As the company grew there were a number of changes. I was never into sales, but was sold when my friend told me as a Field Energy Consultant (FEC) I wouldn't have to get my own leads. They have associates to get the leads for you, then you go to the customer's house and present them with how much money they will save on their electric bills, which is an easy sale.
Well I unfortunately had to start out as the associate who got the leads, a Field Energy Specialist, FES (I still don't know how I did it). I had to jump out at everyone who walked past me in a home depot, asking them if they owned their house and would they be interested in solar. I did this in hopes of becoming an FEC, everyone's dream job. No more jumping out at people. You get to talk with kind people who were already interested in the product to see if solar worked for them. After about 5 months I had the honor of being promoted to an FEC, the 3rd promotion in that region since the company's start.
I was in that position for around a month before they expanded in my region drastically. There were around 15 FEC's when I was promoted and within a month or 2 it increased to 50. They chose not to do the same increases with the FES's who we received our leads from. Instead they told us we could only use FES leads for 6 months and then we're on our own. By that point they thought we should have our own referrals and resources to get leads. The problem is it takes 2-4 months to get the solar panels installed and another 2 months before the customer sees changes in their electric bill. Most customers will not provide you with referrals until they see positive results.
The 2nd problem was since they only chose to expand in one area although I was still in my first 6 months as an FEC, there were so many other FEC's they hired I still wasn't getting many leads at all from the FES's. My first month I had 2/3 appointments every day. Half way into month 2 I was happy if I received 4 company leads in a week. Plus it is very hard trying to sell solar in the winter seasons, Thanksgiving, Christmas, snow, etc, which the company did not take into account. They were too busy praising the number of sales they were getting from associates in California who didn't have to worry about weather conditions.
Problem 3 is now that they stopped us from getting Home Depot leads after our 5th/6th month working there I was back to doing my old job that I hated so much. Of course I was doing it strictly to acquire my own leads but door knocking, and finding venues that I had to pay for in order to get leads became a bit of a nuisance. In the end me losing that job became one of the happiest days of my life.
I realized I was tricked into thinking I wanted to work there. The weekly live calls make you feel like you would be crazy to not want to be part of SolarCity. Then when I was finally out, it almost felt like I was leaving a cult. I was free! The burden had been lifted off my shoulders. However, the day I was let go they didn't even ask me to bring in my things (like they did to a # of my co-workers who were also fired). They placed a one on one meeting on my calendar, which I had every week, and had a cab waiting for me when I got there. Since I had been driving a company car for over a month, I had to take all my things out of the car with nothing more than a small purse, and this was from a boss that I initially had a lot of respect for. When I got in the cab the driver said he has gotten called their a number of times to pick up people who were getting fired. At one point they would send out a mass email to let us know when they had parted ways with their employee, but because they had been letting sooo many people go they put an end to that too.
