The solar power industry has been recently gaining a lot of momentum. Businesses as well as consumers have started investing in solar power not only because it is environmentally responsible, but also because the economics makes solid sense now.

Utility-scale mega solar farms were the first to become economically attractive. But now rooftop solar installations have also caught up, creating opportunities for rooftop solar installation businesses.

But the rooftop solar installation businesses are quite different from the utility scale solar EPC firms. Rooftop solar installation projects are fast-tracked, small scale projects. So rooftop solar installers typically run many of such small projects in parallel.

The market for rooftop solar projects is also very different than utility scale business. Correspondingly, sales also need to be managed differently. A rooftop solar business will definitely benefit from a CRM or sales management solution. But a traditional, generic CRM may not be the ideal solution.

Large number of leads to be pursued

Typically a rooftop solar business executes many small projects in parallel. For this reason, sales teams are usually chasing many commercial or residential rooftop solar installation leads.

A lot of information also needs to be collected from each of these leads. Naturally, sales teams need a good tool to track their leads, work done on each case and data taken from each potential customer.

To monitor the status of each sales case, it is useful to define a sales process or workflow. So you can easily identify where exactly a lead is presently standing in that workflow.

So when you are evaluating a CRM solution for your solar business, ensure that it allows you to create and manage workflows.

It will ensure that the workflow that your sales team is already following can be digitized in your new solar CRM, which is always better than having a fixed workflow. Then your sales team has to spend some time to learn that process and bring it in practice.

Many documents to be managed

For rooftop solar sales, usually there is a lot of interaction with the customers even before the project order.

Sales teams usually survey the site, assess the exact power generation needs and gauge customer’s budget and then prepare a proposal for new solar project. Sometimes preliminary engineering designs are also made along with the proposal.

Many documents are gathered during the sales phase itself (e.g. electricity bills etc.). Sometimes, drawings and reports are also prepared along with the proposal. All these documents should be ideally linked to the CRM.

So an ideal CRM for solar businesses, should also come with excellent document and drawing management capabilities. Many generic CRM software are however lacking in this respect.

Handover to execution team

Moreover, all the documents and data gathered during the sales phase, have to be handed over to execution team once the project order is received. This would include – all the documents gathered during sales phase, site survey information and photos of the site.

Sales team may save all the documents and data on a CRM platform. But usually, the execution team is not connected to CRM or sales platform.

The information handover can be done quickly and effortlessly if the CRM or sales platform is connected to the project management or construction management platform used by the execution team.

It is a good idea to look for a CRM which can easily get connected to project management or even document management solutions being used by execution and project management teams.

Link with marketing

Arguably, it is even more important to connect the sale process with marketing effort using the same platform.

So while selecting a CRM or a sales management platform, it is important to also look for capabilities that can help with marketing as well.

Email marketing, online advertising, social media campaigns, marketing blog are some of the tools that will prove valuable on a sales management platform.

WorkPack for solar sales and marketing

Our team at WorkPack has been helping many solar EPC businesses to streamline and manage their solar project execution. We have also helped their sales and marketing teams to manage the sales efforts on the same platform.

So essentially, WorkPack users are able to perform the following on the same platform –

• Manage Customers Lists, Contacts etc.
• Configure sales workflows, monitor sales progress
• Track sales pipeline
• Create and manage email marketing campaigns
• Upload and manage all sales related documents and data
• Project management & tracking after order is placed
• Construction monitoring
• Manage documents and drawings during installation and commissioning

Basically, WorkPack has served these teams as a central solution for all important business processes. Which is well suited for the nature of rooftop solar businesses.

Do you think WorkPack can help your sales team as well? Find out for yourself. Sign up for a free account on WorkPack. Or get in touch with us, we would be happy to answer any questions.