In the solar industry, door to door selling is the best approach. Why? Because the cost of outfitting a home with solar panels can be upwards of $25,000 — an investment homeowners won’t make without fully understanding the benefits.
Door to door sales gives reps the opportunity to explain the ROI of a solar energy system, discuss financing options, and even show homeowners a rendering of what their home will look like after solar panel installation.
In this post, we’ll outline a 10-step process solar companies can use to boost door to door solar sales, and how to simplify the sales process with the right tools and technology.
10 Steps to Increase Door To Door Solar Sales
Want to learn how to sell solar door to door? We should warn you, it will take time and effort. But once you learn and implement the 10-step process below, you’ll start to see results. So let’s dive in with step number one!
Identify Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
Success in sales starts with an in-depth knowledge of the people you’re trying to sell to. The same is true for solar companies. So before you do anything else, build an ideal customer profile (ICP.)
An ICP defines the perfect customer for a company’s products and/or services. In your case, it will be a description of the person (or company, if you sell solar panels to other businesses) who is most likely to invest in your company’s solar systems.
The ICP should include customer location data, financial details, and information regarding specific “pain points” you can help solve. And you may have more than one ICP. Here are two examples of homeowners that might be interested in installing solar panels:
The Environmentalist
- Donates to environmental charities
- Drives an electric vehicle
- Has a master’s degree
- Follows environmental groups on social media
- Lives in a neighborhood where the average home value is $500,000
- Pain point: Wants to reduce reliance on fossil fuels
The Investor
- Owns secondary property, like land or a rental home
- Works in finance or senior leadership
- Follows investment and wealth management topics on LinkedIn
- Lives in a neighborhood where the average home value is $800,000
- Pain point: Wants to reduce electric bills without sacrificing personal comfort
- Pain point: Wants to increase the value of their home
Use ICP data to prospect efficiently
It doesn’t matter how good you are at door to door sales; you won’t be able to close every deal. There are a variety of reasons for this.
Some people, for example, don’t get enough sun on their property to make solar a worthwhile investment. The last thing you want to do is waste your valuable time talking to a prospect who has no intention of making a purchase.
To avoid this, use your ICP data to only connect with potential customers.
Tools like SPOTIO make it much easier to prospect efficiently, thanks to features like Lead Machine, which allows users to filter prospects using 200+ data points.
Map and assign sales territories
At this point, you know what your ideal customer looks like and you’ve identified a few of them in the field. Now it’s time to map and assign territories so your canvassers and/or reps don’t waste time visiting the same prospects.
Once again, the right tools can help with this. Take SPOTIO’s Territory Management tool, which lets you assign territories based on geographical boundaries or by drawing on a digital map. Sales leaders can then assign territories to the most qualified reps on their team and monitor the results.
Also of note, Territory Management provides data-backed insights into territory history and performance so you always know what’s going on and why.
Perfect your pitch
What do sales reps do once they’ve been assigned a territory? They hit the road and go talk to people, of course! When they do, they need to be ready to pitch.
Here are five door to door sales pitch examples your reps can use:
- The Opener Pitch: This pitch aims to build connections with prospects as quickly as possible and create a positive first impression.
- The Elevator Pitch: This sales pitch is short and sweet, giving prospects a wealth of information in quick bursts.
- The Storyteller Pitch: This pitch uses the power of story to build trust with prospects and deliver information in an entertaining way.
- The Pain-Based Pitch: This sales pitch helps reps uncover prospect pains so they can pinpoint how their company can help.
- The Close Pitch: Reps use this sales pitch when they’ve built rapport with prospects and are ready to ask them to make a purchase.
For more information on these five pitch examples and how solar companies can use them to fuel a door to door solar sales strategy, read our blog post on the topic.
Don’t Educate — Showcase The Value
Here’s the thing: Your prospects don’t need to know the technical details of solar.
How each panel works might be interesting information to you. But prospects only care about smaller energy bills, higher home values, and (maybe) environmental factors associated with the solar system you can install on their properties.
So, don’t delve too deep into education. Tell prospects what they want to know. For environmentally conscious homeowners, that might mean preparing data about how solar energy can reduce their carbon footprint. For investment-minded homeowners, be ready to present evidence of how solar will save them money and raise the value of their home.
Enable canvassers to send leads to reps
If your solar sales department is like many others, it asks different employees to handle different tasks. Canvassers, for example, are responsible for pinpointing leads, making initial contact, and scheduling future appointments.
Closers, on the other hand, attend the appointments their canvassers make, explain the benefits of solar, and convince prospects to make a purchase.
To be successful, this system requires the seamless transfer of information. Manually tracking these steps in the sales process can be cumbersome, but it’s easy to do with the right technology.
SPOTIO, for example, makes these kinds of transfers smooth by automatically transferring canvasser notes to a company CRM, documenting all communication channels that canvassers use, and automatically capturing lead data.
Integrate your CRM data
Your sales team acquires a lot of data. Make sure your reps have access to it so they can consistently close more deals in less time.
You can do this by integrating your preferred CRM with SPOTIO. Once you do, your reps will be able to access all of your company’s important sales data from any device, including their phones, which is handy when out in the field.
More importantly, you can organize data on a digital map, filter it based on the needs of individual reps, and manipulate it in a variety of other ways.
Track sales activity and performance
You can’t help your sales reps improve if you don’t know how they spend their time in the field. That’s why it’s so important to track sales activity and performance.
With SPOTIO, you can see each of your field rep’s routes in real time and track sales rep activities so that you know exactly who they contact and when, and the communication channel they use.
This information will tell you whether you need to retrain your reps or motivate them to work more efficiently.
Prepare for objections
Prospects always have a reason not to buy. Because of this, the best door to door solar sales reps have learned to handle objections the right way.
Here’s what we suggest:
Prepare Specific Rebuttals
Cost is probably the single biggest objection, and any solar sales rep should be prepared to address those concerns. Reps could, for example, explain how in the long term, homeowners end up saving money after installing a solar energy system, which means they’ll recoup their installation costs.
Visual aids can be quite effective in door to door sales. So if a solar company creates an illustrated one-sheet explaining the benefits of solar, a sales rep can leave that with a prospect to review.
Use The LAER Model
The LAER Model stands for Listen, Acknowledge, Explore, Respond. Basically, it means that sales reps should listen to prospect objections, acknowledge that they hear and understand them, explore the reasons why these objections have come up, and then reply in a sincere way that may help prospects see past their objections and make purchases.
For more information on common sales objections and how to handle them, read through our blog post on the topic.
Use Social Proof
In the solar market, social proof can be a great way to help hesitant prospects overcome objections. Again, this is where a handout could be useful, if it includes testimonials from customers. And when you do make a sale in a neighborhood, ask your customer if you can place a sign in their yard for your solar business. Even seeing your business name regularly could make a homeowner more receptive to a sale.
Always follow up
Selling solar door to door is a numbers game. The more people you talk to, the more sales you’ll make. This applies to follow-ups, too.
Just because a prospect says “No” doesn’t mean they’ll never buy from your company. A “No” today could easily turn into a “Yes” next month or next year. But you’ll never realize that potential if your reps quit after the first “No” they hear.
The hardest part about following-up is keeping track of who you contacted, when you contacted them, and when you need to contact them again.
With a tool like SPOTIO, a solar salesperson doesn’t have to worry about tracking these tasks. Instead, they’ll use the platform’s Autoplays feature to automate follow-ups at the cadence of their choosing. This ensures leads don’t fall through the cracks.
Start Selling More Solar Panels
The key to solar sales is having the right strategies, processes, and technology in place.
SPOTIO enables solar sales reps to be more productive and hit higher sales numbers thanks to a host of helpful features:
Lead generation: Find leads that fit your ICP using SPOTIO’s unique Lead Generation tool, which quickly pulls up a list of prospects for your reps to contact. Reps can then filter prospects by homeownership status, age, credit capacity, and a host of other factors to make sure they’re a good fit for your brand.
Appointment setting: Whether you employ a team of canvassers or ask reps to source their own leads, they can do it more efficiently with SPOTIO’s Appointment Setting tool. Users can instantly set appointments from the field, pass them off to other team members, automate time-consuming tasks, and more.
Activity management: Where have your reps been? How many times have they contacted Prospect X? Come to think of it, where are they right now? SPOTIO’s Activity Management feature will tell you exactly how your reps spend their on-the-clock hours. (Note: This feature can be turned off if desired.)
Territory management: You can cut, manage, and assign territories inside SPOTIO, too. Use our intuitive suite of tools to divide geographical areas by ZIP Code or by drawing on a digital map. Then assign the territories you create to specific sales reps. You can run territory-level reports in SPOTIO to evaluate performance.
Route planning: Door to door sales is effective, but not always efficient. SPOTIO helps reps maintain peak productivity by automatically planning the most efficient routes between prospects. That way reps focus more on how to sell solar panels instead of how to get from point A to point B.
CRM integrations: Every solar sales team needs a CRM solution. One of the best things about SPOTIO is that it integrates with just about all of them. Whether you’re a loyal Salesforce user, a HubSpot enthusiast, or you use another platform, you can connect your CRM of choice to SPOTIO and reap the benefits.
Tracking and reporting: SPOTIO does a lot for solar sales reps. But what about the folks that manage them? SPOTIO was built for you, too. Enjoy detailed tracking and reporting features that will help you keep your finger on the pulse of your department at all times. Even better, SPOTIO reports are easy to create and read!
Does SPOTIO sound like the right tool for your door to door solar sales team? Then what are you waiting for? Request a free demo of our platform to see it in action.
