If you’re just starting out in the solar industry, or you’ve hit a wall with your small business and are looking for ways to grow, one of the easiest methods to get more done faster throughout the work day is to pick up a solar design software with features built specifically for growth.
In this article, we’ll be outlining every solar design software feature you should be looking out for if you’re ready to grow your small solar business with as little friction as possible.
Team Management Capabilities with Specific Roles and Permissions
Where you may have started your business with a few core team members, you might be at a point where you’re looking to add more employees to your company, be it salespeople, project designers, accountants, etc. While each member should be knowledgeable in their role, you might want to restrict some access to certain facets of the business to avoid any mistakes and to prevent people from working on top of each other in order to minimize overlap and confusion.
This is where having a solar software with team management and roles and permission settings comes in handy. As the CEO or sales team lead, you’ll want to maintain visibility on what solar projects your team is working on, how many deals they’ve signed, and how many solar installations they currently have in their pipelines.
Choose a software with a dashboard functionality that reports the day-to-day goings-on of your business to you without having to pull any data out yourself. Make sure the solar design software you choose also allows for you to limit what the team below you can do within the software, whether it’s restricting them to only using certain solar products, or only seeing their own system designs and projects in their accounts.
This will allow for seamless team growth without the confusion that many small solar businesses see when they begin to increase their numbers.
All-in-one Integrations
When you get to a point where you have more team members selling solar, quoting homes, and generating more leads for your business, you’ll want to make sure that you have a solar software and design tool that eliminates any roadblocks in their workflows.
Select a software that not only allows for solar system design and proposals, but that also acts as your solar CRM, your financing partner, your permit team and more, so that you spend less time switching between applications and doing admin work.
A good solar software will enable you to get everything done in a single application, from the moment you generate a lead to post-sale when you need to get your financing taken care of and your solar permits ordered.
You should also keep an eye out for a tool that integrates with a service like Zapier, so that you can automate anything extra that your company does or monitors in places other than your solar design software. This could be through instantly importing any leads generated from your website into your design tool for the design team to jump on, to exporting any product or sales data into a Google or Excel spreadsheet for your accounting team to pull from.
Make Selling and Upselling Easy and Intuitive
While having solar software features available to help you manage your small solar business’s growth is great, you also want to make sure that your design tool of choice also allows your team to sell more solar overall, and upsell at every opportunity.
The solar proposal generated with your software should be customizable based on what your solar company offers, and also by the look and feel. Change your proposal’s look to match your company branding, change the order of your proposal sections based on the order your team likes to pitch in, and add photos of past jobs, the materials you offer, and any other text or videos you might want to showcase.
You’ll also want a place to show the homeowner other benefits to a solar-powered home, such as the environmental impact of going solar, as well as any facts or stats about solar power they may not be aware of that could help close the deal.
Finally, growing small solar businesses should take any opportunity to upsell on a solar job as possible. Select a solar software that enables your team to put together Good, Better, Best options on a single quote with different solar design options, materials, and prices so that your clients can look over multiple proposals in one and select the one that looks the best for their solar project. This will effectively set your company up as your own competition and ensure that you close the deal no matter what.
In Closing
Growing small solar businesses need as much help as they can get to break free from the herd and start increasing their numbers. To start, select a solar design software that enables you to not only manage the business you have but provide you with the tools you need to seamlessly grow in this competitive industry.
Solargraf offers all these features and more to create an easy-to-use, all-in-one solar sales and design tool built to help you get more done in less time. From an intuitive solar design tool, endless customization options, proposals with Good, Better, Best options, integrations with Zapier, financing, permit and stamp orders, shade reports, proposal orders, and more, we’ve got everything you need to help you grow. Book your free demo today to learn more about why so many solar contractors choose Solargraf every day to get the job done.
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