Why most solar proposals kill deals before they’re read

▶ 0:00Happy Sunday everyone. Today I'm going to take you through how to create absolutely unbeatable solar proposals in minutes. This is relevant for both residential and commercial solar projects. Okay, so we're going to take you from something on the left to something that looks similar to what is on the right. And it's not going to take your sales team or you hours of your time every time you want to make a proposal. So you've got a few options. The first option is, which is what most people are doing. You just use the open solar or easy PV export.

▶ 0:30It's going to look something like this. Yes, there's some benefits. Well, there's one benefit. It's fast, right? You already have to make that to actually fulfill the project. So it makes sense to just basically send that straight off to the customer. You know all the information is going to be correct because it's come straight out of the software. You know that it's got everything that it needs to have. You know that it's not got anything from any old proposals that you forgot to swap out. But there's some big problems. You look exactly the same as everyone else. There's probably three, maybe four different design softwares that people are actually using to

▶ 0:59design their system. If you've put all this effort in, like I'm working with a client at the moment, they've got a 78 page brand guidelines document. They're pretty big. And they put all this effort in to creating these fantastic brand guidelines, which by the way, look incredible. I don't know what they're doing specifically. But if they then go ahead and send an open solar boilerplate proposal through all that effort, all of the materials that the customer has been exposed to in their journey thus far up to the point of receiving the proposal is basically

▶ 1:29washed down the drain because it was all consistent, all the tone was right, all the look was right, the colors, everything. And they get to the open solar thing and it's just aerial font. They've put the logo in, it's slightly misaligned and got the wrong padding and stuff. And it's just going to look terrible. And then what's even better is they're going to receive two, maybe three, maybe four proposals from the exact same software where every single document looks exactly the same.

▶ 1:56And guess what that opens you up to? People think, okay, well, all the documents look exactly the same. It's come out of the same software. I'm just going to skip to page 17 that tells me the price. I'm going to go, okay, that one's 80K. That one's 90K. That one's 107. All right, I'll just ditch that one. Disregard that one.

▶ 2:13If you actually put some time into explaining why and putting together a well-formatted proposal as to why they should go for the 107K option, it might actually be a far better fit for them. But because everything just looks the same, they've already disregarded it. And beyond that, they just generally don't look very professional at all.

▶ 2:32They're very just data heavy. The charts don't look good. I mean, it's very surprising how many companies are using these proposals and yet the companies, the softwares, haven't decided to actually make them look better. And you can understand why this happens because it would take, theoretically, it would take hours to create a bespoke proposal per customer.

▶ 2:50But customers feel that. They feel that they're just getting an export from a system design document. They feel that they're just a number in the system. And it's actually very easy to make them not feel like that. Option two is to use a PowerPoint or a keynote presentation. We don't recommend this. Don't worry. Yes, it's more on brand, but it's incredibly time consuming.

▶ 3:07One of our clients, when we were doing, kind of going through the discovery questions and stuff, we spoke to them about their proposal process. And it was taking them three hours per proposal and it involved two people because one person would do the kind of, you know, put all the data in, the screenshots from the proposal, the charts, forecasts, and then another person would actually make it look good.

▶ 3:28So to get a proposal out, it had to go through two people who each were spending maybe two hours or an hour on this one document, sending it out. And then they had no visibility over if the person even looks at it because it was just sent out as a document. And yes, they looked fantastic, but there's a huge problem with that.

▶ 3:45Like, if you start working with us, it's just not going to work because, you know, make your energy, book two surveys in the first 24 hours of turning the ads on. And that's not an expectation we should really set because that's very atypical for a fresh ad account. But it happened. Chris booked one survey at nine o'clock at night.

▶ 4:02So called up the customer at nine o'clock, booked it for the following day. So if he was doing this three-hour proposal process, he would have had to stay up till one o'clock just to get the proposal ready to take with him to the survey. And it's just not feasible. And if you're a company that's doing even as low as kind of like eight installs a month, you're doing two a week.

▶ 4:22To get those two deals, you're probably sending out six to ten proposals. So if each one takes you three hours, you're spending 30 hours a week, 120 hours a month just on creating proposals, many of which won't even be opened. It doesn't stack up. It doesn't seem like a good use of resource. The other piece to this is that it has to be shared as a file.

▶ 4:43So it might have really poor accessibility. So a lot of customers will get the proposal through either via WhatsApp or email and stuff. They'll open it on their phone. If it's one of these open solar easy PV proposals, it's very detailed, small text. Every time they want to actually read something, especially if you take into account the demographic of most solar customers, which is typically quite a bit older and that may need reading glasses to actually consume these materials, they're going to have to pinch to zoom on every single thing that they actually want to read, right?

▶ 5:12And you'd be surprised, but a lot of these customers may not know that they can do that. So they're squinting. They're trying to do that and then they've got to send it to their computer because their email is not logged in on their computer and it all just becomes a complete mess and a lot of people will just forget, right?

▶ 5:26And you'll never hear back and you'll be like, oh, what was wrong with my proposal? They couldn't read it. Like they literally just couldn't read it. You have to take this stuff into account and it's, of course, incredibly difficult to scale, to automate and ensure consistency because, you know, if you, especially if you're using a template or copy, duplicating the previous proposal to then use in the new one, you're going to be missing things.

▶ 5:47You may be leaving the wrong number of panels and then that confuses the customer, all this kind of stuff. We really don't want to do that. I'll give you a real example of this. So together with Andy Fox, who's an incredibly talented brand strategy designer, we completely overhauled Sustain's branding. The logo, colors, well, let's just say Andy did the logo, colors, icons, text, typography, and that enabled us to create a really nice fancy deck.

▶ 6:09But even for Sustain, who have got an incredibly well-oiled sales process and a team to fulfill that, they're still spending a lot of time actually building out these proposals to get ready to send to customers. And because it's commercial, maybe there's slightly less volume, but they're still doing a lot of volume. And that's a lot of time creating proposals, even when some of the slides like this one are completely templated.

▶ 6:31So what is it that we actually recommend? We recommend using a tool called Gamma. Now, the fun thing about this is you're actually looking at a Gamma right now. So all of our presentations, content, et cetera, we script them out and write them on Gamma. And if you put your email into the link somewhere on this post, you're going to get sent a Gamma.

▶ 6:50Well, this Gamma specifically. This is an incredibly powerful tool. They were the first tool that really came to the market with an AI kind of automated solution to creating PowerPoint decks. And PowerPoint are now trying to catch up with the likes of Copilot and really struggling. And thus far, they've not been able to take any of the market share from Gamma of existing Gamma customers and move them to the PowerPoint solution, right?

▶ 7:15Because they've got so much technological debt, they move so much slower. Gamma is just fast. They develop fast. So the first thing is it's 100% on brand, no matter who creates the deck. So you basically create a theme. You create it once. And then any document you create going forward will adhere to that theme. And that theme does all of the fonts.

▶ 7:35It does the colors. It does the headings. It does the images. It does the border radius if you're more of a designer, you know, how sharp the corners are. And it basically allows you to give people free reign who otherwise would make atrocious looking documents, right? So our example is we use Gamma for all of our sales proposals and stuff.

▶ 7:54And I feel very confident letting Joe go crazy on creating Gamma documents because I've made the theme. And I know it's going to look really good even though Joe is, let's say, less fanatical about design as I am, okay? So once you do that, you can then create a template and customize it per recipient in minutes. So you could create one residential solar proposal template and you'd have all the placeholders ready.

▶ 8:21You'd have variables or things that you can insert for things like customer name, etc. And you can get that done in literally minutes. Swapping out an image on PowerPoint is, like, really cumbersome. You have to, like, right-click it and then click replace image and then you have to find the file. With Gamma, it's a case of, like, Command-C to copy the image, Command-V, and it swaps out and it does all the cropping and formatting, etc.

▶ 8:45It's fantastic. Which brings me on to the next point, which is that it has a super easy editor. So if someone wants to make a timeline, they drag that in. And if someone wants to make a chart, they drag that in and they edit the data. They don't have to go into Excel to edit the data. They edit it directly in Gamma in a very simple table format.

▶ 9:03So you can basically empower your team without worrying that they're going to just make everything look crap. It says that it's intentionally restrictive. So, yes, with PowerPoint, you can get things, like, pixel perfect and, you know, a designer can go crazy with loads of cool elements and stuff. And we did that with Sustain.

▶ 9:20We made that really fancy deck. But what happens is you then hand that off to a salesperson or someone that doesn't necessarily care so much about the design and it will deteriorate over time naturally. And that's not their fault whatsoever because their job is to sell rather than to keep your PowerPoint pristine. Okay.

▶ 9:36With this, it's very hard for them to actually do anything wrong, which is incredibly powerful when it comes to scaling and doing more volume. But this is where it gets really interesting. So you can actually publish these to a custom domain. So they almost act like a website. That's going to sound really weird at first for people that are coming from PowerPoint.

▶ 9:54But what I told you about, you know, with the PDF and how people happen to pinch to zoom and all that kind of stuff, not a problem here. Because if your company is XYZsolo.com, you can basically give them a unique trackable link to view their presentation on any device. And it will adjust the text size. It, you know, it isn't a fixed width.

▶ 10:14It will be, it will adjust to the width of the device. So you could do proposals.xyzsolo.com slash Jude Cornish or the address of the property. There's some huge benefits to this. So firstly, they can open it on any device and it's going to work just as well. They get an incredibly personalized experience because they think you've literally created a web page for them.

▶ 10:35A lot of people don't really understand how this stuff works with, you know, websites and all that kind of stuff. So when they get a website that literally has their name in the URL, they're going to be like, oh my God. They've, they've, they've got the development team to, to go and build this on their website. And they've, they've then, you know, put all my data in.

▶ 10:53They're going to be really impressed. Okay. But what's even better is that this same link gives you analytics to empower your sales team. So you probably found yourself wondering at some point, you know, has the lead or the prospect ever even looked at the proposal? Or maybe you're sending out a commercial solo proposal and there's a specific decision maker.

▶ 11:12Maybe, you know, the sustainability director, et cetera. And you want to ensure that they've seen a specific slide that you put in there specifically for them. Now, previously you would have had to basically send an email and go, um, excuse me, Mr. Client, have you seen slide number 17? And you just look like a bit of a mug.

▶ 11:29Whereas with this, you basically get access to all of that in the backend without having to ask anyone. You have it at your fingertips. So this is the actual analytics for this document. You can see we've had 34 people that have gone ahead and started to view this as we're building it out. And we can see what cars they viewed.

▶ 11:47We can see the amount of time that was spent on each card. So over time, we're going to basically start to understand what area of this document is the most valuable to people. What area are people skipping to, to read as opposed to reading through the whole thing? You won't be able to read through the whole thing unless you're on a real mission.

▶ 12:05In which case you probably just work with us because it will take, you could, you could literally have a discovery call, sign the contract on board with us and launch your ads before you could read this entire document by the time we're finished building it. So I'd recommend doing that instead, but jokes aside, this is an incredibly powerful tool for the sales team, uh, getting this level of analysis that you just can't get with PowerPoint.

▶ 12:30And of course, for any of the bigger companies, the first thing you're going to be thinking about is like user permissions, version history, all that kind of stuff. It's all there, folders, organization. Finally, you can add comments as well. So I'd be careful with this. So basically you can allow people that view this gamma to add a comment to a certain section, similar to you would on Google Docs or Word.

▶ 12:49You can highlight a section and add a comment. We started doing that and it was useful because we, it allowed someone to basically give feedback or ask a question on a very specific part of the proposal. However, it opens the floodgates to extreme nitpicking, paralysis by analysis, people focusing on the features rather than the benefits.

▶ 13:07So it's up to you as to whether you would actually enable that feature. Finally, for installers that are doing 20 plus installs a month, anything manual is just setting off alarm bells in your head. It's like, oh my God, no, no, nightmare, nightmare. So there's still an option. You don't have to send the OpenSolar eZPV proposals.

▶ 13:27There's still something you can do. You can essentially automate the creation of very advanced and bespoke PowerPoint or Google slide documents using automation tools. So you can essentially create variables in the template for those slide decks and use a tool like mate.com to essentially build those up for you from the OpenSolar or eZPV document.

▶ 13:52So that's a nice middle ground and it's probably the most efficient solution at scale if you still want to go the extra mile for the customer. If you want to find out how to do that, then it will be very expensive because it's an extremely custom process. It will be at least kind of 10 grand. But if you're at the volume of doing 20 or more installs a month and it's going to increase your close rate 10%, it's more than worth doing.

▶ 14:13So drop me a message if you want to find out more on that. Finally, if you want access to this gamma so you can basically see how it looks like on the back end, because this is basically what you would be building out, then click the link somewhere on this post, enter your email, all that good stuff. Then if you want the implementation of everything that has been shown, carry on on that same link.

▶ 14:31You're going to get asked a few questions about your business, which is essentially going to qualify you for certain offers. And then if you're qualified, you'll be able to book a call with me. Have a lovely rest of the weekend and I'll see you in the next one.