The data used in this article can be found in the latest iteration of SunBiz Enlighten
Have you ever wondered what percentage of leads get converted into sales by a typical solar retailer? And are you far off the mark?
Solar businesses get one shot to make money from each potential customer – a product that lasts 25 years doesn’t offer repeat sales.
So you’d think you’d want to get pretty good at converting leads into sales. The quality of those leads often isn’t amazing – actually its almost the biggest gripe in the industry.
But most solar companies don’t properly track their win rate. Everyone’s so busy running on their treadmill, frantically finding the next customer to fuel their cash burn.
But our research shows it’s the single key metric that defines what type of business you’ll become.
Are you going to invest a lot of time educating customers, only for them to buy from your competitor?
OR
Are you going to quickly churn through a large number of leads?
OR
Are you going to burn customers that are sitting on the fence, because you don’t have time and you’ve moved onto the next one?
OR
Or will you learn how to spend the right amount amount of time on each lead, optimally converting, and implement practices that drive up your low-effort high-conversion sales model
Your approach dictates what type of business you become. SunWiz’s research demonstrates only the last model will deliver you high-margin and growth. The other approaches result in boutique companies, bottom-feeders, or crash-and-burn.
The challenge is: what win rate is best to target?
Until now, there hasn’t been any decent information on win rates. You could ask your competitor. Potentially after spotting them on the beers at a trade show. If you even got an answer, even if they knew the answer, it would certainly be misleading.
SunBiz Enlighten – by SunWiz
Over 80 companies have authorized SunWiz to analyse their solar software accounts and provide them with valuable feedback on their performance. In an approved process, we then anonymise and aggregate their information.
Therefore we now have an excellent dataset on what conversion rates are occurring in the industry.
We can see that the typical solar business converts 28% of their qualified leads into sales.
However there is a wide range of outcomes, with win rates of 37% common.
Some companies are really churning through their customers, with a 10% conversion rate.
What do you think of these figures?
SunBiz Enlighten also shows:
⭐As you’d expect, higher priced systems convert less. But some companies have healthy conversion rates on high-priced systems.
⭐High volume companies tend to convert less.
⭐The cheapest systems don’t necessarily convert any better than low-priced systems. So stop selling junk – just get better at selling.
