🗓️ Idiom: Knock on Doors (v)
💬 Meaning
- To actively seek opportunities or customers by approaching people directly, often without an invitation.
- To make proactive efforts to promote or sell something, especially by visiting places or reaching out persistently.
🧠 Example Sentences
- Our team spent the whole day knocking on doors to pitch the new product.
- In the early days of the startup, she knocked on doors to find her first few clients.
- To land his first job in sales, he literally knocked on doors to offer insurance plans.
🏛️ Origin
The idiom comes from traditional sales practices where representatives would go from house to house (door to door). They would knock on people’s doors to present offers or make sales. It now also applies more broadly to actively seeking new customers.
📝 Practice Exercises
1. Fill in the blank:
When we launched the service, we had no leads, so we just started to __________.
Answer
knock on doors
2. Choose the correct meaning of “knock on doors”:
A) To wait passively for customers to contact you
B) To actively seek opportunities by contacting people directly
C) To close business deals over email
Answer
B) To actively seek opportunities by contacting people directly
3. Rewrite the sentence using the idiom:
“They approached many companies directly in hopes of getting sales.” → Change the sentence using: knock on doors
Answer
They knocked on many doors in hopes of getting sales.
ℹ️ Other Useful Pages
👉 Marketing and Sales Idioms 👉 Marketing and Sales Vocabulary
👉 Business English Idioms List
👉 Student Space
👉 Tutor Toolkit