As part of my marketing campaign, I decided to call on the chiropractor located next to the post office.

Purposely, I hadn’t phoned in advance.

On that particular day I was literally knocking on doors.

What the chiropractor didn’t know was that I had sold him some training cassettes over a dozen years ago, by phone. But now, my idea was to test his openness to becoming one of my new coaching clients.

As I entered his dimly lit office, he greeted me. Instantly, I felt a sense of emptiness, partly conveyed by missing receptionists, assistants, and above all, clients.

“Hello, Dr. Frisbee,” I said brightly. “I’d like to get one of your business cards and then set an appointment with you to see how we might establish a consulting relationship.”

“Okay,” he replied in a subdued, but not disinterested tone.

And with that, I decided NOT to pitch him on the spot, which would have been my preference had I not sensed such a vacuum in his quarters.

In fact, I never pitched him. His name went to the bottom of my prospecting list because I felt his career wasn’t soaring. It was going the other way.

This perception turned out to be correct. A few days ago, as I was driving up his street, I noticed some sheets or towels had been hung awkwardly over the broad storefront window with his name still etched on the glass.

He was out of business.

This sounds like a sad story, but it isn’t; not if you’re a marketer or a salesman. In fact, it represents a breakthrough in a retro sense.

By doing your prospecting on foot, or by car, you can gauge what’s really going on in a business. Instead of seeing just another “tombstone” description of your prospect on a computer screen, you can gaze into the parking lot at that distributorship and see that there are some very upscale sports cars parked in the executives’ spaces.

This company is doing fine, its people are prospering.

Likewise, you can see how large the buildings are that your prospects occupy, and above all, you can evaluate the mood of the place by assessing the reception you receive. Obvious employee contentment and broad smiles tell you this is probably not a place that’s headed for imminent disaster.

Of course, you may be hunting for failure, for dourness, especially if you’re seeking new digs for a real estate client and you want to get in on the ground floor with a motivated seller. Then, you might be hunting for a marginal enterprise that’s more than willing to move on, and to move out.

But you get the idea. Prospecting in person, while it may seem inefficient and archaic, is anything but. It can be the most enlightened way of seeing what’s going on in the real world.

The top salesperson at an international shipping company, one of my clients, used to get in his car and follow the competition’s trucks to see where they were making pickups. He’d count how many boxes were loaded, and how much time was spent at each dock.

Then, he’d customize a proposal before even contacting those prospects, who of course were amazed that he seemed to know so much about them!

Try this, at least every now and then. It will make prospecting a lot more fun, like detective work, and you’ll breathe new life into what can otherwise be a highly impersonal and abstract marketing process.