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Comment by AlphaWeaver | Hacker News Reader

>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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

It doesn't go unsold, everyone pays via subsidies.

Why can't the business suffer losses instead of everyone pay subsidies?

Because public traded business must be greedy in America. They will be sued by share holder of they are not greedy.

>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.

So let’s subsidize nuclear instead. Far more efficient than millions of people buying solar panels. Properly designed nuclear is proven technology.

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.

Let's do both.

Because it’s politically popular to subsidize anointed industries.

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.

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.

> 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.

A loan is a better option than a lease, IMO. The terms are generally less obfuscated with loan agreements as well.

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.

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?

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.

> 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.

"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.

You're mixing an economic system with a legal framework.

Norwegian agreement law § 36:

An agreement may be wholly or partly set aside or amended to the extent that it would seem unreasonable or contrary to good business practice to make it applicable. The same applies to unilateral binding dispositions.

The decision takes into account not only the content of the agreement, the parties' position and the circumstances of the agreement's conclusion, but also to the subsequent circumstances and the circumstances in general.

The rules in the first and second paragraphs apply correspondingly when it would seem unreasonable to make the current commercial use or other contractual custom.

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.

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?

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.

Counter example: PG&E. More expensive than smaller, greener alternatives. And 85 people killed just last year alone is the safety record.

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.

I like this argument but I disagree with it.

I will stipulate that PG&E qualifies as a 'poorly run, centralized utility' and based on its billing it cannot provide power to residential homes for less money than a locally installed solar system can.

The reasons for this are worth considering.

PG&E has to maintain a power transmission infrastructure. That infrastructure has a high inspection cost, land use cost, equipment costs, and insurance risk cost (witness that the threat of the being found liable that their transmission line maintenance (or lack thereof) contributed to the most expensive wild fire in CA history).

Then there are the externalities which we don't account for as much in either scenario. Whether it is the cost of scrubbers on a coal plant, the waste storage costs of nuclear, or the gas pipeline infrastructure for natural gas plants that leaks methane into the air.

What solar does it centralizes the manufacture of the energy production equipment with finite externalitie. It provides highly granular capacity that can be deployed without large step wise changes in capacity (this is the 'nearly unused plant' problem where you have to run a plant because the instantaneous need occasionally exceeds your current generate capacity while the average need is staying below that level (this is where Teslas battery farms help energy companies cut costs).

So when comparing systems dollars to systems dollars, Solar with the current economics of about $3.25/watt installed is actually cheaper than poorly run centralized power plants.

Oh, don't get me wrong - solar power generation is fantastic in areas that can support it (Which is most of the world.)

Rooftop solar power generation is what I have an issue with. Utility-scale solar has all the advantage that you cited, without the disadvantages of being incredibly labour-intensive, overcomplicating the electric grid, and offloading long-term maintenance to non-experts.

If you are going 100% off-the grid, then yes, local installations may be cheaper (Because they don't include the cost of maintaining the grid.)

However, you'll still have to maintain a national grid - because not all buildings or businesses have the rooftop capacity, or the hundreds of thousands of dollars in capital to install enormous battery blocks.

So, what ends up happening, is that a few people drop off the system, and raise prices for everyone else - including people who don't have the option to drop off the grid. My building, for instance, houses 40 units. It has four times the rooftop capacity of an average home. No amount of battery storage is ever going to let it be grid-independent. Other residences dropping off the grid, completely, just shift costs around - they wont reduce overall costs.

It requires a grid, but maybe not a national grid?

There has been a lot of talk about how we need more long-distance power lines for load-balancing solar and wind. However, the PG&E bankruptcy seems to show that we've been underestimating what it takes to properly maintain a grid. Are long-distance power lines more expensive than we thought?

Or maybe rural, fire-prone areas would do better with more local solutions that reduce the amount of low-usage power lines that need to be maintained?

PG&E is a pretty poor strawman for anti-grid arguments. CA pays 2x what neighboring states do for electricity, and despite having mild weather and high population density have unreasonably high levels of safety and reliability issues.

It’s probably second only to Puerto Rico on that front, at least in the US.

Having said that, I’m eagerly awaiting the day I can disconnect my house from the grid, and close my account with them.

It's interesting that you say this because I've had the same feeling. However, I'm still quite hopeful for rooftop installation simply because from a societal point of view it's a better utilisation of land. Where I live we have really ideal conditions for both solar and wind and while I'm relatively happy dotting every hilltop in this area with wind turbines, they've been clear cutting the forest, paving it over and carpeting it with solar panels. I realise that we're going to need some of this, but I would really like to minimise it as much as possible and I'm willing to pay for it. It frustrates me no end that at the same time they started pushing renewable options, they deregulated power sales and capped the distribution costs for the power company in our area. So while the costs of running the grid goes up, they have have no leeway in increasing prices to match. Sigh... I sometimes feel I'm going to be living in a literal silicon valley at some point... The irony, of course, is that I live in Japan and while we have oodles of geothermal potential, it's still a politically sensitive option to even experiment with (for fear of disrupting the hot springs -- lots and lots of money tied up in that and already people complain about the drop off in temperature due to over use...)

For 6-7 hours on most days, rooftop solar can provide power to residential homes more cheaply than PG&E.

For 12+ hours a day, PG&E is almost certainly cheaper I believe.

You cannot just look at $/MW costs when the goal is to have 100% generation adequacy (i.e. demand is uncontrolled, people can turn on loads within their home whenever they want and always expect to have adequate supply).

If loads are interruptible and you don't mind not being able to turn on your air conditioner at 10pm on a hot summer night, then sure, off-grid rooftop solar can be cheaper. Primarily, the way people who actually live off-grid operate is the same way people without running water wash dishes: you ration your consumption.

But most people want power for all their stuff, all the time. It will always be easier to plan for generation adequacy and resiliency centrally rather than every single power user having to install enough generation and storage to meet their own needs, 100% of the time.

Totally agree that it's easier to plan a centralized system over a decentralized one, provided that you adequately fund people to maintain all the components. (And trim trees!)

But have you ever been in a power outage, used your cell phone as a flashlight, and thought, "man, I wish my entire house ran off of a battery like my cell phone?"

A home builder already plans for 95% generation adequacy of hot water -- they literally find space in the floor plan for a hot water heater, and decide how big the tank should be. If you run out, either you ration usage or you buy a bigger water tank.

If home batteries had the right safety-energy density ratio (admittedly -- hard problem; see the RFS for Energy), you could just include one in the floor plan based on 80%ile usage, like the batteries in laptops, and cell phones, and electric cars. They're just too big and expensive now.

Define safer? more safe for an individual or more safe methods of generating power?

Centralized utilities also have a nasty issue of not coping with natural disasters particularly well...

A centralized utility, even a poorly run one, will always provide electricity safer, cheaper, and more consistently then thousands of tiny private installations.

Not necessarily. For household solar, economies of scale kick in at the manufacturing level -- if you’re producing lots of standardized units, each household’s installation costs can go down.

You’re right that there will be some distribution inefficiency, as some households will over-produce and some under. But it may not be that bad if most households size their installations sensibly.

The centralized utility can balance distribution across many households, but there are some extra costs too -- installation and maintenance of power lines, power leakage, downtime due to faults.

Edit to add: I suspect we could agree that district solar (small local utility companies) is an excellent compromise that gets most of the benefits of both types.

Maybe? A well-ran local utility is likely to do a better job then a poorly-ran large one.

Unfortunately, how well a business runs is not always correlated with size.

More efficient to produce a certain kW figure, but run for profit and at the cost of freedom for the consumer.

There are hundereds of different subsidies in the US across all the different states. Some vesting over time, valid from day x to day y, and all kinds of other scenarios. It's really complicated, but chances are high that there is a subsidy or grant somewhere you could take advantage of.

Did they try and sell you anyway?

Thankfully no. But they haven't seemed to have deleted my number from their phone number list either.

PG&E who, if you can believe their actions, is really concerned that people will just drop off the grid altogether.

It is.

It just looks to the east where nearly all of the largest commercial energy consumers in Nevada have dumped NV Energy and built their own solar farms to save money.

How do you calculate savings at the 11-year mark? If you'd invested the same amount in index funds over an 11 year period you'd see your money double in an approximately 10 year period.

We have kept records of the power we've consumed, the power we've generated, the cost of the system and the cost of repairs/maintenance (one panel and one inverter so far over its lifetime).

For the financial analysis we assumed the money would be committed to paying for power one way or the other, there isn't really an option for putting it aside in the mutual fund so the 'invest' option was off the table. With the use of a current measuring system[1] we also have time of day usage numbers which is an option that helps people who aren't home during the day. In our case there is always someone in the house so the tiered rate metering was the only rate schedule we needed to consider[2].

With this information we can calculate the total money would would have spent just paying for power from PG&E and making no change, to the money we spent on the system install ($20,000) and the subsequent money we paid to PG&E for power and for their meter reading service. A bit more than 11 years after the install the total money spent over the period was less for the solar option. Our current annual electricity spend is about $420 (that is $120 for their meter reading + about $300 in additional KWh of energy above what we generate) vs roughly $3000/year or average $250 a month. Effectively $2600 a year is not being spent. If I were a min-maxer then I'd be putting that money into a mutual fund and it would start compounding and well, then the difference would start to look ridiculous.

[1] "The Energy Detective" -- http://www.theenergydetective.com/

[2] While it is true we could have changed further things about our lifestyle to fit into other rate schedules that avenue wasn't pursued.

It's worth modeling the cost of capital of your system to provide a fair comparison. Assuming the it lasts 20 years before you need to replace it entirely and after maintenance you save $2600 a year ($217/month) then what rate of interest could you pay if you took out a loan to cover the initial capital outlay?

Plugging the figures into: https://smartasset.com/personal-loans/personal-loan-calculat... and adjusting the interest rate slider you get a monthly payment of $217 when the interest rate is 11.75%. That's a pretty good rate of return for your investment. Not ridiculous, but solid.

$250/mo is a pretty generous number to compare against. Our >2500 sqft house averages under $100/mo. With the fairly extreme heat we have in in Texas, and A/C set to frigid while we’re home our bill _peaks_ at ~$150 in August. Well..that’s after a $1000 investment in attic insulation the first month we moved in.

Do you keep track of your KWh per month? If so, consider reading this page: https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/rate-plans/rate-plan-o... and then plugging in the numbers. That will give you an idea.

For my house in Nov of 2014 the tiers were Tier 1: 15 cents/kwh Tier 2: 18 cents/kwh Tier 3: 26 cents/kwh Tier 4: 32 cents/kwh

And the baseline allowance is 10KWh a day (our house typically uses 24 - 28KWh per day.

Put those numbers in to your power bill and tell me what the number comes out to.

What I mean is that your initial outlay either needed capital or a loan. This is money that could have been invested, with electricity bills taken out of that kitty. What's confusing me here is that you've said you've been saving $2600 per year in electricity costs but it took 11 years to save $20000 off your bills. Either you've averaged about $1800 per year in savings or you've spent more than $20k on the system + maintenance, or I'm missing something. Was there some sort of tax offset here to make it more cost effective?

The point I was trying to make is that a dollar spent 11 years ago isn't the same as a dollar spent today.

Thanks for that clarification, we did in fact finance the initial capital, we were re-doing the roof and as part of that we chose to refinance the house to take advantage of the lower interest rates. And yes, there were government rebates in force at the time, the actual system cost was closer to $40,000 but our part of that bill was half or $20,000. FWIW the refinance which only added the cost of the roof and panels to the balance and reduced the interest rate left us with a smaller monthly payment with a similar pay off date (replaced a 30 yr fixed with a 15 year fixed)

As for costs, maintenance included replacing a failed inverter, that was $3500, and a panel, that was $450. The way in which electricity has also changed, when we started it was just kilowatts in vs kilowatts out annual true-up, they dumped that and switched to time of day, but changed their mind when the economics didn't work out for them, and now they are on the tiered system. They also blew up the town of San Bruno and convinced the PUC that they should be allowed to raise rates to cover their costs, so the price of electricity has gone up. Net result is that we didn't save as much per month when we started, incurred maintenance costs above the original $20K, and PG&E has changed the rules several times on how the accounting works. Fortunately all of that complexity can be factored out just by computing the bills vs what we paid.

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".

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.

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.

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.

"Did you know you're a horrible looking person. You're ugly, and we can see your pimples. And your eyelashes look like thin straw. And your mouth and lips look dry and colorless. Your hair is a tangled dry-ends mess. But our products can make you look human again."

This is what women are subjected to day in and out by all the media targeting them. They're told how ugly they are, how inhuman they look, how they stink, their disgusting bodies (periods), and more that I know I dont realize being a man.

And only the company's products - well, they never make you awesome. They make you whole from ugliness and disgust.

Lo and behold, we see the same strategies being used in this realm too. It's fear, uncertainty, doubt, and self-loathing; and only that company can save you... for a 20 year hunk of flesh.

There are enough real world examples of women with and without make up on where it's obviously not entirely a manufactured cost/benefit ratio. There is a real ROI for women who purchase those products.

Not to say there isn't real anxiety and pressures generated but at the same time it's not all some grand fiction created by the advertising industry like some Fight Club reductionist style ideologies like to promote.

At least from my perspective, the ROI is often negative. Lipstick looks varying degrees of clownish to me, and if I can’t see your pores you look like a robot. I don’t blame anyone for doing whatever makes them feel beautiful; I’m sure my choices look distasteful to some. But a look enabled by product works because it has been sold to us, men and women alike.

I'd love to read this but can't find it-- link/title? (I did use search but could not find anything).

edit: I think this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19133394

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.

It's terrifying that California legalized this in such a fashion and seems to have handed companies like Sunrun a huge victory.

And again and again, @AOC is completely correct. 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?

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?

As per the gp

> 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 is where the graft and cronyism comes from, and not just for liberal "over-reaching government" policies - graft and cronyism also infect regulations to enforce monopolies by people trying to downscale government protections, and they infect the removal of some regulations that industries consider too onerous but which benefit society at large.

The issue in the US right now is that graft & cronyism are so deeply embedded into the government that we may not legitimately be able to get them out, but I'd urge caution whenever you're tempted to pre-judge people who want to make large changes as doing so for personal gain.

If you read the article closely SunRun entire business model is built off of buying up thousands of tax credits intended for regular America and selling them to mega-corps so they pay zero taxes. And in return it's thousands of loans directly tied to properties by selling short-term gains to consumer who eventually get burned by long term financial trickery.

I mostly agree with you but giant gov programs in 2019 are just setting you up for failure. This isn't patriotic post-war 1950s American in boom times ready to get to work.

There is a sophisticated highly competent industry set up around poking and prodding these deals inside and outside of government.

Private/public deals are cancer. Well intention gov mega-deals like California's massive tax credits and new solar-policy, etc, etc, etc are just bad ideas that keep working against the public interest while politicians get praised as helping the poor/middle class when it gets first released. There's no accountability afterwards. They tell us it's just a lack of gov interferring, which will solve all the problems they made.

Let markets do what markets do and only come in to regulate when there is a clear and obvious dynamic where markets simply dont work (military, police, health care, etc). Simply the tax code. Simplify spending. Stop pretending these grand social and economic experiments. Stop public/private nonsense and choose one or the other.

Without a lien on the property this type of business model, where the company pays for tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment up front to private individuals who may not have any other assets to be used as collateral, simply wouldn’t work. It’s not that different from a mortgage.

Except that they would still have the solar panels and the power generated by them to sell as assets.

A better system would be to offer buyout of the panels when the house sells.

For example if they decide that the system needs to be bought for 20k when the house gets sold, then when you want to sell your house you just bump the price 20k to account for the panels buyout.

There, no lien to the home, and no confusion from the buyers thinking they get a house with solar panels when they're just getting a house where somebody else's panels are installed.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

> “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.

My advertising professor told us the opposite, he straight up told his students that the best sales tactics is to evoke emotional responses like fear and mental anguish and to leverage that to your benefit, including with with lies of omission and unsubstantiated claims about what you are selling.

Sure you don't HAVE to do those things, but then you won't make nearly as much money doing only slightly less soul crushing advertising work. Just like being a good politician doesn't usually get you nearly as far as being a bad and corrupt politician willing to lie straight to people's faces.

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.

>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.

The implication of caveat emptor is to not to take the word of someone selling you something, period.

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.

Some folks manage to act and speak in the customer's interest and still sell things.

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.

Have you ever purchased something custom for business use?

Yes, definitely. The products that I help develop for my day job contain numerous custom components ranging from machined parts to high-level assemblies.

Sometimes it goes well, sometimes not. Sometimes it's our fault, sometimes the vendor's. I'm often not the only person involved in the purchasing process, and there are a number of different interests from engineering, operations, and so forth. Likewise on the vendor's side, we may be talking to salespeople, engineers, and so forth.

I'm often the one who has to bear the bad news: "Hey, this thing doesn't work at all."

We do a great job of tracking service and warranty replacements, and the top-ten list is entirely populated by buy-in subsystems.

Certainly "don't trust any salesman" is an over-simplification that may hold pretty well for consumer products, but not so well when a product is complex and technical. But verifying that the vendor is actually capable of what they claim to do, is still considered to be vital.

The vendor isn't always being dishonest. They may believe that we are over-spec'ing something, and that their product really will fit our needs once we are able to lay our hands on it and use it.

Many sales scripts appeal to the emotional side of us as humans. I don't have a problem with that. My primary criticism is that they focused on using the negatives, specifically "pain and fear" to try and sell their product, instead of using the positives.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

> 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

Seriously: I'm sure Sunrun is scummy. But... come on.

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.

That's a massive false dichotomy. There are many ways to get solar panels other than Sunrun.

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