Field sales prospecting: success starts with the plan, not at the door

What is field sales prospecting?#

Field sales prospecting is a face-to-face sales outreach method. The sales rep visits prospects at their place of business in B2B (selling to businesses), or at their homes in B2C (selling to consumers). The rep presents an offer and leaves with a contact who could become a customer.

A bad list wastes your time before the first conversation even starts: a closed storefront, or a type of business that has no need for the offer. Preparation does not replace the conversation; it puts you in front of the right person.

The real estate agent who rings homeowners' doorbells and the sales rep who walks into an auto repair shop both do in-person prospecting. Their techniques differ; their preparation follows the same plan.

How do you follow a field sales prospecting plan, step by step?#

Most advice on field sales prospecting focuses on what to do at the door: opening the conversation, delivering your pitch, and handling objections. An effective sales prospecting plan starts earlier (our guide to the sales prospecting plan details its goal, target and channels). It has five steps, and the first three happen at the office.

1. Set the target and the area. One trade, one geographic area, and the criteria that make a business a good prospect.
2. Build the list. One row per location, with its address, its phone number, its SIRET number (the French ID of a business location), and the reason to visit it. That is your prospect list.
3. Check before you leave. Is the business still active, open on the planned day, reachable at the number you noted?
4. Organize the route. Group visits by neighborhood and business hours.
5. Visit and record the result. Each visit gets an outcome: meeting, callback, refusal, closed.

Made-up example, to adapt: you sell reservation software to three restaurants in the same neighborhood. The day before, you confirm their hours by phone and ask when the manager can see you. Restaurant A gives you an appointment: you lock it in first. Then schedule your visits to B and C around their hours, allowing time for travel. If a manager is out, note when to call back or stop by again. After each visit, you note the contact's name, the need that came up, the outcome, and the next action, with its date. Tell "closed at the time of the visit" apart from "permanent closure confirmed."

One table is enough to prepare and track the route, one row per business:

The conversion rate (the share of visits that end in a sale) also depends on the work you do at the office. A visit to a closed business never converts. The techniques you learned for face-to-face prospecting come into play afterward, once you are speaking with the right person.

Which prospects should you target before heading out on a route?#

Every field sales prospecting strategy starts from a trade and an area. For example, a point-of-sale software vendor targets restaurants in a metro area. A parts distributor targets independent auto repair shops in a département (a French county-sized administrative area); our guide to automotive prospecting in France shows which shops to target for each offer.

Next come the criteria that separate potential customers from the rest: headcount, age of the business, revenue when it is public. Visible equipment matters too. A kitchen open to the dining room or a vehicle lift shows what the business actually does.

The NAF code (the French code that classifies a business's declared main activity, also called the APE code) helps you build an initial list. It describes an administrative declaration, not what the business does today. A brasserie and a fine-dining restaurant can have the same code yet make very different purchases.

The NAF classification is about to change

The classification itself is changing: according to Insee, NAF 2025 takes effect on January 1, 2027.

When the sales force has several reps, each one gets an area. This keeps two reps from visiting the same business in the same week.

Finally, note the precise reason for visiting each business: what need can your offer meet?

An active business can be closed: the step prospecting techniques leave out#

The best prospecting techniques are useless in front of a closed storefront. Handle this step before heading out, using two data sources: the Sirene register and the business itself.

In Sirene, the business register run by Insee, a location is either active or closed. It stays active until Insee has received an administrative closure filing. The data is updated every day.

This status is administrative. A shop that has stopped operating without declaring its closure therefore stays active in the register.

On October 24, 2026, among traditional restaurants active in the Sirene register that Scalon links to a Google listing, 6.0% have their listing marked "permanently closed" by Google, about 1 in 17; among auto repair shops in the same situation, 1.8%, about 1 in 54. Before a route, check that each address is really open: an "active" status is not enough.

Conversely, a company placed in dormant status (operations stopped without dissolving the legal entity) remains active in the register while its locations, including the shop you plan to visit, are marked closed. So check the status of the location you are visiting, not the company's.

The status says that no closure has been declared. It does not say the door will be open Tuesday at 2 p.m.

To read it, you need the SIRET number of the location, the number that identifies one specific business location. Our guide to finding a company's SIRET number shows how to get it from the name. The number does not always match that of the headquarters: in our October 2026 test of 2,420 businesses, the correct SIRET number differed from that of the headquarters for 18% of them. This test covers picking the right location, not the number of closed shops.

Before you leave, three checks are enough:

• The Sirene status of the SIRET number: active or closed.
• The published hours and days the business is closed, so you can schedule the visit during business hours.
• The phone number. Checking whether it is reliable means calling it. If the number is out of service or a different business answers, mark the row "to check" and find the right number before deciding whether to visit.

This data is not real-time. It still saves you trips to places already known to be closed or unreachable.

Field, phone, digital: which sales prospecting methods should you combine?#

Different prospecting methods work in sequence. Before the route, prospecting by phone, whose rules and script our guide covers, confirms the hours or lands an appointment with the manager. An in-person visit shows you what a screen cannot (the business, its equipment, its foot traffic), and lets you talk to the manager without going through a switchboard. After the visit, an email recaps what was agreed and the next step.

Digital prospecting, such as social selling (making contact on professional social networks), assumes the decision-maker is active on LinkedIn. For a neighborhood shop, that is not always the case, and the visit remains the most direct channel.

Which prospecting tools help you prepare and track the route?#

To choose the best field prospecting tools, select one tool for each step of the plan.

• The list: a prospect list in a spreadsheet or database, with one row per business and a reason for each visit.
• Verification: the Sirene status for each SIRET number, plus a call to check any phone numbers you are unsure about.
• The route: a mapping app to order the visits by neighborhood.
• The follow-up: the CRM (customer relationship management, the software that keeps each customer's history), where you record the outcome of each visit.

The CRM keeps a record of prospecting actions. Tell "closed at the time of the visit" apart from "permanent closure confirmed." In the first case, check the hours and plan another slot. Remove businesses that are off target or permanently closed from the list so you do not visit them on the next route.

Many sales prospecting tools are built for reaching out. They do not tell you whom to contact. Your initial prospect list determines how the day goes.

Scalon steps in at this first stage. We deliver a list of businesses in an area, checked row by row, showing whether each one fits your target and why, and cross-checked against the contacts already in your CRM.

You handle the route, calls, and follow-ups. The details are on the page Scalon for field sales reps and SDRs (the sales reps in charge of landing the first meetings).

What the law says about field sales prospecting at a business#

In practice, the question mostly comes up if you have a contract signed during a visit to a business.

The law does not speak of commercial prospecting but of door-to-door solicitation (démarchage). According to Service-public.gouv.fr (the French government's official information site), solicitation means approaching a customer somewhere sales are not normally made.

For a consumer: the two rules from Service-public.gouv.fr

For a consumer, that page sets two rules. The customer you approach can cancel the contract within 14 days. Soliciting a person who has clearly refused the visit is prohibited.

Between two businesses, some of the rules on off-premises contracts (signed during a visit, away from the seller's premises) apply only in one specific case. Article L221-3 of the Code de la consommation (the French Consumer Code) sets two conditions:

• the purpose of the contract is outside the scope of the main activity of the business being solicited;
• that business has no more than five employees.

Both conditions must be met. If one is missing, the rule does not apply.

Whether an offer falls within the main activity of the business visited is judged case by case. A sales rep who sells to very small businesses should consult a legal professional before the first round of visits and before asking anyone to sign a contract during a visit.

Method#

The headquarters figure comes from the test Scalon published on October 14, 2026 on the page finding a company's SIRET number: 2,420 businesses whose correct SIRET number we knew, drawn at random from the Google listings tied to a single location. For 18% of them (give or take 1.6 percentage points), that SIRET number is not the headquarters'.

The closed-listing shares come from Scalon's graph, which links business locations in the Sirene register to their Google listings, for traditional restaurants (NAF code 56.11G in NAF 2025, formerly 56.10A) and light-vehicle auto repair shops (95.31G, formerly 45.20A). We count locations active in the Sirene register, in their latest version, that Scalon's graph links to a Google listing through a reliable ("green") link; only these reliable links count. A listing counts as closed when Google marks it "permanently closed"; a location linked to several listings counts only if all of them are. The links are those in the graph on October 24, 2026 at 9:19 a.m., after the new index was added (713,735 new reliable links since October 23). The Sirene data dates from September 1, 2026; the Google listings were collected between October 2025 and October 12, 2026 (median dates: September 21, 2026 for restaurants, September 23, 2026 for auto repair shops), so a closure that Google already shows may not yet appear in that Sirene data. 22.1% of active traditional restaurants and 15.0% of active auto repair shops are linked to a Google listing: a location with no linked Google listing is not counted. A listing whose status is unknown counts as not closed: the locations linked only to listings with an unknown status (129 restaurants, 44 auto repair shops) are counted as not closed, which pulls the rate down. The shares are accurate to within 0.27 percentage points for restaurants and 0.20 percentage points for auto repair shops (95% confidence interval).

Sources#

• Base Sirene : statut actif ou fermé d'un établissement, Insee
• Démarchage à domicile : règles à respecter, Service-public.gouv.fr
• Article L221-3 du Code de la consommation, Légifrance
• Find a company's SIRET number from its name, Scalon