Why systems have to come before scaling solar leads

▶ 0:00Happy Saturday we are back today I'm going to do a little video on systems and operations and a bit of an update on what we're working on at the moment so quite often when we go on discovery calls with installers they will be towards the earliest stage of their company journey right and maybe they were primarily doing subcontract work or they were a one man band they were electrician they're coming into solar and they're looking to build up the scale and the volume and to do that they need more leads they need to generate demand and they need to almost provide a bit more of a streamlined service offering work rather than doing

▶ 0:29any and every electrical job that they can and that's fantastic however the first question that we ask them is do you have any sort of crm or organizational company system in place and more often than not the answer is no they may be using some sort of app that does job management type of stuff but especially from a sales pipeline perspective quite often there is literally nothing in place and we are very very apprehensive and the vast majority of times we will outright say no to launching any campaign

▶ 0:59campaigns if something isn't in place on the back end because we know that we're pretty good at what we do and that very quickly we're going to turn the ads on we're going to turn the ads off again because the installer is just going to get overwhelmed with the amount of leads coming through with who they need to be following up with where people are in the process you know dno applications all of that kind of stuff and just by the nature of social media leads you are going to get some people that come through that don't progress very far at all and the flip side you're going to get people that come through that don't progress very far at all and the flip side you're going to get people that come through that

▶ 1:29that are going to progress all the way and actually end up in an installed system and you need a system on your end that allows you to differentiate and focus your efforts effectively this is also the case for us because we do very well joe and i just kind of bouncing ideas off each other and we at any one point in time we have a pretty good idea of what the other person's priorities are of what they're working on what's blocking them all of that kind of stuff we work together train together we've got a pretty good understanding however we're now hiring two framer developers which by the way you can still

▶ 1:59apply for it will be for the next batch so it will be for our third developer but you can still apply for the link will be somewhere on my profile and very soon after that we're going to be hiring a full-time video editor because of the sheer volume of advertising creatives that we're looking to churn out and test so if those individuals came into the business right now they would be utterly lost there are some systems in place i mean we've got for example some databases on the back end built in coder that is like the hq and then we've also got our billing which had all the client invoices and feeds the client portals so it is organized especially from the perspective of what our clients need that was kind of what we put first um but in terms of our own

▶ 2:40organization and systems in place um it's certainly lacking so what i've gone ahead and started to build out is actually like a full air table database that is going to essentially be our company hq that is going to have every single piece of information in it and what i'm particularly excited about here is that with a table because it's a database system we can link all of the records together so when a lead comes in it will be attributed to a funnel to an ad itself to a source and from there our video editors will be able to see exactly the deals that have been or the leads

▶ 3:16that have been generated by specific ads and likewise our eventually our web designer that will be running the conversion rate optimization test on our perspective funnels they'll be able to see ah well this is these are the leads this is the conversion rate this is how it's comparing all the way through and i will guarantee that there will be trends that we're not seeing currently because we have the data but we don't have a visual um an easy way to see that data air table will essentially allow us to do that where previously it almost was starting to feel like do as i say not as i do now we are putting the systems in place to be able to handle this ourselves

▶ 3:52especially with the content that we're putting out the demand in our services has gone through the roof and fortunately we've got a good sales crm in place outside of this but we still need all of the back-end fulfillment and operation systems to be really ticking and operations is more joe's side so he's going to have his work cut out just basically making sure that everything is really ticking and churning so we can get people onboarded as quickly as possible and get them and actually get to the point of delivering results for them as quickly as we possibly can and in a stable and sustainable way as well we could very easily just run straight to launching as many clients as possible but

▶ 4:25if they only get good results for a week because everything falls apart in the background that it doesn't really matter does it um and it's not a very good use of anyone's time or money so that is why yeah we're putting everything in place and i'm excited to uh to share some more updates as that comes through but the general point of this video is just as an installer especially if you're looking to do your own demand generation using sources like social media you need those systems in place if you want any guidance on that we do offer stuff like crms and things like that um but i'm always happy just to answer a question and i can probably like geek out about what i'm building with this uh air table set up as well while i'm at it as long as you

▶ 5:01can put up with that so yeah i hope you have a lovely weekend and i will see you in the next one