AI for solar installers: where to start

Quick answer: an AI audit for solar installers looks at how leads are qualified, how proposals are built and followed up, and how customers are kept informed through permits and installation. It puts a time and a cost on each manual task and ranks what AI can take over. Most of the repeat work sits between the first inquiry and the signed proposal.

A solar sale involves many small steps: a lead arrives, someone collects the utility bill, the roof and the ownership details, a proposal is built, and then the customer waits through permits and installation. Each step has repeat work that is easy to see and easy to lose time on. This page explains where it hides and what an audit looks at first.

The numbers on this page are made up to show the idea and are labelled as such. An audit measures your own.

Where the repeat work hides in a solar company

In most solar installers the repeat work sits around leads, proposals and status updates. These are the five places we look first.

• New leads that wait. Inquiries arrive in the evening and at weekends and sit until the next working day.
• Qualifying by hand. The utility bill, the roof and ownership are collected over several calls, one question at a time.
• Proposals that go cold. A proposal goes out, then the follow-up depends on someone remembering.
• Re-typing between tools. The same customer details are entered in the CRM, the design tool and the proposal.
• Permit and install status. Customers phone the office to ask where things stand.

Five automations an audit could find

These are examples of the kind of fix an audit can find. Yours will depend on how your company works.

• A first reply to every lead. Each new lead gets an acknowledgement and the right questions, and your team sees it ready to review.
• Lead qualification. The system collects the utility bill, roof and ownership details and drafts a summary for your sales team.
• Proposal follow-up. Every proposal gets a scheduled follow-up, drafted for a person to review and send.
• Data carried between tools. Customer details entered once are carried into the CRM, the design brief and the proposal.
• Permit and install updates. Customers get status updates without having to call.

You can see the idea in our example build of automated lead management and an AI phone receptionist.

What stays with your people

AI drafts and a person approves. Designing a system, pricing it and committing to a savings figure are decisions for your designers and your sales team, not for an automated message. The same goes for anything about permits or incentives, where a mistake costs the customer money.

Many of the best fixes are internal: qualification notes, reminders and data entry that your team reviews. They shorten the path from inquiry to signed proposal without putting an unreviewed message in front of a customer.

An example lead

This table shows how an audit puts a number on each step. The figures are invented for illustration.

What an audit looks at, and what you get

• Findings: what your team does in a normal week, written in plain language.
• A process map: how a lead becomes a signed proposal, a permit and an installation.
• A ranked list of fixes, including the ones not worth building.
• The estimated return: hours and money per task.
• A roadmap: what to build first, what to leave alone and in which order.

The audit has a fixed price agreed in writing before it starts. You keep the plan and can build with us, with someone else or on your own.

How to start this month

You can learn a lot in a week without any tool. Gather four numbers from your own leads and you will see where time and sales are slipping.

• Time the first reply. Take the last ten web leads and note how long each waited for an answer.
• Count the calls it takes to qualify a lead. Pick five recent leads and count how many contacts it took to collect the bill, roof and ownership details.
• List the proposals sent last quarter and mark the ones nobody followed up.
• Write down the five questions customers ask most about permits and installation.

An audit repeats this across the whole company, puts a cost on every step and ranks the fixes, so you start with the one that returns the most.

Common worries

Every roof is different, so nothing can be automated. The design and the price are different for every roof, and they stay with your team. The questions you ask to qualify a lead, and the follow-up after a proposal, are far more regular.

Customers expect a person for a decision this big. They do, and they get one. The point is to spare your sales team the data collection and the reminders, so more of their time goes to the conversation that closes the sale.

Incentives and permits change too often. That is exactly why those answers stay with a person. What can be automated is the status update, once a person has the facts.

After the audit: your options

When the plan is done, you choose. You can build the first fix with us, hand the plan to another provider, or build it yourself. A build with us is quoted per project, and only if you want it. If the ranking shows that nothing is worth automating, the plan says so, and that is useful too: you will not spend money on the wrong thing.

Want to see what an audit would find in your company? Book a free 15-minute call, read how the AI audit works or see what it costs.

Frequently asked questions