Why is lead management so important for Solar?

Let me guess, you have hundreds of leads a month coming into the top of the sales funnel for your solar business, but only a small fraction actually end up becoming a customer. The solar sales cycle can be long and present multiple decision points for the buyer and a good initial experience is all-important.

In this post, we look at how solar companies can leverage the Salesforce platform for a more successful and higher converting sales process, using intelligent lead capture to start the process more quickly, better lead assignment for swift follow up from the right team member, and clearer analysis of where to focus your marketing dollars on future lead generation.

Intelligent Lead Capture

The ability to capture the right customer data right at the beginning gets you a head start on the sales process. This will help you give your leads a higher service experience, from the moment of the first contact to the final sale.

Using Salesforce’s out of the box web-to-lead functionality, you can automatically log important new client information using a short web-based form. This is an easy way to pre-qualify leads with simple questions, such as more information on the customer’s energy requirements or current knowledge of solar PV financing options, etc. By saving this information into the new lead record in Salesforce directly, you immediately start the sales process from a place of knowledge and get to work sooner.

Speedy Lead Assignment

Next step, who takes responsibility for the lead? A lead assignment process on Salesforce could be as simple as making a list of all of your sales reps and assigning each new lead to whoever’s next in line. Alternatively, you could have an assortment of more complex lead assignment rules based on a range of criteria e.g. customer types, location, budget, etc. In most cases, your sales team does the site surveys, evaluates power generation requirements, aligns with the customer’s budget, and prepares a proposal, so this is going to help specifically in the solar industry because each lead will be tailored to the exact right rep to get the job done and the product sold, depending on customer type.

Lead Analysis

To understand which marketing channels your best quality leads come from, you need to track your lead sources, that’s to say where your leads come from, so you can invest your money in the channels that are working. So if you’re spending a chunk of your money with companies like SolarReview or EnergySage and essentially buying leads, you want to know that you’re getting a return on that investment in the form of converted leads. Equally, if you’re using a large portion of your resources for cold-calling, you want to make sure a hefty percentage of people are being converted to warm leads, otherwise, you’re wasting valuable resource time. When you can track your customers right back to their initial lead source on Salesforce, you can see exactly where to put your future solar marketing dollars.

Of course, this is just the start! There is so much more you can do to make the solar customer journey successful on Salesforce, but putting in place an efficient, professional and automated lead management process is a great first step in creating a healthy solar sales pipeline. 

If you would like an expert report on your current Salesforce setup, then take a look at our free Solar Sales Assessment service and power up your solar lead management!