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If you’re looking to get solar leads or do your own solar lead generation there are a few things you need to be clear on before you pull the trigger
First, let me tell you, how solar leads are categorized in the industry, so you have a clear understanding what each of them means and what is suited to your situation
There are many ways to generate leads, the important thing to understand is what really a solar lead is
Solar lead is when someone expresses an interest in getting solar for their home, they can share this interest by someone reaching out to them or the homeowners reaching out to a solar company themselves.
Regardless, someone who shows an interest in getting solar would be described as a solar lead
Let’s discuss each one by one
Online leads are broad category that can be broken down further into different categories Including
Leads generated when you run ads on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube Ads, Google Ads, or LinkedIn.
Many people consider them as an inbound lead hence associate them with better quality, but it is far from the truth.
When you run ads, you’re reaching out to complete strangers with a big digital megaphone, trying to attract as many people as you can. So, you’re basically outreaching to people just in bigger numbers on automation.
Anyone who is interested will ping you, but the sales process would most likely be similar to what you consider an outbound lead. You will have to build trust with them and present them with great and competitive offers.
Since you do not control the data or the audience, you most likely have to compete on your offer and ads, and that generally leads to ads that are low quality and promote false advertisements...
...such as free solar programs, or government funded free solar programs. When you or your sales rep tries to get on a call with them, they are often surprised by what was shown on the ad, and it makes seriously hard for them to close that lead in to a deal
As if that wasn’t enough, most companies who run ads for solar companies claim they will provide solar exclusive leads, meaning won’t be shared with anyone...
...but in reality, how social media/Facebook and Google/YouTube ads really work is if someone signs up on your ad, that lead will be shown a barrage of ads similar to yours of several other solar companies alongside which makes the lead even more competitive
However, when you’re looking to scale quickly, online ads can be beneficial and prove to be a good resource especially if you have a funnel that filters through only to people who are serious from tire-kickers and removes bogus leads.
Additionally, you must have a sales team ready to tackle the leads as soon as they come in. Speed to lead is key to success when it comes to any online lead.
Grab them, take commitment and keep a great follow-up.
If you have a funnel, and a sales team behind, you can quickly scale up your solar business. But do know all of this operation will not be quite so pocket friendly, so have some chunk ready to throw on this operation
The second category of leads online which we consider truly inbound are SEO leads. SEO if you’ve been living under a rock means, search engine optimization.
Which means optimizing the content of your website based on what people are searching so that your website can be shown in top results on Google to grab that traffic
Optimization of the website in SEO happens when you regularly post content relevant to your target audience, and keywords they are searching
Additionally, you must have a technically SEO optimized website too, I will not go in details, but you should have main keywords in meta tags, titles, your website should be fast to load, a lot of backlinks to better ranking reputable sites and a whole lot more
In addition to that expect traffic to be generated in about 6 months from when you start putting in the efforts, maybe a little faster if you’re optimizing for local area rankings but you should budget for 6 months at least
Now what can you expect after putting the effort into SEO. As we said, in the start these are inbound leads, meaning they were searching for solar, they came to your website, read content on your site, familiarized themselves with you, the initial trust is built, and they are reaching out to you instead of you to them
These leads are of the highest quality you'll ever get, second only to referrals.
It is true, good things happen to those who wait.
The bad news is that you can’t control the flow of the leads. You just have to sit there and let SEO do its thing, and wait for leads to come in, if there is enough demand and reasonable competition.
You can’t increase or decrease the number of leads.
You can only get a share of the total search volume in your area, for example, if the total search volume in your area is 100, theoretically you can only get a maximum of 100 leads
This can be a roadblock when you’re looking to scale your company which is why most companies always use SEO along with other marketing methods to generate a bunch of solar leads and scale.
SEO always plays a trustworthy and reliable source and a cash cow for any solar business...and most of them use other marketing methods to scale quickly and beyond the search volume on a search engine.
Online bidding sites like solar reviews or energy sage basically operate on a bidding model. Let me explain to you as simply as I can.
They have done what you can do too with SEO, they’ve ranked their websites for solar in different cities, counties and states, and they bring traffic and then have that traffic fill out a webform which then is transferred to a database as a lead where it is available for bidding
Whoever bids the most gets the lead. These are again inbound leads, but they are little different to what you would get from SEO.
With SEO you get leads that have come specifically to you, they know your brand name, they have consumed your content
With lead aggregators like solar reviews or energy sage, their brand is being built and the lead has no connection or trust with you or your brand. For you they would be considered as a cold lead as opposed to warm leads form your site
Nevertheless, since they have done hard work and ranked, they can generate quite some traffic and a quick way for you to get leads. Please do remember these leads are not cheap
As you can imagine more competitive areas would have more buyers hence it can drive cost per lead up to $300 which only leaves the market for bigger players.
This can work if you have a large budget, better lifetime value of a customer and sell expensive systems with maybe battery storage as well
The limitation again is you cannot control the volume of leads, you are left at the mercy of market demand shared between bidders, and so even if you have millions to shell out, you can’t get past the total demand or search volume in your area
1. Social media content
Is another form of online leads, where you either build your YouTube channel along the topics of solar energy, residential solar, commercial solar or built a following on your Facebook, Instagram page.
The trick is to share valuable content so you can build an audience around your company about solar and post regularly to generate inbound leads.
These are generally great quality leads as well since they are inbound leads, they already know, like and trust you by getting indoctrinated to your content and can serve as the most profitable source of lead generation.
However, it is a tedious task to build social media following as it requires great content, consistency and long-term view of lead generation
And as it is an inbound form of lead generation, you can’t really have direct control of what volume you can get, unless you mix it with an outbound approach
Defined as when you’re reaching out to people to pitch your products and services. Like online leads it is a broad category that can be broken further down into different methods which I shall explain further
1. Door knocking is a form of lead generation where you go door to door in your area and pitch solar to different prospects and generate leads that way.
It is cost effective, and quick way to generate leads and close deals faster, however it requires the most amount of effort.
The downsides though are when you look at it through the lens of operations, it is a cumbersome operation to run a door-to-door team, managing that team, training and providing resources to the team.
You’re restricted to certain zip codes, areas or county. It is incredible difficult to scale a business this way to other regions, or new areas, since you must build the team from scratch again.
And it would take time for them to produce results as well.
2. Telemarketing/Cold calling leads: Is another form of outbound lead generation where instead of going door-to-door you call homeowners and pitch solar, and if they are interested, they can give you the time to meet in person or virtually.
Sort of like digital door knocking, only that it is much more scaleable, cost-effective and less cumbersome.
You essentially get a bunch of leads whether homeowner leads or aged leads and call them to pitch your solar services, if leads are interested, they’d give you a time/day to meet and then you can present them with your quotes and close the deals.
Cons:
It is an outbound approach so you will need to have experienced callers to be able to generate leads and solar appointments from calling them cold
If you run or thinking about running a call center, then that is an operation in and of itself, although not as difficult as door knocking it can still be challenging if you don’t know what you’re doing
The data can vary based on your chosen vendor in terms of quality so finding a relaible partner who can provide data consistently is hard.
Pros:
If done correctly, cold calling leads can blow all of the methods listed above out of the water in terms of the volume of solar leads and appointments you can produce.
It is a quick method to produce leads and close deals faster
You control the demand and flow of solar leads and appointments. You can theoretically generate unlimited number of leads and appointments limited only by the number of residents in the areas you cover
So, it could be a good way to feed your team of solar reps or yourself with a full calendar of leads and appointments to close deals and enjoy a rather competitive cost per acquisition (CPA)
It is also more attractive to people since they don’t have to go door-to-door in bad weather and is not physically demanding as such, not to say it is definitely psychologically demanding.
Are leads that signed up on various online sites that are ranked by publishers with the intent to generate leads just like you would on your website.
However as mentioned they use bidding system so once they are sold to top buyers, they typically have a commitment with buyer that they won’t sell this in open market for a time period.
For e.g. 7 days, which means after selling to top buyer they won't sell those leads for 7 days to anyone else, and after 7 days, they will open it up to buyers on a flat rate.
These leads are then sold a second, third, fourth and maybe even unlimited number of times to buyers hence increasing the competition and chances of you to be able to get good quality leads.
This is a grey area in solar lead generation, since it’s just an excel sheet, there is no exclusivity, you can’t really know or tell how many times a list has been shared or distributed between different buyers.
Once you get these leads you must cold call them to pitch your products and services and book solar appointments.
We typically hear from solar companies that when they usually call aged solar leads, they are met with harsh conversations, since they solar to so many companies, and everyone is calling multiple times, they are just tired of getting calls.
These leads are typically sold cheap, but can be a challenge when you’re looking to scale, since they are also limited to number of people signing up in an area, so their availability in your area might be a challenge
Or even if you get some results from it, the leads can deplete quickly and no longer available for you to call to book solar appointments.
They are good source when getting started with cold calling yourself, or with a new rep but then you need to find a more consistent and larger source of leads.
Is just the data that you would use to call to pitch your solar services and convert them into solar leads and appointments just like aged leads, the only difference is that aged leads have opted in, and solar homeowner data haven’t.
It is basically data of homeowners, that includes their complete property addresses, their numbers so you can call them and book appointments.
You have to DNC scrub it to be able to make calls, however if you have a good data source, they can prove to be better for solar appointments since they are not in a public pool shared among thousands of buyers.
However not to say that they can’t be obtained by others. There are a lot of sellers on platforms like Fiverr and upwork who sell solar leads list that they can skip trace for you or have pre-scraped solar leads for sale.
This data is dirt cheap and is very scale-able if you have a good team of setters. You can quickly scale up your lead generation process and deal volume BUT you need to have a good sales process, including follow-ups to convert these leads into sales
Infinitum Media’s Premium solar homeowner data:
We are also in the business of solar lead generation and solar appointments. When we started 4 years ago, we were faced with the same problem as you might be facing now.
Where to get the best, consistent solar leads. We tried every lead source you can possibly imagine, some worked and some tanked, and some worked for some time after which they started to become a liability.
Low quality, shared leads, were driving us nuts since we had a lot of clients, we needed to deliver high-quality exclusive solar appointments and leads daily
Our core problem was data...you see data is everything when it comes to solar lead generation
If you have shared data, bogus or data that has already been dialled multiple times, your chance of generating a high-quality lead goes down the drain, forget about consistency.
So, we had to find a better way of producing data which we can feed to our team to produce high quality solar appointments
Fortunately, we had some great minds that we gathered and solar industry veterans to figure out the data problem
After weeks of discussion we had an epiphany, since we worked with real estate agents, and they thrive on homeowner data, we knew they were getting great data from property sites like Zillow, Redfin, Trulia since these sites rely on the most updated and accurate data
So we start working on building a software that can generate us unlimited data in any state on demand and the challenge was to keep it cost effective so we can scale appointment generation for our clients.
We did it. After months and doing hundreds of tests we came with the final iteration of our software, and this is what it does
Please watch the video below for a short tutorial of our software in action
With this software we now have the ability to produce the best quality, fresh and exclusive data in any zip, city, county or state we want and that too cost-effectively.
This has catapulted our growth quickly to 23 states and still growing. More importantly we’ve generated thousands of leads and appointments for our clients so far.
We went from 5% connectivity on a good day when we were buying data from outside to now over 20% connectivity from our inhouse data, and with same resources, we have now tripled our appointment numbers.
Just by having a better data source, we have tripled our profits, our team has grown by 652% year-over-year.
Infinitum Media takes great pride in its unique and proprietary data system, which excels at producing fresh and exclusive data tailored to each customer's location preferences.
By leveraging your location preferences, we consistently curate fresh lists with unparalleled connectivity, ensuring that our data remains consistently up-to-date and relevant.
Whether you’re looking for solar lead data, or exclusive solar appointments generated from our own data, we can help you.
Feel free to contact us by completing the form “Get Quote” on our website.
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