Is your company ready to buy solar leads… or maybe said more effectively, are you ready to successfully and profitably buy solar leads?
Many solar companies and installers who we speak with are not.
Generally these companies have been subcontracting or getting work via word of mouth and referrals. They do great work and people are pleased with their service. Accordingly, they have an appetite for growth, and correctly assume they need more leads to do so.
Unfortunately, that is just one piece of a more complex puzzle.
This article covers a comprehensive checklist for confirming whether you and your company are ready to buy leads from a third-party provider like LeadsHQ.
Importantly, if you read this and realise you’re not ready, that’s actually a win. You’ll save yourself money and pain, and it is my hope that you will come away with a roadmap for getting your organisation ready.
Alternatively, if you read this and confirm you are ready, great (we should talk).
Stage 1: You Have Established Business Basics
This might sound simple, but so many organisations do not pass stage 1.
To successfully buy solar leads you need to have the following established business basics:
- A company with an ABN (ideally 6+ months old… people don’t trust new businesses)
- Relevant licenses and accreditations (e.g. SAA Accreditation)
- Digital infrastructure such as a website, Google Business Profile and professional emails
- Evidence of a proven track record of success – completed installations, happy customers, reviews, and so on.
The specifics of these business basics are outlined here in this Qualification page.
If you don’t pass that list, the rest of this post isn’t relevant yet – we recommend that you establish the basics first.
Most companies we speak with pass this stage. They’re real businesses. They’ve been trading for years. They have happy customers. They’re accredited and licensed and properly insured.
Stage 2: You Have A Sales Process That Turns Strangers Into Customers
Now this trips up a few companies.
They grow their business through word of mouth and referrals. This is truly great and it demonstrates that you do an awesome job on delivery.
But it doesn’t tell us anything about your company’s ability to sell.
I often joke with installers that I could put on a branded polo shirt with your company logo on it, knock on the door of one of your referrals, and close them. And I’m only half joking.
That’s just how easy quoting and closing warm referrals is. Before you arrive they’ve already decided to work with someone like you and the sales process is “show up, quote and don’t stuff it up”.
Selling a digital lead is the opposite of that.
Before today they’ve likely never heard of your company. They filled in an online qualifying form because we’re good at lead generation, and now they’re going to talk to someone they have no relationship with about spending thousands of dollars.
Closing digital leads is a completely different sport. And it’s full contact.
So if you’re wondering what’s required to be successful in the full-contact sport of solar sales, you will need the following:
- A contact cadence that actually gets you on the phone with the lead. Not “I called twice and left a voicemail.” We recommend a minimum of ten attempts across ten days including calls, SMS, voicemails, in different windows of the day. If you stop at two attempts because that’s all referrals need, your contact rate plummets.
- Communication skills and appointment-setting scripts that build confidence, trust, and value. With a referral, trust is pre-loaded. With a digital lead, you have one phone call to convince someone you’re a real company they should let into their home. That requires a different conversation than “g’day, I was given your number by Steve.”
- Sales skills and the ability to run the in-home appointment and walk out with either a signed contract or a convinced homeowner. Closing digital leads requires being a better, more valuable and educational sales conversation than the other two installers they’re seeing this week, not just being competent.
- A professional quoting and quote follow-up process. Sending a professional, considered quote is important (no scribbled hand-written notes, no verbal quotes). After you’ve sent the quote, ensuring you have a process for following that up is essential to success.
If any one of these four elements is missing, your sales process isn’t a stranger-conversion sales process. It’s a referral-conversion sales process.
They’re different.
If you have a stranger-conversion sales process, well, read on. The next question is just how well does that process work.
Stage 3: You Know Your Numbers And What Success Looks Like
To pass this stage you not only have a proven process for turning leads (strangers) into sales, but you also know your numbers.
Can you answer these questions: What’s the lead contact rate? How many appointments do you need to make a sale? What percentage of the quotes that you send do you win?
Knowing your numbers ensures you know what good (and bad) lead performance looks like.
We recommend that you track (and know) each of the following numbers:
1. Lead Contact Rate: What percentage of leads do you speak with? Out of every 100 leads, how many do you get on the phone (even if it’s them telling you to rack off).
2. Contact To Appointment Rate: What percentage of successful contacts turn into an appointment? If you speak with 50 leads, how many qualify to an appointment? This takes into account those not interested and those your team disqualify.
3. Lead To Appointment Rate: What percentage of leads qualify to a booked appointment? If you know the two numbers above, you can easily calculate lead to appointment rate.
4. Appointment Show/Sit Rate: What percentage of booked appointments actually show / get sat? If you book 100 appointments, how many do the consultants actually sit?
5. Appointment Close Rate: What percentage of sat appointments turn into a sale? For every 100 sat appointments, how many sales do you make?
These five conversion points are the only data that lets you have a real conversation about whether buying leads will be profitable for your business.
Multiply them out and you get the number that actually matters: how many leads do you have to buy to make one sale, and what does that mean each lead is worth?
This will allow you to calculate your CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost), sometimes referred to as Cost Per Sale.
In lead generation, this is a money-ball statistic. Knowing this number means you know exactly what you can pay per sale (and by definition lead) and run a profitable business.
It also means that you and your lead-generation partner have a shared definition of success. We know when we should open a bottle of champagne and when we should be worried we’re going to lose you as a client.
Without this we are flying blind from day one.
Many of you will be tracking this already. You will know these numbers by lead source, by sales rep, and so on.
If not, I recommend you start tracking those five key numbers now. Even a simple five-column Google Sheet will give you great insights.
Stage 4: Your Company Has The Bandwidth For More
The last stage is the simplest, yet it’s the most violated.
Simply – does your company have the ability to handle more customers without breaking? You must consider each pivotal stage including lead management, sales and installation.
Can your appointment setters handle more leads without negatively impacting their ability to hit their required contact cadences?
Effective lead management means someone needs to make ten attempts per lead in the first ten days. Five leads per day equates to approximately two hours per day of lead management and talk time. Use this Resource Calculator to understand these numbers.
Can your sales consultants comfortably handle more appointments without compromising on the quality of these interactions including quoting and follow-ups?
Each in-home appointment can take a solar consultant 90 minutes + travel time. At three appointments per day that’s a limit of 15 appointments per week. Can you handle more? If your consultant is already at capacity, then appointments slip, the show rate drops, and the close rate craters.
Can your installations team handle more sales without blowing out install timeframes or compromising on their established level of care?
If your sales process works and you close 4-6 jobs from the bundle, can you install them in a sensible timeframe? An eight-week install backlog kills your reviews and your follow-on referrals.
Frequently we have seen companies add or increase lead volume only for all of their conversion metrics to suffer. Lead management suffers, appointments are missed or rushed, quotes are being sent late, and customers that were waiting days for installations are now waiting weeks.
The issue here is clear: the leads aren’t the problem — the company’s bandwidth is.
So does your business break if we send you more leads?
There’s bandwidth required at three distinct stages, and the bottleneck at any one of them will eat your conversion rate alive.
Right-sizing the lead volume to your team is the conversation we have on every onboarding call, and it’s the one place where saying “let’s start small” is the difference between a client who scales and one who burns bright and short.
If your honest answer to “does the business break under more leads” is “yes, probably, at some stage of the funnel” — the answer isn’t to buy fewer leads forever.
It’s to fix the bottleneck first (add, hire, train, subcontract, automate – easier said than done, I know!) and then come back. Or to start small, see where the bottleneck shows up, and fix it before scaling.
It certainly isn’t “let’s buy some leads and hope it works out”… because it won’t.
I’m Not Ready To Buy Solar Leads, What Should I Do?
You’re not the first and you absolutely won’t be the last.
If you’ve realised that your business has got holes then make a plan to fix the specific gap or constraint. Develop the business basics, work on your sales process, start documenting your numbers and increase the bandwidth of your team.
I Think I’m Ready To Buy Solar Leads, What Should I Do?
The solar company who buys leads from us and scales has an established business, a proven sales process, documented numbers, a shared understanding of what success looks like, and the appetite and bandwidth to scale.
If you’ve read this far and you’re nodding along on all four stages, then request lead pricing and let’s have a real conversation.
We’ll happily walk through the specifics of your business, its needs, the lead approach that suits your business, and define what success looks like. Pretty quickly we’ll work out if our businesses are a fit for each other.