Why always booking a follow-up improves solar close rates

▶ 0:00Good evening. Tonight we're going to talk about solar and renewables sales. Whoa, a bit different. Normally I'm on the marketing side and now I'm going to be talking about the sales side. So take my advice with a pinch of salt. Now, I must say I'm no expert, right? But I'm gaining a lot of visibility and data from our 25 or more clients on what is working really well, what's not working so well and what people are potentially missing in their processes to actually get really good results.

▶ 0:27Now, huge caveats. Whoa, put a big asterisk up here somewhere. I'm not going to be bothered to do that. The main thing that's going to increase your close rate is actually working on the basics and the fundamentals. It's going to be increasing your reputation, delivering the highest quality of service as possible, encouraging referrals.

▶ 0:42All of this kind of thing is going to mean way more to you as a business than anything I could say in this video or anything anyone else could say. So focus on those things. Once you've nailed, focus on those things and they're all going in a really positive direction. Then you can start focusing on things like this. So with our own sales process, we never close on the first call.

▶ 1:02It's a discovery call. When you book in with us, we're going to learn a bit about your business and we're going to showcase a bit about what we do and how we do it and why we do it. Right. And the reason we don't close on the first call is because we actually want you to go speak to the competition. We want you to see what they're offering because then it will become very, very clear as to why we price ourselves higher and why we're a premium service.

▶ 1:21And we do video first and we do video first and things like that. And we want you to come to an educated, well-informed decision in your own time as opposed to trying to make a decision on the spot and being kicked out if you don't. However, I will not let you get off that call until you've booked a follow-up discussion with me.

▶ 1:39If you don't book a follow-up discussion with me, I am going to basically assume that something I've said isn't in line with how you want to do advertising for your business and we're not really a good fit. And I think that that's fair enough. I don't want to waste your time. I certainly don't want to waste my own time as well.

▶ 1:56So even if we book the follow-up for in three weeks' time, I don't care, you might be going on holiday, three weeks' time, fine. But we've at least got something in the diary. We've got something, a next step. We've got some element of commitment and buy-in from yourself. Why is a follow-up discussion so important and why is it so important in the context of solar?

▶ 2:13So obviously that's our sales process, but it's just as important as what we're witnessing from our best performing clients. I mean, some of our clients are closing close to 20% of leads, 20% of leads. Like our average client's close rate from surveys is around 20%. There's clients that are closing 20% of leads. How on earth is this happening, right?

▶ 2:35There's tons of different factors and of course the reputation, worksmanship, all that's going to come into it as well. But there are certain habits that they're doing. One of them is booking this follow-up call or follow-up discussion or proposal review or appointment or whatever you might call it. It's a follow-up. It's a next step that is solidly in the diary.

▶ 2:53Why are they doing that? So first of all, it prevents stalling. So without a scheduled next step, people have busy lives and they're probably just going to get carried away with something else and potentially come back to you in three months' time or something like that. We want to ensure that we keep them on a very structured process.

▶ 3:09In doing so, it creates momentum, right? Someone has just seen all of the benefits of solar from one of your advertisements and then they've had a survey. Hopefully someone that took their shoes off at the door and was really nice and warm and showed them all the benefits that they could have specifically from their system.

▶ 3:24They've just had a really great system design done. Maybe you did a 3D LiDAR scan on their roof and saw some things that other companies didn't see, right? They've just had a referral from a friend, right? And they're really bought into the process of going solar. And you know, this is the important part, you know as a service provider that you have something of extreme value to give them.

▶ 3:45You know that when you see that proposal that the estimates and forecasts are reliable and that they are going to make their money back in seven years. They've already told you they plan to stay in this house for 20. They are going to at least double their return, right? From this system. And they're going to increase their energy independence.

▶ 4:02They're going to be protected against rising energy bills. You have something of extreme value to give them. So you want there to be as much momentum in this process as possible and for it to keep climbing, that momentum to keep building, you don't want it to stall at all, okay? The next thing is you need to show professionalism.

▶ 4:17Like this isn't your first rodeo. If you go to the property, you present the quote, you build a really good rapport and then you kind of just leave and leave it in the prospect's core, it almost feels like you don't really know what's meant to happen next. So you're kind of like, well, it'd be nice if you kind of said yes to the quote or like, I don't know, you can come back to me in a few weeks' time maybe.

▶ 4:37Or if you are assertive and say, look, we need to book in a follow-up discussion to discuss it. Obviously, you can cancel if it's not a good fit, but we need to get something in the diary to make sure we're going on the right steps. So it actually shows that there is a process that this prospect will walk along and that many other prospects in the past have walked along and have achieved the A to B transformation that you are trying to pitch.

▶ 5:01The next thing is it's going to reduce uncertainty. Now, solar for a lot of people is in many cases the biggest investment that they could ever make in their lifetime, right? It is, there's a huge focus on financial returns and there's uncertainty around that just because of the nature of it, the nature of the product, right?

▶ 5:20And there's uncertainty with even something like installing a new roof, right? Is it going to keep the water out? With solar, that's like tenfold, okay? So we want to make sure that our process has as little uncertainty as possible and that there is reassurance at every step. The next thing is it's going to shorten your sales cycle because by having that next step in place, you're basically expediting how fast things are going to move.

▶ 5:43You're putting it in your terms and once you've got enough data and volume, maybe your advertising is going really well, your budget is increasing, you're on 20k a month meta ads budget. Then you can start to actually see, okay, based on our close rates, we've got this many decision appointments booked in for next week.

▶ 6:00Therefore, we should close this many amount and you can start to forecast your cash flow and then reinvest heavier and more aggressively into your marketing budget. So it's going to really help there as well. And then finally, it's actually a case of prioritization and resources. So when prospects speak to us and when they sign with us, they quite often are flooded with really qualified inquiries, right?

▶ 6:23Example, AJ Renewables. First month with us, spent four and a half thousand pounds on ads. They made over a hundred grand in sales within the first month. So not even accounting for the sales that are going to close after the first month from those leads. Within the first month, 11 sales and over a hundred grand closed deals, okay?

▶ 6:40Now, when you're suddenly inundated with that much quality interest, even if you're on a lower budget of, say, $2,000 a month, you might be looking at four or five deals, right? You suddenly are going to be really struggling to actually know where to allocate resources, especially if you haven't advertised before. So we've got quite a few clients that have either had to turn the ads off or they have basically had to scramble to find either in-office staff or more teams to actually install, all that kind of thing.

▶ 7:10Now, what you're going to need to do is, while also just increasing your resource that is available, you're going to need to figure out how to prioritize which prospects deserve the most of your attention, right? And booking this follow-up call in is a surefire, clear-cut way to determine who is interested and who is not.

▶ 7:30Because if someone won't agree to a follow-up call, then you may as well assume that you've said something wrong, that there's a way better quote out there, or something just isn't quite right. And because that prospect won't even give you the slightest bit of buy-in or commitment, you should basically put them onto some sort of long-term nurture sequence, something that's less high input, right?

▶ 7:50The 50% or more that do actually go ahead and book in that follow-up appointment, they can get more of your attention. And you can probably significantly increase the close rate of those people that actually were higher intent and were going to buy. Just because you've got this very clear filtering mechanism of the ones that are less intent and higher intent, okay?

▶ 8:09So, that's pretty much it. That's a bit of a breakdown as to why you should always book that next appointment. And again, it doesn't matter, obviously the sooner the better, but it doesn't matter how long in advance it is. You could literally make a joke out of it. And, you know, someone's going on a cruise and say, oh, should we book in for next year?

▶ 8:25Just book it in, right? Just book it in. Because even if they don't turn up, it also gives you a reason to follow up. You know, the day before you can say, looking forward to an appointment and things like that. Without it just being like, hey, just checking in. Did you see this? It just doesn't really work. So, I'll leave you with that.

▶ 8:44Hopefully you enjoyed. Next time, I'm going to try and bring more data into it. Because this is just kind of like my observations, but it'd be really good to see like an A versus B on people that do X versus Y, right? That would be really cool. But for now, I'll leave you to it. See you in the next one. Cheers.