Before we look at any tips for increasing the sales for your solar installation business, it’s important to realize there are two important parts to your sales process.

1. Lead generation
2. Managing the solar sales funnel

Your final sales number are combined outcome of these two steps.

A typical solar sales funnel

A typical sales funnel has four stages:
Awareness >> Interest >> Consideration >> Sale

Your solar sales process must also go through these 4 stages. At each of these stages, a buyer gradually learns about your offering. At ‘awareness’ he has just discovered the most basic details of your solar PV offering.

Then over time he learns the value of solar energy, goes to your website and asks for pricing – going to the next ‘interested’ stage in the funnel.

When you provide a proposal to the buyer, he ‘considers’ it before the ‘actual sale’ can happen.

At all of thee stages, the buyer is looking for different information about your offering. Therefore how you manage this funnel directly determines how a prospective buyer will understand and perceive your offering.

That’s why it is important to create a sales process which provides due attention to each stage in the solar sales funnel.

Sales are the product of lead generation plus sales process

Your final solar sales number for a quarter are directly proportional to –

1. How many leads you pulled in your sales funnel
2. How efficiently your converted those leads

In other words, you can increase your solar sales by either investing more in marketing and lead generation, or by improving the conversion rate of those leads with a more efficient sales process.

How to increase your solar sales

Now let’s look at how we can do both.

Getting more leads

Solar sales tips for adding more leads to your funnel.

1. Email marketing

Email marketing is a very cost effective channel to get new B2B leads. It is quite under utilized in the solar EPC industry. You can use cold email marketing tools, to reach more people and get better responses for your B2B email campaigns.

Use these solar specific email templates to write an engaging email copy. Use a mail merge tool connected to spreadsheets for sending highly personalized email marketing campaigns.

2. Yellow pages and business listings

Maintain reach presence on platforms like – Google Maps, Google My Business. Keep you profile updated with photos, testimonials, contact details etc. Make it easier for prospects to find you and contact you.

List your business in local yellow pages or trade portals like Indiamart or JustDial etc.

3. Targeted Google Ads

Use Google Ads with geographic targeting. Target the people from your city, who are searching for solar PV or related solutions.

4. Social Media Channels

Use different social media channels depending on your target customers. LinkedIn is excellent for B2B lead generation. Whereas facebook allows you to target consumers in your area, with specific interests related to solar PV and renewable energy.

Use social media automation tools to post regularly on your LinkedIn and Facebook account. This helps to organically build up following for your company on social media channels.

5. Offline lead generation

But with all this focus on online lead generation, don’t ignore offline lead generation channels like – trade shows and partnerships with local contractors.

Here are a few more detailed tips for residential and commercial solar lead generation.

Converting more leads

Tips to increase the conversion ratio for you solar sales.

1. Screen your leads carefully

There is a lot of effort involved in the solar sales process – doing site surveys, preliminary engineering, commercial discussions can take up a lot of time, straining your valuable sales resources.

Understandably, it is best to invest all those efforts very selectively. If a new lead in only interested in understanding high level benefits of solar PV, it would be a big waste of time to perform site survey and engineering design for him.

Therefore it is important to carefully screen your leads before putting them in the sales funnel.

2. Don’t delay proposals

There is a lot of competition in the solar installation business. It’s quite normal that a lead will speak with multiple installers before buying from someone.

Any delay in responding to a lead or sending proposal can result in losing him to the competition. Therefore it should be a KPI of your solar sales process to minimize the time gap between customer visit and proposal submission. You can help your sales team to stay on top of the game by sending them daily “Todo List” emails, to ensure timely actions.

You can also speed up the proposal submissions by connecting a standardized proposal template to your CRM software. Use an automation workflow to insert the customer details from CRM into a standard template. This way you can create and submit proposals in a matter of minutes.

Further speed up the process by using a standardized proposal email template to share the proposal with your customers within seconds.

3. Use a site survey app

Quite often proposals get delayed because of communication gaps. In absence of a direct communication channel between sales and engineering teams, site survey reports are handed over to engineering after a time gap.

Correspondingly, subsequent engineering design and proposal submission get delayed.

Minimize this time gap with a site survey app to directly connect engineering and sales teams. Basically it should come with a mobile friendly site survey form which can be used from the field to send measurements to engineering team.

4. Educational material for each stage in the funnel

Use well designed educational content to drive your leads deeper in the sales funnel. At the marketing stage, give them articles and videos about economic and environmental benefits of solar PV.

If they are aware of the benefits and considering to buy, given them detailed comparison sheets of different panels, inverters available with you.

Your sales proposal format should also be simple enough to understand – so you don’t have to spend a lot of time in explaining them everything.

5. Use sales process automation

A typical solar sales process moves through different blocks –

Lead in CRM >> Site surveys >> Engineering Design >> Proposal >> Order

Information in all these blocks in managed in different silos – CRM, Engineering Document Management System, emails, site survey reports etc. These silos kill the efficiency of your lead management process.

Prevent this loss of efficiency by connecting all the dots of your sales process. Use a workflow automation tool to connect your solar CRM with site survey app, documentation, emails etc.

When you use a CRM platform to manage your solar sales process, all your important customer information, documents and files are centralized in one single place. Then you have the option to connect your CRM to a project management solution, which will allow you to readily pass on all the customer information to project execution team whenever you get an order.

In fact, one of the important features for a solar CRM should be connectivity with other tools. Fuzen provides a connected platform to track and manage your solar sales process. You can try all these solar sales tips in FUZEN CRM for free.