Top 5 Solar Metrics to Drive Sales Success

The solar industry continues to grow at an average 25% annual growth rate. It's a bright time to be in the solar energy business.

And that means competition in this thriving sector is increasing as market complexity grows and more organizations join the field.

Does your company have a plan to keep up with—and better yet, surpass—your competitors?

Your growth plan, technology, and strategies will only take you so far if you're not able to measure performance. You've heard it before: you can’t improve what you can’t measure.

Below are five key solar sales metrics that should be part of your campaign strategy—across the entire solar buyer’s journey. Track and optimize your performance with these KPIs to drive growth and efficiency.

For businesses engaged in outbound sales and lead generation, data is going to be one of your biggest costs. Measuring your total cost per lead helps you understand just how costly it is to equip your team with the leads it needs to fuel growth.

Getting the most value out of every lead involves smart strategies coupled with monitoring the right KPIs to continuously optimize your lead engagement. This will boost your contact rates for connecting with those leads, and thereby enable improvements in conversion rates as your agents talk to more leads.

Generating leads in home services industries requires diverse strategies in a range of marketing channels. As you track your cost per lead, communicate with others in your industry network to get a sense of where you should be benchmarking this KPI and others. With an idea of others’ typical costs, you’ll gain insight into the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and can begin to identify areas of inefficiency.

Once you acquire a lead, you’ve got a foot in the door so to speak. But you need to act quickly, before you’re shut out.

Speed to lead, or lead response time, is a metric describing this quickness. The statistics on speed to lead tell a clear story: the faster you respond, the more likely you are to make contact and convert:

• Calling a lead in the first minute boosts your chance of conversion by 391 percent.

• Calls placed in the first five minutes are 100 times more likely to connect.

But it’s one thing to know you need speed to succeed, and it’s another thing to achieve it. Heather Griffin, a veteran of the call center industry and CEO of Jenova Solar, says that having the right dialer software makes all the difference in your lead response time.

“No matter what, the new leads with a status of ‘zero attempts’ need to go to the front of your hopper. That’s what’s going to get you to that lead within seconds.”

Griffin says to opt for a dialer that completes this prioritization automatically. Because too often, she says, these leads get filtered through a bunch of other sales platforms before being loaded in the hopper.

“That’s killing seven seconds. Guess what? Somebody else has them on the phone already. You have wasted too much time.”

Having top-notch speed to lead sets the tone for your sales operation, putting you in a position to capitalize on leads that raise their hand to learn more about your offerings. That’s because with speed to lead, you not only strike when leads’ interest is highest but also when they’re most likely to answer—helping you drive a higher contact rate.

The importance of the contact rate metric for solar sales success can’t be overstated. As David Stodolak, President of Solar Direct Marketing, says,

“This is a contact sport. No matter what vertical you’re in, you have to contact enough people to make it work. If you don’t have the right technology, then nothing else matters.”

That’s because technology doesn’t just help you drive ever-important speed to lead. You need a technology partner with tools to support caller ID reputation management. These days, every outbound sales team needs to navigate issues of call blocking and flagging.

Without tools to ensure that you’re dialing leads with clean caller IDs, your risks increase for the label “Spam Likely” to show up on your leads' phones, causing your contact rates plummet. Convoso's ClearCallerID Pro has built in automations for remediation and works to prevent labeling and blocking of your numbers in the first place.

Your dialer technology should also help you get in touch with more of your leads with smarter outreach strategies. Because of those call flagging issues and changes in consumer preferences, you need to be able to implement an omnichannel strategy that relies on SMS, email, and other channels that work in conjunction with outbound calling. The more channels you operate in tandem, the more opportunities to drive revenue you’ll have. It’s that simple.

Running a solar business can be complex. As Heather Griffin describes, organizations are often really three businesses in one: 1. A lead generation, sales, and marketing operation that fuels growth; 2. A financing operation that helps most buyers afford the cost of solar; and 3. A "construction" company tasked with advising on and installing new solar systems.

This last component drives one of the biggest challenges in solar sales: the difficulty of coordinating teams in the field with agents on the phone. Between juggling load-balancing issues and ensuring that customers stick to their scheduled appointments, the first—and most significant—casualty is often a company’s sit rate.

A solar company's sit rate measures the number of leads that ultimately “sit”, or show up and complete, a sales appointment, regardless of that appointment’s outcome.

How do you maintain and improve your sit rates? Omnichannel outreach can play a big role. Using proactive, well-timed text messages as part of an automated workflow can ensure easy scheduling for customers, and that they receive follow-up reminders leading up to the appointment.

Heather Griffin also points to the importance of using filtering technology while dialing leads in the first place:

“Long gone are the days of uploading a list of 100,000 leads and dialing straight through the list. With the right technology, you can set the filters you need—whether it’s zip code, state, or territory filters—to make sure that your agents are dialing the data that matches the availability of your sales personnel. I still buy all the data, but I watch my load balance schedule. I know that zipcode filtering will help me sort out and match my dialing strategy to my scheduling on the fly. Using the right tech, you can keep your schedules booked evenly thanks to filtering.”

While each of these metrics for solar success will give you a clear window into specific aspects of your sales process, you still need a metric that gives perspective on your business’s performance and profitability.

That’s where cost per acquisition comes in. CPA helps you understand the total cost of acquiring a new customer, from generating the lead to closing the sale. Changes in your contact center and sales operation’s true CPA over time can help you understand how efficiently you are working. Reasons your CPA might be too high include poor agent training, poor call ID health, poor list management, a disconnect between marketing and sales, and more.

While your overall CPA is important to track and improve, advanced call center reporting and analytics can help you get more granular insights that make it even easier to take impactful action.

For example, real-time monitoring of a List Conversion Report can make all the difference. Selling varies across state solar markets as does lead quality. Data simply doesn’t always perform the same.

So, to understand where and how you are driving the most success, you need to be able to understand your true CPA at the individual lead source level. With a List Conversion Report from a solar sales solution like Convoso, you can see which sources are delivering positive results. More importantly, you can pause outreach on lists that aren’t performing and come back to a new strategy that delivers more success.

Solar energy itself is at the forefront of a revolution in clean-energy technology, particularly for consumers. To scale your solar business and take advantage of the ongoing “sun rush,” lead gen and sales teams need to partner with a powerful sales technology.

At its core, Convoso’s solar dialer is built to help businesses reach and convert more leads, faster than your competition, while driving gains across all five of these mission-critical sales metrics.

See for yourself how Convoso can maximize productivity and profitability for your solar team by signing up for a free demo today.