For years, podcasts, influencers, stage speakers, executives, and CEOs have been touting that “Regulation is coming.” Well, my friends, welcome to the beginning of that time. You were right.

I started in the solar industry by knocking on doors. At the time, we were handed a long-shaped, pink, yellow, and white carbon-copied cluster of contracts as our sales tool. I was taught to go over the contracts at night with a yellow highlighter and mark all the positive AND negative stipulations of the agreement. That set of highlighters became my first investment in solar—five bucks from the nearest CVS, and I was on my way to success. It was important that I always had 10 prepped and highlighted, neatly folded, and precisely creased agreements on hand. After pitching at the door, THAT was our “leave behind.” Having 10 of them secured in my white vinyl knocking binder each morning meant I was ready to go all day.

A year later, we got our first branded booklets, where we would tuck the signed pink receipt into a sleeve at the back of a well-illustrated reminder of why the homeowner had signed in the first place. If you sold some deals in that era, you knew the rules. Those booklets were not to be used as “leave behinds.” You had to get to the office before anybody else to secure a handful before the crowd arrived. They were more valuable and rare than gold to us sales reps.

In today’s residential sales environment, finding a Setter, Closer, Sales Manager, Sr. Sales Manager, Regional, Sr. Regional, or even an Owner who has studied or read the agreement their homeowners are signing is rarer than the day those booklets first arrived in our office. I have a hard time finding even one. I haven’t sold door-to-door in years, but I know these contracts better than some of the financial executives at the very companies that employ them!

Somewhere along the way, it became unimportant for sales reps to read and understand their agreements. They don’t realize the content in those contracts protects the homeowner more than the company that drafted it. If they learned how to reference it like a real sales professional, they would have a much higher sign-to-install ratio, earn more commission, and slowly transition to a referral-based business. Instead, they squander the opportunity, feeding off a system that rewards booking a site survey rather than getting the project installed. What a shame.

The leaders of door-to-door sales reps have created an uncontrollable problem—a culture. The wrong culture. This issue is bigger than any office policy. It’s bigger than just getting paid. The culture is so powerful that if an owner decides to take a stand against some of the harmful practices, sales reps see it as a signal to leave and go to a company that “really cares about them.”

The acceptance of lazy practices, half-funded accounts, misled homeowners, and undereducated representatives is amplified by organizations that prioritize volume over quality.

Like Pavlov’s Theory, we have conditioned our largest revenue driver—our sales force—to salivate for food. The ingredients they have learned to value are fast install timelines, low redlines, scheduled site surveys, upfront pay, and incentives. They have been fed junk, and now they have learned to survive on it. If any of those things shift, they will go find another hand that feeds them what they’ve been conditioned to expect.

The culture has grown so big and so strong that it has captured the attention of the country.