How to score commercial solar leads (properly)

▶ 0:00Good morning, happy Monday. Today we're going to talk about commercial solar lead quality. If you're a residential installer, I think this video is still going to be extremely relevant for you because essentially the main point is how we actually assess lead quality, especially when you start to have more of a sales team rather than a one man sales operation, because you need to ensure that there is a consistent way and a structured way for everyone to assess leads in the same manner.

▶ 0:25And that is also going to enable you to or rather inform the questions that your sales team are going to be asking in the discovery process so that they can all essentially assess the lead in the same manner so that overall the sales team has a very clear idea of which leads are actually priority, which are the highest value and which they should be allocating most of their time to.

▶ 0:45So I was speaking to a commercial solar client of ours, and we were working on this very scale. And the thing that kind of brought this discussion to life was a comparison between kind of digital leads and cold outreach leads. So the digital leads is interest capture based marketing, someone is already searching for commercial solar via Google ads, but you know, organic search, the cold outreach leads is interruptive marketing.

▶ 1:09So they haven't actually expressed any sign that they're actually interested in commercial solar. Because of that you're entering the conversation at a much earlier point on the digital side, it's often very competitive, because at that point, they've often already got your two or three quotes, and they're looking to get a price immediately.

▶ 1:25So you're entering at the buying stage, but you've got to fight against all the other competition. With the cold outreach leads, quite often, you're actually able to start the conversation. So they haven't already got quotes, you can very much dictate where they go in the process. So they've got respective advantages and disadvantages. But what this also means is that you need a way to fairly assess both types of leads against one another. Because if you put too much weight on urgency, then the digital leads are always going to come out on top, when in reality,

▶ 1:55cold email leads or cold outreach leads could be actually better opportunities, it's just that they're going to actualize in six to 12 months, rather than three months, right. So you need to ensure that there's a fair scoring system that actually assesses the long term potential of these leads as well. So the first thing I would do basically map out what matters to you most as a business with the leads that you're getting, we've had a go at this. First one would be decision making authority, we're basically creating like a weighted scale. So we're going to score each of these factors on a scale of one another.

▶ 2:25to 10 and then that's going to allow us to create like out of 10 a complete scale so this decision making authority makes up 2.5 points out of the total 10 that is available right so if it's one to three you can see that that is quite heavily going to impact the lead score because if you're speaking to a gatekeeper you're not very far in the process really next we've got energy usage and costs obviously if that's really low then it's going to be a low value opportunity because solar actually doesn't have as much of an impact for that that business property ownership is another one because that can basically expedite how quickly you can move in the process timing or project readiness this is where the digital versus cold outreach comes in budget or financing capacity

▶ 3:09you might imagine this would be weighted further but this particular client has a very strong ppa capacity so in reality if they don't have a lot of cash up front that's not necessarily a problem for the project and then site suitability with 10 as well and you might even say you might get a bit more complex with this you could make it almost like an exponential scale where if the site suitability is zero as in it will not work then obviously it should really make the total score out of 10 zero in a way because it kind of just rules out any potential for a project and then you basically make the total score the sum of the weighted points um and then you can interpret that you know eight to ten it's really high quality five to seven follow up but this is where you can start to say okay when

▶ 3:52the sales team is really dealing with a high volume of inquiries they need to focus primarily on this eight to ten and then they need to set up automated processes and systems that are going to enable them to nurture the five to seven the one to four so that they don't just get lost in the pipeline for the discovery process we're going to ask questions that allow us to give each of these six factors a score out of 10 that's really important and for some of them it might literally be asking you know okay mr mr client how urgent is this on a scale of one to ten how much of a business priority is this for you are you focusing on other things ahead of this or is this it's got to be done by this quarter

▶ 4:32and that will give you a fantastic idea of what the school will like for example decision making authority they're the ceo energy usage pretty high property ownership they own it timing urgency not urgent at all budget and financing capability uh let's say they've got loads of money and site suitability it looks like it could be a good project but we don't have the half hourly data yet so the total we've got there and that total at the bottom doesn't really matter because it's this one that matters you've got 2.5 and there you have it so that opportunity comes out to an 8.4 so i think that's a pretty good representation of how this looks and i think that this could be quite representative of a lead that comes from cold outreach because you've got you know very high scores throughout but

▶ 5:15it's just timing and urgency isn't very high because you've basically just interrupted this person there's been no actual intent for them to seek your services so this is going to be the one that you're going to be trying to urgently kind of push up and get that urgency in so that the score overall could become a low nines i hope that was useful if you think that i could have covered anything else in terms of the characteristic that we're scoring against or if you disagree with the waiting then definitely let me know in the comments i'm always looking to learn and hear what people's experiences are um also if you have a version of this on the residential side then definitely share that because that

▶ 5:49would be super useful to do a video about as well if you would like to get a copy of this document so that you can copy that that format then definitely go ahead and put your email and contact details into the link that is somewhere on this post probably in the comments as well and then if you want the implementation and for us to assist you with the strategy actually getting everything done then just carry on on that same link and you're going to get asked a few questions about your business at which point we can assess whether we can help you get to the next step awesome have a great week and i will see you in the next one