Selling Solar

The U.S. climate bill aims to change how Americans power their homes, offering significant incentives to reduce consumer costs for clean energy.

Residential solar incentives included in Inflation Reduction Act:

• Long-term extension of the personal income tax credit (ITC) for residential solar: raised to 30% until stepdown starts in 2033. This includes projects installed in 2022.
• Residential storage ITC for batteries over 3 kWh: 30% until stepdown starts in 2033. This is the first time the ITC includes stand alone storage systems.

While the bill represents the most significant climate legislation in U.S. history, it is likely that solar companies will continue to face challenges reaching eligible consumers. We’re all hoping to see a boost in residential solar system installations, but the fact remains that solar installers are facing more competition than ever for a small pool of consumers who are eligible to go solar.

Despite tremendous interest in renewables, less than 4% of eligible households are powered by solar. Consumers just aren’t actively seeking out residential solar, which presents a unique challenge for solar companies.

Solar customers must also conform to eligibility criteria including good credit, standards that must be met on the homeowner’s roof, etc., which leaves you with a very narrow pool of consumers who can seriously consider purchasing solar. This results in fierce competition for a very narrow audience, often resulting in eligible prospects feeling burned out on door knockers, cold calls, and traditional high-volume marketing tactics.

We’ver put together the following tips for solar installers to effectively grow their solar sales:

• Invest in optimizing your sales processes – Whether you generate solar leads or buy qualified leads from reputed lead generation companies, improving your sales process can help on multiple fronts including increasing contact rates, improving sit rates, supporting compliance, and maximizing profitability. Improving how you use your solar leads can involve various strategies, technologies, and tools that will help you gain a competitive advantage.
• Automate your call center workflows – If you’re looking to scale your solar business, consider automating your call center workflows and adopting outbound dialing best practices to increase contact rates. This will enable you to better customize your approach to leads while also taking the guesswork out of contact cadences for perfectly timed communications with prospects.
• Partner with solar marketing companies – Leveraging third-party customer acquisition solutions can help generate high quality solar leads for your sales teams. Doing your research will help ensure you have selected a marketing partner that understands your unique business needs.
• Make sure all your data is compliant – At the end of the day, if you’re the one dialing data and it’s not compliant, you’ll be the one held responsible even if your vendor was at fault. So it’s critical to audit third party data providers. You can help mitigate legal risks by working with solar lead providers that comply with all applicable state and federal telemarketing policies and regulations including the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) and any relevant state-specific laws.
• Seek out industry-specific solutions – Focused expertise can go a long way to supporting your solar business. Harnessing industry-specific solutions and working with partners that understand the complexities of your business operations, products, and services can accelerate how solutions can be adapted to generate the best outcomes for your business.

Colossus provides sales solutions built for the solar industry and partners with solar companies around their unique needs. To learn more about growing your residential solar sales, visit Colossus.com. Also check out the upcoming webinar “Unlock the Full Potential of Your Solar Leads” on Sept 29, 2022.