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>One former Bay Area employee sent me a Sunrun training manual he said was current when he resigned in April 2017. It’s called “Power Play 2.0: The Guide to Suc

>One former Bay Area employee sent me a Sunrun training manual he said was current when he resigned in April 2017. It’s called “Power Play 2.0: The Guide to Successfully Sell Sunrun.” (The company confirmed its authenticity.) It instructs salespeople to sow distrust in and disdain for traditional utilities and appeal to customers’ emotions. Over 61 pages, pain is cited at least 31 times and fear at least a dozen. When reviewing a customer’s traditional utility bill, the trainee is told, “amplify the pain significantly.” Among “components of success”: “creating pain and fear.” Among the “five fatal flaws” to avoid: “failing to build pain or fear.” Not the company I want to be stuck in a 20-year contract with.

rrauenza 8y ago
We got a quote from sun run - it made us uncomfortable how all of their numbers assumed ridiculous utility rate increases. And our gut said we should just wait and purchase instead. A few years later solar prices came down and we made a purchase with an installer whose main business was purchase, not lease. edit: I responded below, but my complaint isn't with their price -- it's their scare tactics and fuzzy break even financial calculations assuming wild rate increases. We went with a vendor who was more open and honest about the break even calcs.
- macspoofing 8y ago
  To be fair, the cost of solar panels at the time you were considering them was what it was. Someone needed to pay for them. If that someone is Sunrun, they need to recoup those cost and make a return. You can be as creative as you want with the financing, that reality won't change. You could have gotten a bank loan too.
  - CydeWeys 8y ago
    No, someone did not need to pay for them. That's not how the market works. If no one is willing to pay the listed price then the product goes unsold. Sunrun has no right to paying customers at any arbitrary price level, same as any other business.
    - eecc 8y ago
      And that’s why markets end up stuck in local minima. Unless you consider government subsidies, which is a way to collectively share the burden of overcoming temporary obstacles.
    - erobbins 8y ago
      It doesn't go unsold, everyone pays via subsidies.
      - chii 8y ago
        Why can't the business suffer losses instead of everyone pay subsidies?
        j16sdiz 8y ago
        Because public traded business must be greedy in America. They will be sued by share holder of they are not greedy.
        alasdair_ 8y ago
        >Why can't the business suffer losses instead of everyone pay subsidies? Because the old model of coal power plants makes people pay in other ways (pollution). Subsidies are reasonable if it means that the negative externalities are diminished.
        briandear 8y ago
        So let’s subsidize nuclear instead. Far more efficient than millions of people buying solar panels. Properly designed nuclear is proven technology.
        passivepinetree 8y ago
        You’re creating a bit of a false dichotomy here. There’s absolutely methods and reason to subsidize both forms of power. Both would be a vast improvement over coal/petroleum.
  - rrauenza 8y ago
    It's not their price I'm complaining about -- it's their financial break even model they pushed claiming huge increases in public utility rates -- which didn't seem realistic given recent history. It's in line with their scare tactics and emotional push.
  - jsight 8y ago
    You aren't wrong, but, unfortunately a lot of consumers weren't aware of the real costs and were misled by companies offering these kinds of deals. I feel like it has done a lot of damage that is going to cost the residential solar industry a lot of money over the coming years.
    - oarsinsync 8y ago
      > You aren't wrong, but, unfortunately a lot of consumers weren't aware of the real costs and were misled by companies offering these kinds of deals This is the same model mobile phones have operated on in many countries for many years. Up front costs are subsidised by the carrier, who then proceeds to gouge you over the 12-24 month term to recoup that cost + a return. > I feel like it has done a lot of damage that is going to cost the residential solar industry a lot of money over the coming years. Possibly, given that the term lengths and financial costs are significantly higher. Unfortunately, the basic model itself is generally appreciated unless you've got the funds to pay up front. More unfortunate is that most people do not have the funds, so accept this trade off and move on.
      - jsight 8y ago
        A loan is a better option than a lease, IMO. The terms are generally less obfuscated with loan agreements as well.
- rconti 8y ago
  Sun Run's quotes were on par with every other installer we got, but I bought outright because I didn't want to have to deal with any of this nonsense.
- justaguyhere 8y ago
  Customers of Sunrun and other companies must sign binding arbitration clauses, barring them from suing or joining in class actions This is how unchecked capitalism looks like. How can this be legal? How is it that so many companies (Google, Sun Run...) are able to get away with forcing their employees and customers to sign away their rights like this? This is in addition to the fact that even if someone has the balls to sue Google and others, it would take massive resources, so most people aren't going to sue in the first place. Is it this bad in other western countries? or is it just the U.S?
  - briandear 8y ago
    So don’t buy from Sunrun. It’s that simple. That’s how capitalism works. If they ask you to sign something as a condition of using their service, simply decline and they lose the sale.
    - richmarr 8y ago
      > So don’t buy from Sunrun. It’s that simple. That’s how capitalism works. That's how laissez-faire capitalism works, within bounds. Capitalism just means private ownership and trade; it doesn't dictate, or even imply, anything about regulation. In more regulated capitalist economies legal systems are quite happy declaring 'unfair' contracts to be void. For example in the UK a single unfair clause can invalidate the entire contract.
    - pixl97 8y ago
      "In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread." Your idea might work, if all companies didn't follow the same anti consumer rules. At some point a law becomes so favored to a business that the savings from anti consumerism dwarfs potential lost sales. Not enough people will realize they are being screwed in the first place.
      - nec4b 8y ago
        You're mixing an economic system with a legal framework.
throwaway5752 8y ago
Every company that sells anything - consumer, enterprise, whatever.. has sales scripts, which this is. If it's not something a live salesperson is walking you through, then there is a workflow you are stepping through to maximize your conversion through steps in a pipeline. This isn't worth getting mad over, and it's universal (it's just modern, quantitative sales best practices). The saying "caveat emptor" is centuries of years old, but is still as relevant, particularly with long term leases.
- someguydave 8y ago
  >The saying "caveat emptor" is thousands of years old. Yes, and the implication of "caveat emptor" is to take a very dim view of the ethics of folks who pitch in this way.
  - throwaway5752 8y ago
    The implication of caveat emptor is to not to take the word of someone selling you something, period.
    - magduf 8y ago
      Sure, but there's a big difference between simply distrusting people who try to sell you stuff, and seeing actual proof that a particular company has truly horrible and evil ethics.
    - someguydave 8y ago
      Some folks manage to act and speak in the customer's interest and still sell things.
      - analog31 8y ago
        Sure, I just don't take their word. If they point out something that I was genuinely unaware of, and I can verify it, then of course it's in my interest to consider it. But as a general rule, I hope that I don't have to ask the salesman for any information.
MR4D 8y ago
I agree with your post completely. An interesting irony struck me while reading your post that many of those potential customers are stuck with PG&E, which has to completely suck. No wonder they focus on sowing distrust.
ChuckMcM 8y ago
It is funny because we get cold called by these folks probably twice a year, and once a rep came up to our house and wanted to tell us about solar, so I gave them a short tour of the 5KW system we installed 15 years ago. The one that has literally paid for itself (about half way through year 11) based on actual generation and power consumption statistics. It would have paid for itself sooner except that PG&E has twice updated the grid tie rules which have incrementally reduced the benefit of rooftop solar. The TPO systems as described are a boon to PG&E who, if you can believe their actions, is really concerned that people will just drop off the grid altogether.
- skybrian 8y ago
  Even without explicit subsidies, it seems like rooftop solar is still getting hidden subsidies? If homeowners were paid wholesale rates for the power they provide, with prices based on the spot market, would any of it make sense financially?
  - vkou 8y ago
    No, it wouldn't. For the same reason that me operating a coal power plant in my backyard wouldn't provide me with cheaper electricity then just buying from the grid. A centralized utility, even a poorly run one, will always provide electricity safer, cheaper, and more consistently then thousands of tiny private installations.
    - labster 8y ago
      Counter example: PG&E. More expensive than smaller, greener alternatives. And 85 people killed just last year alone is the safety record.
      - vkou 8y ago
        PG&E provides ~100 TWh of electricity/per year. Rooftop solar kills ~1 person per 2 TWh of produced energy. Mostly from people falling off roofs. If you were to look at the big picture, and not one outlier year - and look at the entire past decade, PG&E will probably have a better safety record. Also, if you want to do fair accounting, you can't solely blame PG&E for California wildfires. The entire state is a powder keg - and they just happened to be the last people who touched it. It would have burned sooner, or later. If your horse bolts from a barn, because there is no barndoor, do you blame the last person who went into the barn? Sure. Are they the sole point of blame? No. Especially if your barn has a history of horses bolting from it.
floatrock 8y ago
Is this really all that different than putting segment.io onto your site, instrumenting every button click, and A/B testing which color or CTA phrasing results in the highest conversion rates? Just yesterday, there was a front-page post here about the top pricing experiments you can run, full of neat behavioral psychology tricks like decoy pricing and anchoring. Our industry does the same emotional manipulation... we just call it "growth hacking" instead of "sales scripts".
- Someone1234 8y ago
  Yes, it is really that different. What you're talking about is better connecting with a customer's needs and promoting the product's benefits. There's no losers in that situation, just a customer with more facts of which to make their decision. What that training manual is describing is exploiting someone's primal fears to manipulate them into something they wouldn't have otherwise done: apples and oranges. A better analogy might be those beauty ads that call the customer ugly then offer their product as a solution. Seems both that and the Sunrun technique rely on primal fears and worries to get sales.
  - floatrock 8y ago
    Tell me how A/B testing a button's color and placement "better connects with a customer's needs" over maximizing primal attentiveness circuits. Or how implementing decoy pricing and measuring relative price plan conversion funnels "promotes the product's benefits." Tell me how running multiple ad copies for multiple persona-tailored landing pages on a platform that's programmed for automatically rebalancing ad-spend with conversion-maximizing optimization algorithms doesn't trend towards finding the primal fears or urges or whatever that best gets sales. I'm not saying any of this is good, I'm just saying lets not do holier-than-thou mental gymnastics to pretend the tech industry isn't built on taking these traditional sales scripts and industrializing their effectiveness.
    - Someone1234 8y ago
      I won't pretend it never happens. But you have to admit there's a contrast between abusing negative emotions (like fear, hate, anger, and distrust) and trying to connect with positive emotions (joy, interest, hope, enjoyment, etc). If for no other reason that it is much harder to get someone to do something they wouldn't otherwise do while prodding at the positive, but almost easy while prodding the negative. The only times when I can see positive emotions being abusable is sex (as a topic) and gambling, neither of which typically apply to the area we are discussing.
ajross 8y ago
> Not the company I want to be stuck in a 20-year contract with. As opposed to... your electrical utility?! Do people not remember the electricity crisis? It was an enormous, deliberately engineered market fixing scam that produced widespread power outages and a $40B windfall for the power producers financed by emergency state spending. Yet it was totally legal because they managed to get their lobbyists to fool the legislature into writing it into the law before pulling the trigger. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis Seriously: I'm sure Sunrun is scummy. But... come on.
- philwelch 8y ago
  One incident that happened almost 20 years ago, in one of the worst-governed states in the union, in a way that immediately inspired one of the biggest landmark examples of corporate regulation in history.
- darkpuma 8y ago
  That's a massive false dichotomy. There are many ways to get solar panels other than Sunrun.
sverige 8y ago
That's ancient sales wisdom, not anything new. MCI and AT&T perfected those techniques during the long distance wars in the 80s and 90s, and it was ancient sales wisdom back then. A corollary is that they are your family. That's my favorite red flag: some employer or vendor or other non-family entity tries to tell me I'm part of their family. Uh, no, I'm not.
kevin_b_er 8y ago
Not just a 20 year contract, but a 20 year contract that holds a lien on your home. This lien is great for sunrun. It has near zero risk profit backed by a lien on a home. The financial engineering at the expense of the public is quite good.
- jrnichols 8y ago
  It's terrifying that California legalized this in such a fashion and seems to have handed companies like Sunrun a huge victory.
  - crankylinuxuser 8y ago
    And again and again, @AOC is completely correct. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNjckHXBNBI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNjckHXBNBI There's no laws federally preventing corporate collusion and corruption regarding federal congress. And I would also make the claim it's also true for states as well. This Sunrun contract they peddle isn't good for anyone, except for their wallet books. Just how many homes will have unattachable liens from this debauchery?
    - dmix 8y ago
      People like AOC love pushing these types of these well-intentioned top-down gov economic engineering policies which claim to help the little guy (or the environment in this case) but ultimately either do the opposite and largely just create inefficient systems, promoting graft and cronyism, and generally making us worse-off than before. Often they work for a short period of time before the entire marketplace figures out how to exploit it or work around it. Rinse and Repeat. Despite constant evidence that it continually fails to do what they claimed and keeps profiting large politically connect companies, at what point to we start rejecting the whole concept in the first place? Are we continually supposed to believe the next time will be better? The next politician will be more honest and competent? The next batch of over-committed way-too-late patch work of policy with fix the thousand leaks of the boat which they largely generated in the first place?
dakna 8y ago
The same reason why a lot of other industries and political parties use this playbook: It works more often than not. It is much easier to influence a decision by catering to emotions instead of reasoning.
- tacon 8y ago
  The latest brain research pretty clearly shows that all decisions are emotional first, then layered on with the necessary reasoning in our conscious mind to satisfy us. In fact, I recall there is a study that people who have had the emotional center of their brain damaged or destroyed are simply incapable of making any decision at all.
dragonwriter 8y ago
Pretty much all sales and advertising is built around creating a perception of pain and/or fear and offering relief for that. That SunRun included that in their sales manual just indicates that they were addressing a sales force that was significantly staffed with sales novices who didn't already understand that, not that they were particularly nefarious.
- pdonis 8y ago
  > Pretty much all sales and advertising is built around creating a perception of pain and/or fear and offering relief for that. No, pretty much all sales and advertising is built around finding some problem the customer has that the product or service being sold solves (or solves better than their current solution). But there's no need for the problem to be pain and fear--let alone pain and fear that is a perception created by a sales pitch that has no qualms about playing fast and loose with the truth.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > No, pretty much all sales and advertising is built around finding some problem the customer has that the product or service being sold solves “Finding a problem” in sales is very commonly a euphemism for creating the perception of a problem that the customer did not perceive before the sellers efforts. > But there's no need for the problem to be pain and fear “Pain” (outside of it's narrow use for physical pain) is a synonym for having an actual current problem, fear is having a concern about a potential future problem. The distinction you propose is vacuous.
    - pdonis 8y ago
      > “Finding a problem” in sales is very commonly a euphemism for creating the perception of a problem that the customer did not perceive before the sellers efforts. Yes, but that just omits the crucial distinction between an actual problem that the customer did not perceive before the seller's efforts, and a spurious problem that the customer did not perceive before the seller's efforts. > The distinction you propose is vacuous. If that's the way you are using the words "pain and fear", that's your choice. But it's not the way I understood those words. I took those words to be referring to a particular kind of problem, the kind for which the customer can be made to feel that they absolutely need a solution, instead of just that they would like to have one. And that distinction is not vacuous, because it explains why the tactic of convincing the customer to perceive a spurious problem might work a lot better if the perceived (but spurious) problem is of the first kind rather than the second.
fsloth 8y ago
Yeah. Unfortunately sowing fear is a really common marketing gimmick.
throwway988998 8y ago
Where can we find that manual. I would love to read
throwway988998 8y ago
Where can we find this sales manual? I bet it would be a interesting read, maybe better than the original article. I would love to read. Can someone post a link? Thank you
- grzm 8y ago
  Why create a throwaway for this anodyne question? It’s fine to have pseudonymous accounts on HN. But HN is a community: if for some reason you don’t want to tie this to your main account, create another one for such questions, but keep some consistency. HN isn’t intended to be a collection of disconnected, orphaned statements.

rrauenza 8y ago

We got a quote from sun run - it made us uncomfortable how all of their numbers assumed ridiculous utility rate increases. And our gut said we should just wait and purchase instead. A few years later solar prices came down and we made a purchase with an installer whose main business was purchase, not lease. edit: I responded below, but my complaint isn't with their price -- it's their scare tactics and fuzzy break even financial calculations assuming wild rate increases. We went with a vendor who was more open and honest about the break even calcs.

macspoofing 8y ago
To be fair, the cost of solar panels at the time you were considering them was what it was. Someone needed to pay for them. If that someone is Sunrun, they need to recoup those cost and make a return. You can be as creative as you want with the financing, that reality won't change. You could have gotten a bank loan too.
- CydeWeys 8y ago
  No, someone did not need to pay for them. That's not how the market works. If no one is willing to pay the listed price then the product goes unsold. Sunrun has no right to paying customers at any arbitrary price level, same as any other business.
  - eecc 8y ago
    And that’s why markets end up stuck in local minima. Unless you consider government subsidies, which is a way to collectively share the burden of overcoming temporary obstacles.
  - erobbins 8y ago
    It doesn't go unsold, everyone pays via subsidies.
    - chii 8y ago
      Why can't the business suffer losses instead of everyone pay subsidies?
      - j16sdiz 8y ago
        Because public traded business must be greedy in America. They will be sued by share holder of they are not greedy.
      - alasdair_ 8y ago
        >Why can't the business suffer losses instead of everyone pay subsidies? Because the old model of coal power plants makes people pay in other ways (pollution). Subsidies are reasonable if it means that the negative externalities are diminished.
        briandear 8y ago
        So let’s subsidize nuclear instead. Far more efficient than millions of people buying solar panels. Properly designed nuclear is proven technology.
        passivepinetree 8y ago
        You’re creating a bit of a false dichotomy here. There’s absolutely methods and reason to subsidize both forms of power. Both would be a vast improvement over coal/petroleum.
- rrauenza 8y ago
  It's not their price I'm complaining about -- it's their financial break even model they pushed claiming huge increases in public utility rates -- which didn't seem realistic given recent history. It's in line with their scare tactics and emotional push.
- jsight 8y ago
  You aren't wrong, but, unfortunately a lot of consumers weren't aware of the real costs and were misled by companies offering these kinds of deals. I feel like it has done a lot of damage that is going to cost the residential solar industry a lot of money over the coming years.
  - oarsinsync 8y ago
    > You aren't wrong, but, unfortunately a lot of consumers weren't aware of the real costs and were misled by companies offering these kinds of deals This is the same model mobile phones have operated on in many countries for many years. Up front costs are subsidised by the carrier, who then proceeds to gouge you over the 12-24 month term to recoup that cost + a return. > I feel like it has done a lot of damage that is going to cost the residential solar industry a lot of money over the coming years. Possibly, given that the term lengths and financial costs are significantly higher. Unfortunately, the basic model itself is generally appreciated unless you've got the funds to pay up front. More unfortunate is that most people do not have the funds, so accept this trade off and move on.
    - jsight 8y ago
      A loan is a better option than a lease, IMO. The terms are generally less obfuscated with loan agreements as well.
rconti 8y ago
Sun Run's quotes were on par with every other installer we got, but I bought outright because I didn't want to have to deal with any of this nonsense.
justaguyhere 8y ago
Customers of Sunrun and other companies must sign binding arbitration clauses, barring them from suing or joining in class actions This is how unchecked capitalism looks like. How can this be legal? How is it that so many companies (Google, Sun Run...) are able to get away with forcing their employees and customers to sign away their rights like this? This is in addition to the fact that even if someone has the balls to sue Google and others, it would take massive resources, so most people aren't going to sue in the first place. Is it this bad in other western countries? or is it just the U.S?
- briandear 8y ago
  So don’t buy from Sunrun. It’s that simple. That’s how capitalism works. If they ask you to sign something as a condition of using their service, simply decline and they lose the sale.
  - richmarr 8y ago
    > So don’t buy from Sunrun. It’s that simple. That’s how capitalism works. That's how laissez-faire capitalism works, within bounds. Capitalism just means private ownership and trade; it doesn't dictate, or even imply, anything about regulation. In more regulated capitalist economies legal systems are quite happy declaring 'unfair' contracts to be void. For example in the UK a single unfair clause can invalidate the entire contract.
  - pixl97 8y ago
    "In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread." Your idea might work, if all companies didn't follow the same anti consumer rules. At some point a law becomes so favored to a business that the savings from anti consumerism dwarfs potential lost sales. Not enough people will realize they are being screwed in the first place.
    - nec4b 8y ago
      You're mixing an economic system with a legal framework.

throwaway5752 8y ago

Every company that sells anything - consumer, enterprise, whatever.. has sales scripts, which this is. If it's not something a live salesperson is walking you through, then there is a workflow you are stepping through to maximize your conversion through steps in a pipeline. This isn't worth getting mad over, and it's universal (it's just modern, quantitative sales best practices). The saying "caveat emptor" is centuries of years old, but is still as relevant, particularly with long term leases.

someguydave 8y ago
>The saying "caveat emptor" is thousands of years old. Yes, and the implication of "caveat emptor" is to take a very dim view of the ethics of folks who pitch in this way.
- throwaway5752 8y ago
  The implication of caveat emptor is to not to take the word of someone selling you something, period.
  - magduf 8y ago
    Sure, but there's a big difference between simply distrusting people who try to sell you stuff, and seeing actual proof that a particular company has truly horrible and evil ethics.
  - someguydave 8y ago
    Some folks manage to act and speak in the customer's interest and still sell things.
    - analog31 8y ago
      Sure, I just don't take their word. If they point out something that I was genuinely unaware of, and I can verify it, then of course it's in my interest to consider it. But as a general rule, I hope that I don't have to ask the salesman for any information.

MR4D 8y ago

I agree with your post completely. An interesting irony struck me while reading your post that many of those potential customers are stuck with PG&E, which has to completely suck. No wonder they focus on sowing distrust.

ChuckMcM 8y ago

It is funny because we get cold called by these folks probably twice a year, and once a rep came up to our house and wanted to tell us about solar, so I gave them a short tour of the 5KW system we installed 15 years ago. The one that has literally paid for itself (about half way through year 11) based on actual generation and power consumption statistics. It would have paid for itself sooner except that PG&E has twice updated the grid tie rules which have incrementally reduced the benefit of rooftop solar. The TPO systems as described are a boon to PG&E who, if you can believe their actions, is really concerned that people will just drop off the grid altogether.

skybrian 8y ago
Even without explicit subsidies, it seems like rooftop solar is still getting hidden subsidies? If homeowners were paid wholesale rates for the power they provide, with prices based on the spot market, would any of it make sense financially?
- vkou 8y ago
  No, it wouldn't. For the same reason that me operating a coal power plant in my backyard wouldn't provide me with cheaper electricity then just buying from the grid. A centralized utility, even a poorly run one, will always provide electricity safer, cheaper, and more consistently then thousands of tiny private installations.
  - labster 8y ago
    Counter example: PG&E. More expensive than smaller, greener alternatives. And 85 people killed just last year alone is the safety record.
    - vkou 8y ago
      PG&E provides ~100 TWh of electricity/per year. Rooftop solar kills ~1 person per 2 TWh of produced energy. Mostly from people falling off roofs. If you were to look at the big picture, and not one outlier year - and look at the entire past decade, PG&E will probably have a better safety record. Also, if you want to do fair accounting, you can't solely blame PG&E for California wildfires. The entire state is a powder keg - and they just happened to be the last people who touched it. It would have burned sooner, or later. If your horse bolts from a barn, because there is no barndoor, do you blame the last person who went into the barn? Sure. Are they the sole point of blame? No. Especially if your barn has a history of horses bolting from it.

floatrock 8y ago

Is this really all that different than putting segment.io onto your site, instrumenting every button click, and A/B testing which color or CTA phrasing results in the highest conversion rates? Just yesterday, there was a front-page post here about the top pricing experiments you can run, full of neat behavioral psychology tricks like decoy pricing and anchoring. Our industry does the same emotional manipulation... we just call it "growth hacking" instead of "sales scripts".

Someone1234 8y ago
Yes, it is really that different. What you're talking about is better connecting with a customer's needs and promoting the product's benefits. There's no losers in that situation, just a customer with more facts of which to make their decision. What that training manual is describing is exploiting someone's primal fears to manipulate them into something they wouldn't have otherwise done: apples and oranges. A better analogy might be those beauty ads that call the customer ugly then offer their product as a solution. Seems both that and the Sunrun technique rely on primal fears and worries to get sales.
- floatrock 8y ago
  Tell me how A/B testing a button's color and placement "better connects with a customer's needs" over maximizing primal attentiveness circuits. Or how implementing decoy pricing and measuring relative price plan conversion funnels "promotes the product's benefits." Tell me how running multiple ad copies for multiple persona-tailored landing pages on a platform that's programmed for automatically rebalancing ad-spend with conversion-maximizing optimization algorithms doesn't trend towards finding the primal fears or urges or whatever that best gets sales. I'm not saying any of this is good, I'm just saying lets not do holier-than-thou mental gymnastics to pretend the tech industry isn't built on taking these traditional sales scripts and industrializing their effectiveness.
  - Someone1234 8y ago
    I won't pretend it never happens. But you have to admit there's a contrast between abusing negative emotions (like fear, hate, anger, and distrust) and trying to connect with positive emotions (joy, interest, hope, enjoyment, etc). If for no other reason that it is much harder to get someone to do something they wouldn't otherwise do while prodding at the positive, but almost easy while prodding the negative. The only times when I can see positive emotions being abusable is sex (as a topic) and gambling, neither of which typically apply to the area we are discussing.

ajross 8y ago

> Not the company I want to be stuck in a 20-year contract with. As opposed to... your electrical utility?! Do people not remember the electricity crisis? It was an enormous, deliberately engineered market fixing scam that produced widespread power outages and a $40B windfall for the power producers financed by emergency state spending. Yet it was totally legal because they managed to get their lobbyists to fool the legislature into writing it into the law before pulling the trigger. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis Seriously: I'm sure Sunrun is scummy. But... come on.

philwelch 8y ago
One incident that happened almost 20 years ago, in one of the worst-governed states in the union, in a way that immediately inspired one of the biggest landmark examples of corporate regulation in history.
darkpuma 8y ago
That's a massive false dichotomy. There are many ways to get solar panels other than Sunrun.

sverige 8y ago

That's ancient sales wisdom, not anything new. MCI and AT&T perfected those techniques during the long distance wars in the 80s and 90s, and it was ancient sales wisdom back then. A corollary is that they are your family. That's my favorite red flag: some employer or vendor or other non-family entity tries to tell me I'm part of their family. Uh, no, I'm not.

kevin_b_er 8y ago

Not just a 20 year contract, but a 20 year contract that holds a lien on your home. This lien is great for sunrun. It has near zero risk profit backed by a lien on a home. The financial engineering at the expense of the public is quite good.

jrnichols 8y ago
It's terrifying that California legalized this in such a fashion and seems to have handed companies like Sunrun a huge victory.
- crankylinuxuser 8y ago
  And again and again, @AOC is completely correct. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNjckHXBNBI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNjckHXBNBI There's no laws federally preventing corporate collusion and corruption regarding federal congress. And I would also make the claim it's also true for states as well. This Sunrun contract they peddle isn't good for anyone, except for their wallet books. Just how many homes will have unattachable liens from this debauchery?
  - dmix 8y ago
    People like AOC love pushing these types of these well-intentioned top-down gov economic engineering policies which claim to help the little guy (or the environment in this case) but ultimately either do the opposite and largely just create inefficient systems, promoting graft and cronyism, and generally making us worse-off than before. Often they work for a short period of time before the entire marketplace figures out how to exploit it or work around it. Rinse and Repeat. Despite constant evidence that it continually fails to do what they claimed and keeps profiting large politically connect companies, at what point to we start rejecting the whole concept in the first place? Are we continually supposed to believe the next time will be better? The next politician will be more honest and competent? The next batch of over-committed way-too-late patch work of policy with fix the thousand leaks of the boat which they largely generated in the first place?

dakna 8y ago

The same reason why a lot of other industries and political parties use this playbook: It works more often than not. It is much easier to influence a decision by catering to emotions instead of reasoning.

tacon 8y ago
The latest brain research pretty clearly shows that all decisions are emotional first, then layered on with the necessary reasoning in our conscious mind to satisfy us. In fact, I recall there is a study that people who have had the emotional center of their brain damaged or destroyed are simply incapable of making any decision at all.

dragonwriter 8y ago

Pretty much all sales and advertising is built around creating a perception of pain and/or fear and offering relief for that. That SunRun included that in their sales manual just indicates that they were addressing a sales force that was significantly staffed with sales novices who didn't already understand that, not that they were particularly nefarious.

pdonis 8y ago
> Pretty much all sales and advertising is built around creating a perception of pain and/or fear and offering relief for that. No, pretty much all sales and advertising is built around finding some problem the customer has that the product or service being sold solves (or solves better than their current solution). But there's no need for the problem to be pain and fear--let alone pain and fear that is a perception created by a sales pitch that has no qualms about playing fast and loose with the truth.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > No, pretty much all sales and advertising is built around finding some problem the customer has that the product or service being sold solves “Finding a problem” in sales is very commonly a euphemism for creating the perception of a problem that the customer did not perceive before the sellers efforts. > But there's no need for the problem to be pain and fear “Pain” (outside of it's narrow use for physical pain) is a synonym for having an actual current problem, fear is having a concern about a potential future problem. The distinction you propose is vacuous.
  - pdonis 8y ago
    > “Finding a problem” in sales is very commonly a euphemism for creating the perception of a problem that the customer did not perceive before the sellers efforts. Yes, but that just omits the crucial distinction between an actual problem that the customer did not perceive before the seller's efforts, and a spurious problem that the customer did not perceive before the seller's efforts. > The distinction you propose is vacuous. If that's the way you are using the words "pain and fear", that's your choice. But it's not the way I understood those words. I took those words to be referring to a particular kind of problem, the kind for which the customer can be made to feel that they absolutely need a solution, instead of just that they would like to have one. And that distinction is not vacuous, because it explains why the tactic of convincing the customer to perceive a spurious problem might work a lot better if the perceived (but spurious) problem is of the first kind rather than the second.

fsloth 8y ago

Yeah. Unfortunately sowing fear is a really common marketing gimmick.

throwway988998 8y ago

Where can we find that manual. I would love to read

throwway988998 8y ago

Where can we find this sales manual? I bet it would be a interesting read, maybe better than the original article. I would love to read. Can someone post a link? Thank you

grzm 8y ago
Why create a throwaway for this anodyne question? It’s fine to have pseudonymous accounts on HN. But HN is a community: if for some reason you don’t want to tie this to your main account, create another one for such questions, but keep some consistency. HN isn’t intended to be a collection of disconnected, orphaned statements.