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Follow on Google News | Solar Canvassing Lead Generation Company for the Solar Industry Originates Their Own Solar LeadsBy skillfully reading and reacting to sales metrics, Solar Canvassing excels at diminishing its cost of customer acquisition.
By: Solar Canvassing www.solarcanvassing.com This is validation enough for us to move forward with our current business model, which aims to empower an under-employed labor pool of high school, college and graduate students to become solar evangelists that can generate pre-qualified solar leads, reducing the cost of customer acquisition for solar installers. www.solarcanvassing.com “Ninety percent of all canvass programs fail,” he said. “This should average 11-12 percent of your revenue but the average company spends 15-20 percent and sometimes more, which is too high .www.solarcanvassing.com Customer acquisition costs are now one of the top five most expensive components of a residential solar project. At around $0.50/W, customer acquisition costs must drop significantly for the industry to continue its meteoric growth. www.solarcanvassing.com Investing in effective homeowner outreach campaigns can lower acquisition costs by increasing customer awareness and generating leads on a large scale. Many installers have small marketing budgets, so it’s smart to figure out how to spend it wisely. Some efforts have hidden costs and can leave you with little to show for all your work. So before you launch any of the following three types of campaigns, consider if they will help you profitably grow your installation firm. Canvassing At first glance, a team of canvassers going door-to-door to sign up new customers might seem like an easy way to generate sales. But it is surprisingly hard to generate sales and happy customers from canvassing. The conversion rate for canvassing is so low that the only way you can have even a slightly profitable canvass is if you have as many canvassers knocking on as many doors as possible. To scale up canvassing cheaply, installers need to keep training times short, canvasser pay low, and hours long. This results in high turnover because canvassers are not given the resources they need to succeed, so they quit in frustration. To minimize losses from turnover, installers will invest even less in their canvassing team and continue this painful cycle. Telemarketing Cold calling is also a tempting tactic. Assuming there are no legal obstacles, a single telemarketer can call more than 100 homeowners a day, so even with an extremely low conversion rate, they can still generate a meeting or two per day. While telemarketing is an easier job than canvassing, with fewer training needs and lower turnover rates, installers who cold call are still faced with low-quality leads and low conversion rates. Lead Buying In recent years, lead-generator companies have sprouted up to collect information on homeowners who are interested in going solar and then sell that information to installers. Often the lead gets sold to multiple installers, but installers can buy “exclusive” The main issues with lead buying are: The leads might be low quality. They might already be sold to competitors. They may distract from your more profitable sales efforts. The first two points are problems for obvious reasons, but the third one is a little more insidious. When installers become dependent on a lead generator, they start focusing all their sales efforts on converting those leads and stop building their own sales pipeline. With That In Mind In the end, a marketing tactic is just like any other tool. Each has inherent advantages and disadvantages, and it can be great or terrible depending on the user. Some companies have shown you can be a successful solar installer with a strong reliance on canvassing. Numerous small installers have also shown that it’s OK to buy a few leads every now and then to goose a nascent referral program. The solar industry is booming. And if you think that's a trend from a previous decade, think again. According to a survey released yesterday by The Solar Foundation, a nonprofit industry group, U.S. solar companies will add 22,240 jobs over the next 12 months, amounting to a 15.6 percent growth in employment over the 142,698 jobs that exist today. That astonishing growth prediction (if it happens) will actually be a slowdown from last year's growth rate of 19.9 percent. Though boosting sales is a challenge any business must rise to, in a booming industry (where everyone's piece of the pie is growing) an essential stat is cost of customer acquisition. Verengo Solar, an 854-employee provider of residential solar installations based in Torrance, Calif., has mastered this metric. Get the Right Numbers To begin with, his top team tracks sales leads by marketing channel, hoping to spot one trend or another that will help them improve success rates (and customer-acquisition costs). Those marketing channels include canvassing (door-to-door sales), radio ads, TV ads, direct mail, web-based SEO and SCM, and word-of-mouth referrals. I asked Bishop to break down Verengo's success rates by channel. He politely declined, but he did share a story illustrating how Verengo analyzes its channels, and learns from the results. Vet Your Sales Leads For instance, the company buys some of its sales leads from third-party aggregators who specialize in homeowner leads. Revisit Old-School Strategies, Like Door-to-Door Sales Verengo is also careful about which sales leads it funnels to its inside team (phone, web) and which ones go to the canvassing team. The company has found, through the years, that canvassing works best in neighborhoods where it's currently performing an installation. A campaign team will knock on doors of private residences within a particular geographic area, engaging in face-to-face personal interaction with homeowners. Canvassing may also be performed by telephone, where it is referred to as telephone canvassing. SOLAR PANEL CANVASSING Our mission to make it easy and affordable for solar organizations and companies to meet with homeowners that have the desire to go solar. A campaign team will knock on doors of private residences within a particular geographic area, engaging in face-to-face personal interaction with the homeowners. This is a rewarding opportunity to educate homeowners about reducing their carbon footprint and lowering their utility bills. Use your communication strategies to get your foot in the door. One step closer to an install. - See more at: http://solarcanvassing.com/ Amy Sam Solar Canvassing (858) 215-5345 www.solarcanvassing.com End
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