Navigating a World with Fewer In-Person Meetings – A Remote Solar Sales Guide

Due to recent concerns about in-person interactions with others, conventions, concerts and other events with large gatherings are being canceled left and right. Businesses have also had to rethink their work and sales strategies.

From encouraging working from home to finding creative ways to “meet” and communicate with leads and clients, solar installers will also need to adapt if they want to maintain their current sales numbers in a world where handshakes could be risky. Here are 4 surefire ways to keep up with your current numbers while reducing in-person meetings.

1) Skip the door-knocking.

While heading out to beautiful neighborhoods filled with homes that are perfect for solar can be a nice break from the office and actually generate you some quality leads, it’s probably better to put this sales tactic on the backburner for now and stick to the resources you have at your desk instead.

The best way to replace face-to-face sales is by taking advantage of all the ways you can generate leads online. You can use a map provider like Google and spot a street with south-facing roofs, quote them accurately through a sales and design software and finally do a reverse phone lookup to send these professional quotes remotely. This will help you to generate tons of self-sourced quality leads to start the season strong.

Along with a high-quality lead magnet, a professional website/landing page and a few ads on social media and search engines, you’ll soon be wondering how you ever got by without it.

You could also use blogging to fill the gaps in your lead flow. These tools may take you a little longer to set up but they could be very valuable to you in the long run. Build up a library of content that answers questions your potential customers want answered; turn your company into a thought leader on the solar industry through blogging, which builds trust.

A good referral program will also help to generate extra leads to reach out to. Offer compensation for successful referrals in the form of cash, gift cards or upgrades. If your work is solid and your customers are happy, you should have no shortage of people to call.

2) Focus on the phone.

Once your leads start coming in, it’s time to get creative with how you qualify them. Don’t jump right into booking face-to-face meetings. Pick up the phone instead to try your hand at making the sale or at least better qualifying your potential clients. Your aim is to end the call with a demo booked with yourself or one of your sales representatives and a good idea of the kind of potential customer you’ll be dealing with.

Get the necessary information (home address, email, monthly electric bill etc.) and ask any other qualifying questions you may have on this call so you can make sure to be prepared for your online demo.

Take this time to answer any pressing questions your leads may have about solar. This part of the conversation will also help you decide what to focus on during the next phase of this remote sales process.

At this point, the next step should be to schedule a more in-depth phone call and screen share meeting to hash out the details of the project and system design.

In closing.

In a time when things are changing on a day-to-day basis, it’s important to have a backup plan for yourself and your company to make sure you can stay afloat in a variety of situations. Don’t get left out in the cold with your old sales playbook. Learn to adapt and thrive with a remote sales strategy that works for you.

This article appears in our Remote Sales Toolkit, access more articles here.