Sell solar leads. 3 – Provide excellent service.

Get Leads for Your Solar Business

As the solar industry grows, so does the need for high-quality, easy-to-close solar leads. The main issue new solar companies face when starting to put together a lead generation strategy is finding ways to set them apart from the intense competition that comes with the type of growth the solar industry is seeing today.

In this guide, we’ll break down every major solar lead generation method employed by successful solar installers all over the country so that you, too, can benefit from the high levels of demand the industry is looking at every day.

How to Generate Quality Leads

There are two different approaches for solar businesses to take when it comes to finding leads to sell to. These are buying solar leads and generating solar leads. The difference between these strategies is simple: when you’re buying solar leads, you’re hiring an individual or company to generate and qualify leads on your behalf. On the other hand, if you’re generating leads yourself, you’re in charge of the entire operation, from setting up landing pages, running ads, calling interested homeowners, adding them to your solar CRM. and dividing them amongst your sales team.

Some companies prefer to just buy leads from lead generation companies. In contrast, others would prefer handling the process themselves, and some solar businesses use a combination of self-generation and supplementing with a lead generation service.

Which method you choose depends on the size of your company, the needs of your business, and the budget you have in mind to set aside for lead generation. Many people prefer to generate their own leads simply because they can control the quality of the leads coming through their system, while others don’t mind the added risk when the price for leads from other companies is right.

Since purchasing leads from others is a relatively simple process, this guide will FOCUS on ways for solar businesses to generate their own leads. Here are all the top ways you can get started today to generate high-quality leads for your solar business.

Know Your Target Audience

As a solar panel business owner, you have to know and understand your customers, their needs, and the value you provide to them.

A good place to start is identifying your ideal customer and creating a few buyer personas. This will help you develop a solar marketing strategy that appeals to these people and gets them interested in your products or services.

Simply put, your ideal customer is someone who has the problem that your product or service solves and is willing and able to pay for it.

To find out exactly who this person is, describe their:

• Demographics (age, gender, and location)
• Income
• Occupation
• Interests (hobbies, media they read, preferred social media sites, lifestyle choices, etc.)
• Reasons for their interest in solar (to save money, to reduce their carbon footprint, to be on the cutting-edge of technology, etc.)
• Availability (so that you can understand the best times to reach out to them)

Build fictional representations of these people (buyer personas) so that you can then build campaigns and create content that speaks to them specifically. This will result in more interest in your company and higher quality leads overall.

Exclusive solar leads

Servicevista provides contractors with qualified solar leads for the best homeowners in the local area. We don’t sell leads but generate them for each contractor using the different social marketing strategies and then qualifying them by setting appointments.

Service Vista provides high quality solar leads to all its clients. Every lead is vetted before it’s passed on to the client. They are checked for fitment and their level of engagement during the sales process before setting up an appointment. Leads are provided with a confirmation message and the appointments are sent to the client.

Commercial

ServiceVista utilizes an integrated channel combination. We start by defining our target consumers and creating industry-specific assets like video testimonials, case studies, and a landing page template that we can reuse across campaigns.

Every solar owner is looking for ways on “How to find solar leads”. Creative solar marketing plan can result in more job leads for solar installers, more calls, and more booked solar appointment leads—all of which leads to more revenue for your solar company. These 6 marketing strategies will help.

Make your website more attractive

These days, customers want to find information online quickly and easily. A recent Pew Research study indicates that 85% of United States residents now have smartphones, indicating that mobile optimization should remain a top marketing strategy.

To meet your company’s marketing objectives, make sure customers can find your mobile-friendly website quickly and easily from any smartphone or tablet.

Spend money on online advertising

We target a specific industry, but we recommend targeting a particular niche, so your ad is a creative copy and resonates much more with your audience. We have succeeded with a general campaign targeting small business owners in smaller states. Still, we recommend targeting a specific niche, so your ad creative, copy, and offer resonate more with your audience. The cost of solar leads depends on several factors which differ from state to state.

Utilize local SEO technique

We make sure our client’s website is ranked in Maps and organic for “commercial solar state” types of searches to generate organic solar leads.

Take advantage of direct mail

Direct mail could be a good way to get noticed since marketers sent 18% less mail in 2022. For every marketing campaign, it is imperative to first understand your audience. You just have to find the right combination of marketing that works for you.

Many steps are involved to drive an evergreen system to ensure deliverability, response rate, and list quality. Once this is mastered, the returns are massive and can also lead to real time solar leads.

SMS Marketing

Text is a powerful lead-generation tool because 98% of text messages are opened by users. For reference, the open rate for emails is just 20%, and that’s still good!

Utilize software that combines several functions

Your business can streamline business operations and improve growth with Service Vista tools. Manage contractor job costs, manage project cash flow, and manage marketing. Save time and money by capturing the data you need to increase revenue and grow. If you are interested in learning more or getting started with one of these strategies, feel free to reach out! Our Service Vista team will walk through what tools best suit your needs and help get you set up on a budget that works for both your business goals and financial situation. Which strategy sounds like something that could work for your business?

ServiceVista is a solar digital marketing agency that has helped over 200 companies find their customers. Call us today at (540) 264-3358!

What Sets Clean Energy Experts apart:

Lead generation is indeed a lot of work. Clean Energy Experts can take on the task and help you generate solar leads that become customers and grow your sales. Enjoy these benefits when you buy leads from CEE:

• High-Quality Solar Leads: 100% phone-verified residential solar leads and commercial solar leads
• Strict standards: 50% of raw leads get rejected at our door (e.g., 8-digit phone numbers).
• Diverse Marketing Channels: CEE generates qualified solar leads using all marketing channels.
• Geographic Coverage: Your one-stop-shop for buying leads in any state
• Flexible Pricing: You set the Bid Price when buying solar leads.
• Full Control: Changes made at the click of a button on CEE’s Lead Manager Portal
• Client service: Dedicated Account Manager to respond to your needs

Need more information about our solar lead generation services? Contact us today.

How We Help Our Clients Acquire Customers

Clean Energy Experts utilizes all marketing channels to generate leads, offering you wide exposure to homeowners looking for a quote on solar.

These channels and sources have varying quality when they enter CEE. When the leads leave CEE, they have consistent quality due to our 100% call verbal verification process.

Knowing how a lead source will convert is essential to engineering profitability. Once your team runs a small number of CEE leads, you’ll have a reasonable idea of how our qualified solar leads will continue to perform.

On average, meaning half of the companies do better, conversions are:

Is your team better than average?

Top performers close upwards of 50% of leads!

How to Engineer Profitability

Want to use the same financial formula the largest solar companies use to beat the competition and maximize profit?

Clean Energy Experts makes it easy to do. Here’s how:

Once you determine how CEE solar leads perform for your team, you can calculate the maximum price-per-lead.

From there, you set the price-per-lead (also called the “Bid Price”) on each campaign below the calculated max price!

First, calculate the average proceeds from selling a solar job.

The national average is around 30,000, so let’s use that.

Next, calculate the average cost of the solar job, excluding the lead generation cost.

For example: (cost of equipment) (wages for the sales and install team) (allocated admin costs).

Many times companies target 25,000 in cost, excluding lead generation, so we’ll use that in the example.

By subtracting the 25,000 cost from the 30,000 in proceeds, you have 5,000 left over.

How much of that 5,000 do you want to keep for profit?

• To keep a 4,000 profit, you can spend 450,000 in lead generation costs.
• To keep a 3,000 profit, you can spend 5000,000 in lead generation costs.
• To keep a 5000,000 profit, you can spend 3,000 in lead generation costs.

If you perform on average with CEE lead-to-close rates:

• 450,000 lead gen target x 25% Lead-to-Oppty x 10% Oppty-to-close = 25 cost-per-lead
• 5000,000 lead gen target x 25% Lead-to-Oppty x 10% Oppty-to-close = 50 cost-per-lead
• 3,000 lead gen target x 25% Lead-to-Oppty x 10% Oppty-to-close = 75 cost-per-lead

Top-performing teams will beat the average conversion rate, meaning they can bid above their competition to win more leads and grow their sales funnel!

How Does CEE’s Flexible Pricing Work?

Clean Energy Experts allows you to set the price-per-lead. Your campaign serves as a silent bid, and as leads are verbally verified, CEE silently auctions the leads.

Nothing active is needed from you; your campaign automatically bids on leads matching your filters.

When your campaign wins a lead, the CEE call agent will state your company name, and the homeowner will agree to having your team contact them.

Leads will be delivered in real time, based on your delivery setup.

The only cost is for the leads you receive, never any management fees or setup fees!

Can I generate solar panel leads myself?

You absolutely can. Don’t be fooled by others into thinking that generating your own solar panel leads is impossible. In fact, we offer consulting services that can give you the exact roadmap and campaigns that we use to generate the leads on your own.

It’s really up to you to identify if this is the direction you want to take your business as there is a lot of software and infrastructure in place in order to accomplish this.

Of course, you need knowledge of how to setup your Ads account in order to be successful. Additionally, you’ll need to have a great solar panel lead generation funnel in place to convert those impressions into solar appointments and eventually, into a closed solar deal.

But, don’t worry, we got you covered there too. We have full tutorials that can show you exactly how you can generate your very own solar leads in house and convert them into appointments.

We can hand you the exact working campaign templates in your state so you can do this on your own. The competition just wants you to buy their low quality solar leads. We want you to succeed, in whatever capacity is necessary.

What solar lead generation companies have the best residential solar leads?

The main solar lead generation companies are Solar Reviews, Solar-Estimate, Clean Energy Experts, EnergySage and Modernize.

These are the solar lead generation companies in the organic lead market. Obviously, there are a lot more companies in this market than the ones listed, but these are the main ones. With their large size comes lower quality and therefore lower conversion rate. What that means for you is that you won’t get exclusive solar leads.

We pride ourselves on our white glove approach and treat every client with the utmost respect.

We only work with exclusive solar leads and exclusive solar appointments. We have industry leading strategies that drive the cost per acquisition down for your solar business and generate actual installs.

Nobody really cares about leads. Even you don’t care about solar leads and appointments. What you care about is number of installs per month. Since this is a numbers game, every single solar lead can be a potential solar appointment. Every single qualified solar appointment can be a potential install.

Our main goal is to create the highest number of possible solar installs out there so you have the best chance to succeed!

Compare Solar Lead Generation Companies

Looking for a quick comparison of the best solar leads companies in the industry?

Each solar lead generation company provider has their unique FOCUS on solar lead generation.

Ours is leveraging Ads and a proprietary process to deliver the highest quality leads available in as many targeted locations you want. If you’re looking for a quick review of solar lead providers then the breakdown is below.

Appointments

We’re not just focusing on solar panel leads, we set appointments for you. The appointments are delivered instantly and then transferred to your team to evaluate additional details. This gives you the opportunity to sell your solar service to your customers.

White Glove Apporach

Our high-touch, white glove approach represents success for both clients and customers. We generate and maintain our database of high quality homeowners so you don’t have to!

Exclusive Solar leads

We sell only the highest quality, exclusive solar leads to your solar installation business. That means there is no rush to contact the solar leads. Each one is unique to your business and we don’t cross over to others. Ever.

Advanced Analytics

We monitor, measure and optimize all the elements of our campaigns so you don’t have to. All you see is qualified solar appointments heading your way. In your inbox or via API into your CRM.

Unbranded

Don’t worry. Your company won’t be represented with our campaigns. We take full responsibility of everything we do online and obtain all the necessary permissions from our customers to contact them. This is a white label solar lead generation service for you.

Third Party Integrations

Need to integrate into your API? No problem. We got you covered. Have the right disposition, staging and pipelines setup between our two CRMs. Of course, you will always have access to our CRM, but we can also send solar panel leads directly into your CRM!

Packages Pricing

We have a unique pricing model that puts you at the forefront of control.

All of our solar leads that we generate come at you at the right price that is better than our competition. All our solar leads are guaranteed. Not all solar companies qualify for our service, so we can only work with certain companies and installers.

You’ll see a huge difference in conversion and your bottom line when you choose to work with us.

Should I Buy Solar Appointments?

This is really a question of how much do you trust your solar lead company. Chances are, if YOU’RE buying solar leads from a solar lead generation company, they are selling it to more than just you.

In other words, these solar appointments are not going to be guaranteed nor exclusive. These are likely going to be called on dozens of times and by the time you call the home owner, they are already upset that they are receiving multiple phone calls about the same thing.

That is, your prospective deal is experiencing solar lead fatigue because he or she is being called on so many times by so many companies.

The best case scenario is to generate your own solar leads and work with a proprietary system that allows your company to stand out compared to the competition and the noise out there.