inspection booking drops to 8 to 14 percent because you have no urgency lever. The rep is really selling a free inspection on age, not damage. This is the work you run in the off-season to keep reps sharp and to seed retail replacements. Do not expect hero numbers. Expect one signed contract per 80 to 120 knocks, and judge reps on consistency, not conversion.

Referral follow-up

A customer named you to a neighbor, or you pulled three signed contracts off a street and want the other 17 houses. Contact rate jumps to 55 to 70 percent because you can lead with the referral name. Booking rate on a contacted door climbs past 60 percent when the rep remembers to say, "The Hendersons at 412 hired us to do their roof last week and they asked me to come check on yours." This is free money and almost nobody runs it systematically.

Re-knocks

The door that was a "not now" in week one. The inspection that was scheduled and the homeowner ghosted. The adjuster meeting that got rescheduled three times. Re-knocks are where average reps leak 40 percent of their pipeline and top reps add a third of their revenue. The job here is cadence, not charisma. If you want to close more deals from the doors you already knocked, you need a sales pipeline that closes instead of a contact list that expires.

What separates top reps from average

The top 10 percent of roofing canvassers do not knock more doors. They knock better doors, say sharper things at the doorstep, and manage their pipeline like a franchise owner instead of a hunter. We have pulled numbers off enough teams to see the gap clearly.

An average rep in a post-storm market logs 45 to 70 knocks per day, books 2 to 4 inspections, and signs 1 to 2 contingency agreements per week. A top rep in the same market logs 50 to 80 knocks, books 6 to 10 inspections, and signs 4 to 7 agreements per week. The knock count is nearly identical. Contact-to-inspection rate is not. Top reps hit 35 to 45 percent contact-to-inspection. Average reps sit at 12 to 18 percent.

The difference is almost entirely upstream of the doorstep. Top reps pick streets with higher damage probability, knock at the right time of day for the neighborhood demographic, run tighter openers, and show up with a tablet that already has the property record, the roof age estimate, and the carrier guess. They are not winging it. Average reps wing it.

The second separator is re-knock discipline. A top rep will re-knock a "not home" three times in the first 10 days, a "not interested" once at 14 days with a new angle, and a scheduled-but-canceled homeowner the same day by phone and the next day in person. Average reps mark "no contact" and move on, which is why their pipeline dies in month two of a storm cycle.

The third separator is what they do with the contract. Top reps sit in the driveway and log the signed agreement, the supplement opportunities, and three neighbor referrals before they pull out. Average reps drive to the next street and forget half of it by 8 PM. If you want to understand what really drives revenue at the rep level, the metrics that predict revenue are contact rate, inspection-to-contract rate, and re-knock compliance, in that order. Commission totals are a lagging indicator.

Building a door-knocking operation

A door-knocking operation is three things: a territory, a tooling stack, and a team structure. Get any of the three wrong and the other two cannot compensate.

Territory is where most owners fail. They hand a rep a zip code, which is lazy, or they hand a rep a spreadsheet of addresses, which is unusable on a porch. A real territory is a drawn polygon on a map, assigned to one rep for a defined window, with density targets and re-knock rules baked in. Without that, reps double-knock the same house, skip whole streets, and argue over leads.

Post-storm, the territory logic gets harder. You are overlaying NOAA hail swath data on MLS age data and on whatever knock history you have, and assigning fresh polygons to reps based on expected contact probability. Most shops do this in their head, badly. If you want to see how a structured approach works, we wrote about territory assignment after a storm in a separate post.

Tooling is where owners overspend on the wrong things. You do not need a CRM with a Kanban board in 14 colors. You need GPS-tagged knock logging, a map with live territory overlays, a lightweight inspection workflow, a contingency agreement the rep can e-sign on a tablet, and a pipeline view that the sales manager can coach from on Monday morning. Anything more is usually clutter that reps will not actually use.

Team structure is the piece owners put off longest and regret most. A one-rep shop can freestyle. A three-rep shop needs a sales manager or a working owner who runs Monday pipeline review, Wednesday ride-alongs, and Friday commission reconciliation. A seven-rep shop needs a canvassing lead separate from the estimator, and a production coordinator separate from both. Skip these hires and you will cap out at about $3M a year no matter how good your reps are.

Legal and ethical landscape

Door knocking is legal almost everywhere in the United States, but the details matter and the details change by city. This is the part of the business where a reckless rep can cost the company a $5,000 fine and a week of local press.

Start with solicitor permits. Most cities require a permit for door-to-door sales, often $50 to $300 per rep per year, sometimes with a background check. Some cities require a permit per ward. Some require you to register specific dates and streets. In Texas, cities like Frisco, Plano, and Allen all have different rules. In Colorado, Aurora and Centennial require permits while unincorporated Arapahoe County does not. Assume nothing, call the city clerk, and keep a laminated copy of the permit on the rep.

No-soliciting signs are the second trap. In most jurisdictions, a clearly posted no-soliciting sign creates a legal basis for the homeowner to file a complaint if a rep knocks, even if the sign is not backed by city ordinance. Train reps to skip them every time. The one or two knocks you save are not worth the Google review that starts with "they ignored my sign."

Do-not-knock lists are increasingly common. Cities including Cincinnati, Denver suburbs, and parts of the Twin Cities maintain registries that sales reps must check before knocking. Fines for violating a DNK list run $250 to $1,000 per incident. A serious canvassing operation syncs these lists into their routing tool so the rep sees "skip this house" on the map instead of relying on memory.

The ethical piece matters even more than the legal piece. A rep who pushes past a clear no, who fabricates damage, or who implies an insurance payout that has not been approved will cost you more in AG complaints and public records investigations than any storm will pay. Hire for this. Train for this. Fire for this when it happens.

Scaling from one rep to a full canvassing team

The jump from one rep to five, and from five to fifteen, is where most roofing companies stall. The math changes at each threshold and the management layer has to change with it.

At one rep, which is usually the owner, the operation is a sole proprietorship with a ladder. Revenue per rep is high because the owner closes everything, but the system is entirely in the owner's head. This is fine for a year. It is fatal by year three, because the owner cannot take a weekend off and cannot recruit anyone who expects process.

At three to five reps, you need a written territory assignment system, a shared CRM, and a Monday meeting. Revenue per rep usually drops 15 to 25 percent because the owner is spending time managing instead of selling, and because the new reps are still learning. This is normal. Owners who panic here and go back to closing everything themselves cap their company for a decade.

At eight to twelve reps, you need a dedicated canvassing lead, a production coordinator, and real KPIs. Contact rate, inspection rate, and sit rate all get tracked per rep per week, not per month. Reps who sit below team average for two consecutive months get coached or cut. This is also the point where commission structures start breaking, because the flat percentages that worked for 3 reps create fights when 10 reps are working overlapping territories.

At fifteen reps and above, you are running a sales organization. You need a sales manager who does not knock, a recruiter who does not sell, and a compensation plan that separates base from commission from bonus. You also need a genuinely defensible storm strategy, because the volatility of chasing storms will wreck morale if you do not plan around it. We wrote about long-term storm operations separately, because the topic is too big to compress into a paragraph.

One warning. Do not hire five reps at once after a storm. The math looks good on a whiteboard and feels terrible in practice. Onboard in waves of two, give the first wave 30 days, then hire again. The shops that lose $200,000 on bad hires almost always bulk-hired into a storm and had no training capacity.

The tooling a door-knocking operation actually needs

We have watched a lot of roofing companies try to run canvassing out of a group text, a Google Sheet, and a whiteboard in the sales manager's office. It works until it does not, and it stops working around rep number four. At that point the data loss starts costing real revenue. Reps forget which doors they knocked, leads fall through the cracks between the inspection and the supplement, commission disputes eat the Friday meeting, and the owner cannot tell whether a rep is genuinely struggling or whether the territory was just bad.

The honest minimum for a real canvassing operation is about six things. You need a map where reps see their assigned polygon and cannot accidentally knock someone else's territory. You need GPS-tagged knock logging with outcome codes the rep can tap in three seconds on a porch. You need an inspection calendar that syncs to the rep's phone. You need a contingency agreement the rep can generate and e-sign on a tablet. You need a pipeline view that shows every lead from knock to contract to adjuster meeting to build date. And you need commission tracking that pays reps on signed, built, and collected, with a rule set the owner does not have to argue about every Friday.

Most shops try to assemble this from four or five tools and some duct tape. It sort of works. It leaks about 12 to 18 percent of gross revenue in lost leads, missed re-knocks, and commission disputes. We built RoofKnockers because we kept seeing the same leaks in the same places, and because nothing on the market in 2023 handled storm-cycle canvassing as one integrated workflow. If you want a canvassing tool built for this workflow, it exists now, and plans start at $297/month for a 5-seat team.

We are not going to pretend the tool does the hard work for you. A rep still has to knock. A manager still has to coach. An owner still has to make payroll on a bad month. What software can do is stop the leaks, keep the data honest, and let the owner see what is actually happening in the field without driving to every neighborhood themselves. If that sounds useful, you can start a free 14-day trial without a credit card and see whether it fits your team before you commit.

The doorstep is still the shortest path to a signed roof

Roofing sales is going to get more expensive, more regulated, and more competitive over the next three years. AI-generated estimate tools will commodify the quoting phase. Insurance carriers will keep tightening adjuster rules. Local ordinances will keep expanding do-not-knock registries. The temptation will be to chase the newest channel and let canvassing decay.

We think the opposite will happen. As every other channel gets noisier and more expensive, the rep who can stand on a porch, read a homeowner in 30 seconds, and book an inspection by the time the dog stops barking will be worth more, not less. The operations that invest in doing this well in 2026 will own the 2028 storm season in their markets. The ones that treat canvassing like a side channel will spend the next three years wondering why their CAC keeps climbing.

Pick one neighborhood, one rep, one week. Set a knock target, a contact target, and an inspection target. Write down what you learn. Then do it again with two reps. That is how every serious roofing operation in the country got started, and it is still the shortest path between a storm map and a signed contract. The door works. Walk up to it.