A deal closes in October. The rep who knocked the door in July says it is self-gen. The office says the homeowner called in from a mailer in August, so it is a company lead. The closer says the July knock was a no-answer and the real conversation was theirs. All three are telling the truth about something, and the commission rate depends on who wins.
That argument is what attribution is for, and it is only winnable in one direction: backwards, from a record that was stamped when it was created. Once the deal exists, everyone has a reason to remember the story differently. This page is the field version of the rule — tag at creation, never at close — and the handful of cases where the rule is genuinely hard to apply.
Disclosure: Scout Data is our product, and Scout is a canvassing app that logs every knock with a disposition, a time and a location. That log is the creation stamp this page keeps referring to, so read the tooling parts knowing who wrote them. The rule works on a clipboard too; it just takes more discipline.
What “creation” means at a door
On a call floor, a record is created at import and the tag is written by a staging process. In the field, a record is created by a person standing on a porch, and it exists only if that person logs it. That changes two things.
First, the creation stamp has to be cheap enough to write on every door, including the 63.0% of doors that nobody answers — in our logged canvassing data that is the share of knocks that reach no one, and every one of them is a potential future inbound call. A rep who only logs conversations has no claim on the homeowner who was out at the time and calls the office a month later.
Second, the stamp needs three things a CRM note does not carry: who knocked, when, and where. Time and location are what make the tag hard to write after the fact. A disposition entered at 6:40 p.m. on a Tuesday from the sidewalk outside the address is a claim; a note added the following week from the office is a story.
The five sources a field team actually has
| Source | Created by | The stamp | Usually paid as |
|---|---|---|---|
| Knock | The rep, at the door | Disposition with time and location, logged at the door | Self-gen |
| Referral | A customer or contact, prompted by a rep | The referring customer’s record, and which rep asked | Self-gen, sometimes with a referral fee to the customer |
| Rep’s own outreach | The rep, off the porch — texts, social, their network | The first outbound message, dated | Self-gen |
| Company lead | Something the company paid for — a list, an ad, a partner | The import or inbound record, tagged with its channel | Company lead, lower rate |
| Inbound | The homeowner, calling or filling a form | The inbound event — but see the hard cases | Depends entirely on whether a prior record exists |
The last column is why this matters more in the field than on a phone floor. On most plans the self-gen rate is materially higher than the company-lead rate — the mechanics are in commission structures for solar reps — so every ambiguity is an argument about money, and the rule has to be decided before the money exists.
The hard cases
The rule is simple. These are the four situations where two things plausibly created the same record, and what the rule says in each.
- Knocked, no answer, homeowner calls in later. The knock created the record if it was logged. The inbound call is the homeowner acting on it. Source: the knock, self-gen. If the knock was not logged, there is no record to inherit and it is a company lead — which is not a punishment, it is the whole reason to log empty doors.
- Two reps on the same street a week apart. First logged knock wins, and the second rep’s log shows it was already claimed before they walked up. This is a territory problem presenting as an attribution problem — solar canvassing territory management covers the rules that stop it happening in the first place.
- Company list, rep knocks it, homeowner books. The record was created by the import, so it is a company lead. The rep’s knock was work on a company lead, not the creation of a self-gen one. Plans that pay a higher rate for working a company lead in person can do so — but as a rate on a company lead, not by relabelling the source.
- Referral from a knocked customer. A new record, created by the referral. Source: referral, credited to the rep who asked for it, stamped with the referring customer. The original knock gets the first deal; it does not get the second one for free.
Every one of those resolutions is arguable in the moment. None of them is arguable once it is written down before the deal exists, which is the point: the policy is decided in a quiet room and applied in a loud one.
What the stamp has to survive
Three things degrade a creation stamp between July and October, and a team’s process should be checked against each.
- Re-tagging. A CRM that lets a rep or a closer edit the source field is a CRM in which the source field means “what the last editor wanted.” Lock it after creation. If a correction is genuinely needed, it goes through one owner with a reason, and the original value stays visible.
- Duplicates. The same household created twice — once from a knock, once from an inbound form — is two records with two sources, and the deal will attach to whichever the closer opened. Dedupe on the property, not on the name or the phone, so the second record merges into the first and inherits its tag.
- Rep turnover. A record whose creating rep has left keeps its source. Reassigning the household to a new rep is a work assignment, not a creation event, and the plan should say so.
What to report
With every record tagged at creation, the report that was an argument becomes a table: per source and per rep, doors logged, conversations, appointments set, appointments sat, deals installed, cancellations. The two artefacts to watch for are a rep with an extraordinary conversation rate on very few logged doors, who is under-logging no-answers, and a rep with strong self-gen deals and no logged knocks in the month they were supposedly created, who is tagging at close.
Cohort by the month the record was created, not the month the deal closed, and measure at install net of cancellations. A source that signs well and cancels badly is a common pattern and it hides inside a signature-based report for exactly as long as the cancellation window. The same rules run for a floor rather than a field team in how to measure lead source ROI, and the four different close rates a tagged record lets you compute honestly are laid out in what is a good close rate in solar.
The rule underneath
Attribution is not a reporting nicety. It is how a field team decides what to pay for, what to knock and who to keep — and a team that cannot trust the source field cannot make any of those decisions with evidence. Tag at creation. Make the stamp cheap to write and hard to rewrite. Decide the hard cases before there is a deal to argue over. The October conversation this page opened with does not happen on a team that did those three things in July.
Frequently asked questions
How do you attribute a sale in door-to-door sales?
To whatever created the record — the knock, the referral, the company lead — at the moment it was created, with the rep, the time and the location written down then. The deal that closes months later inherits that tag and does not get to renegotiate it. Everything else on this page is about making the creation stamp hard to fake and the cases where two things plausibly created the same record.
What is the difference between self-gen and company leads?
Who created the record. A self-generated lead is one the rep created by knocking, by a referral they earned, or by their own outreach. A company lead was created by something the company paid for — a purchased list, an ad, an inbound call. The distinction usually sets the commission rate, which is exactly why it has to be decided at creation rather than argued at close.
A homeowner I knocked called the office a month later. Whose lead is it?
The knock’s, if the knock was logged with a disposition at the time. The inbound call is the homeowner acting on a record that already existed. If the knock was not logged, there is no record for the call to inherit and it is a company lead — which is the entire incentive for logging every door.
Why not just let the closer decide the source?
Because the closer decides with the outcome in view and often with a commission at stake. Attribution reconstructed at close flatters whichever source the person reconstructing already believes in, and it makes every channel’s numbers depend on what the other channels were doing that month. A source you cannot trust the numbers for is a source you cannot manage.