Sighten’s Proposal Assistant service is here to support you when creating a compelling custom solar proposal template.

As a solar installer or contractor, you’ve likely put thought and effort into building your company’s brand, logo, website, and social media. These are all essential tools for driving new customers to your business.

Everyone wants great reviews, testimonials, and referrals. But there’s a big difference between wanting these things and actually building them into your company’s process to ensure you get them.

Referrals and positive reviews are tied to hugely positive outcomes for your business. Both significantly reduce customer acquisition cost (CAC), which results in faster and more profitable growth. This means anything you can do to increase the percentage of your customers that provide reviews and referrals will have a big impact on your business.

Once in a while, customers will proactively provide great reviews and referrals. More often, they’re busy and won’t ever think to do it unless you ask. So, the first lesson is just that - always ask! But how should you ask? When? How can you build processes around asking?

In this post, we’ll answer these questions and discuss strategies to reliably generate great customer reviews and ample referrals at your company. With these simple techniques, you’ll win more customers and drive profitable growth.

In the previous post in our solar sales series, we discussed how to use the techniques of storytelling and social proof to improve your solar pitch.

By leveraging the way your customers relate to other people - and by using your solar proposal to layer in case studies and different examples of social proof - you can help prospects make buying decisions with confidence.

In this post, we’ll keep the tips coming but with a focus on how to cultivate strong customer relationships. Specifically, we’ll discuss four ways to create stronger connections with your solar leads, especially how you can build likability and trust.

In part one of our series on boosting your solar sales using the science of decision-making, we looked at two key concepts: single option aversion and the decoy effect.

Together, these two principles can help you close more deals by presenting options designed to facilitate confident buying decisions.

This time around, we’re going to discuss storytelling and social proof--two more science-backed concepts that can have a meaningful impact on your close rate. We’ll dig into what makes these techniques so effective and how you can leverage storytelling and social proof as part of a repeatable sales pitch.

This month on the Sighten blog, we’re kicking off a blog series exploring several key principles in the science of decision-making. Using some simple yet powerful concepts, you’ll be able to make sure your solar sales process maps to how the human brain actually processes information and makes buying decisions.

Adopting these data-driven strategies will help you develop effective, repeatable ways to close more deals. We’ll also show you how MyProposal, Sighten’s solar proposal tool, makes it easy to incorporate these insights into your sales process.

This post will focus on two separate but related concepts: single option aversion and the decoy effect (also known as the asymmetric dominance effect). While the scientific jargon can make these seem like complicated concepts, they’re actually fairly intuitive.

As a solar installer, you know that it’s not hard to convince potential customers of the benefits of going solar – the challenge comes when you have to explain how much it costs. No matter how much the cost of solar has fallen in recent years, the prospect of a five-figure upfront expenditure for an investment that will take years to pay back is simply a non-starter for most homeowners.

That’s where financing comes in. The ability to offer your customers loans, leases, and other financing options transforms solar from a big hit to their household budget into a smart investment that will have them in the black from day one.

Telling a story

Human beings respond to stories and narratives that make complex concepts easier to understand. Research has even shown that humans remember facts at a much higher rate when those facts are part of a story as opposed to just listed out. How can you make your solar sales pitch more of a narrative and drive engagement with your prospects? Start with analogies!

Every successful sale starts with getting your prospect to care about the problem you are solving. This can be tricky in solar, given that most homeowners don’t stay up at night fretting about their electricity bill.

What are some best practices to create urgency with a solar prospect and drive real engagement with your pitch?

Sighten exists to support the people selling, financing, and installing solar every day. That’s why we love hearing about our customers growing faster or operating more efficiently because of Sighten software. Recently, we dug a little deeper and asked our partners about their favorite aspects of running their solar businesses on Sighten. The result? Sighten customers love the platform’s financing tools, ease of use, and speed with accuracy.

You’re ready to grow your solar business this year, but what changes have you made to kick things into a higher gear? What are you doing to generate more leads? Close more sales? Hire and train more sales reps?

Here at Sighten, you could say we’re a little obsessed with helping solar companies grow. To that end, we’ve put together our solar sales cheat sheet -- 5 tips that could be game changers for your sales numbers this year. Take a look and let us know what you think!