SolarReviews is the largest supplier of demand generation services to the residential solar industry

Over the last 10 years, SolarReviews has built a special reputation with both consumers and solar contractors for being an honest and reliable source in the residential solar industry.

The editorial content we offer consumers has always been, and will always be, independent of our financial relationships with any particular solar company. We say it how it is, regardless of whether or not it is good or bad for our commercial interests.

This editorial independence means we are in a unique position of trust in the industry, allowing us to provide referrals from high-quality, educated potential customers.

However, we only want to do this for solar companies that we trust will provide a quality service to their customers and enhance the overall reputation of both SolarReviews and the solar industry. We are in this for the long haul.

In 2022 approximately 10 million consumers visited a SolarReviews website, and we also have a growing Youtube channel where our CEO, Andy Sendy, shares his thoughts about all things solar.

In 2022 we generated more than 900,000 solar leads, more than triple the number of leads generated by any other supplier of demand generation services to the solar industry.

In addition to our organic traffic, we buy more traffic from Google Adwords, Facebook, Youtube, and most other major advertising platforms than anyone else in the residential solar market.

In today's world, these big platforms own consumers' eyeballs, making it harder and harder to get referrals from these platforms without buying traffic. SolarReviews does the traffic buying function for you and then converts this traffic into a product that each of our customers can best deal with: either leads, appointments, or signed contracts.

There are no lock-in contracts for SolarReviews leads or appointments; you can start or pause buying either product at any time. You can also set or change the service areas and daily budget for each product at any time through your Installer.

Leads Products

We offer exclusive, duo, trio, and quad leads where each lead is verified by a PIN number sent to the consumer's phone or a manual conversation with our QA team.

The naming of the lead refers to how many solar companies the lead is sold to. The cost of each lead falls as it is sold to more solar companies, such that exclusive leads cost the most and quad leads the least.

SolarReviews is unique among lead generation platforms because it lets the consumer decide how many quotes they want, and a lead is never sold to more solar companies than the consumer requests. On average, SolarReviews leads in 2022 were sold to 2.2 companies each.

We also offer unverified leads at a lower cost where the consumer did not confirm their phone number with a PIN code sent to them, and our QA team has been unable to get them on the phone after one attempt. We also offer email-only leads at a lower cost for consumers who want to avoid receiving phone calls.

The theory behind our pricing is that each lead product is priced according to the likelihood of it converting to a sale and the cost to generate it.

What you can expect buying leads

From verified leads where you have an automated dialer and automated follow-up process that uses text, email, and phone calls, you can expect:

• Contact rate 75-80%
• Appointment set rate: 30-35%
• Lead to installed contract: 3%-10%

However, you should be aware that much of this result depends on the quality of your systems and sales staff. SolarReviews provides a very consistent quality of lead because our ad text and call to action never change. It has been the same for years, so we know what it yields in terms of quality.

Solar companies experience variances usually because of shortcomings in their internal sales processes. Many company owners believe they have adequate staffing and processes set up to work leads but actually don’t.

In this case, we suggest that these companies use appointments rather than leads because there is less work to do and less that can go wrong at their end.

How profitable is buying leads from SolarReviews

For every $1 that a SolarReviews lead buyer spends on leads, they usually generate $6-8 of gross margin. Strangely enough, this ratio stays about the same regardless of whether you are a discounter (in which case you get a higher conversion rate but at a lower margin per job) or a premium system provider (in which case you get a lower conversion % but at a much higher margin). Here is the dashboard of a small lead buyer in California showing their lead spend and gross margin generated in a month (this is real data from September 2022).

You can run your own numbers on how profitable lead buying will be for you with this lead buying return calculator.

Appointment Products

SolarReviews has recently begun providing appointment products for companies without internal appointment-setting staff or a competitive dialing and CRM infrastructure to work leads effectively.

We sell exclusive and duo in-home pre-booked appointments.

We will only ever book a maximum of two in-home appointments because experience shows that as more appointments are booked, cancellation and no-show rates become unacceptably high.

We also sell pre-booked Zoom/Teams/phone appointments as either exclusive, duo, or trio appointments.

In-home appointments are approximately three times more expensive than leads because it typically takes three leads to set one in-home appointment. Zoom virtual appointments are generally two times the cost of a lead sold to the same number of solar companies.

Appointments are confirmed to both you and the consumer with text and email reminders.

When a consumer does not attend an appointment, either an in-home appointment or a virtual appointment, you will not be charged the appointment rate, but you will be charged the standard lead rate. This is because we still have to pay Google or Facebook for the traffic that generated the multiple leads, which we then followed up to create one appointment.

Without this, selling an appointment product based on buying traffic from major platforms would not be possible.

A few small companies set appointments using overseas call centers to call aged consumer data (in breach of TCPA rules), but SolarReviews does not do this. Appointments generated by such outbound cold calling methods fail at a much higher rate than SolarReviews appointments, both in terms of the consumer not showing up and contracts that are signed failing credit or being canceled by the customer.

Any lead buyer that has used SolarReviews for leads or appointments will tell you that the one stat where we kill all other competitors is the very low number of signed contracts that fail because of either failed credit or customer cancellation.

Other providers can sometimes get similar appointment set rates or even signed contract percentages, but no one can compete with the 90% signed contract to completed job ratio that SolarReviews enjoys. This is no accident; it is a result of honest editorial content, a high-quality estimator, and the high creditworthiness of our educated consumer base.

What you can expect from Solar Appointments

• Attendance rate: 60-80%
• Conversion from appointment to signed contract 20%-35% (depending on pricing and market)
• Conversion from signed contract to completed job: 90%
• Appointment to completed job: 18%-32%

SolarReviews as an outside sales channel

Our outside sales partnerships are the newest product in the SolarReviews suite of demand generation products for solar companies.

These partnerships suit companies that are better at installing jobs and servicing clients than selling jobs.

It is a great alternative or adjunct to working as an EPC contractor for large EPC platforms. Although the economics are similar in this case, SolarReviews agents represent themselves as being from your company and provide quotes to consumers in your company's name. This means that their efforts are growing your company's brand rather than marginalizing you as a faceless EPC contractor. The practical significance of this is that you can have a highly successful brand without the hassle or cost of being an expert in sales or setting up complex sales systems.

To make this work, SolarReviews hires only experienced solar salespeople with more than two years of related experience. To be eligible for us to act as an outside sales partner for your company, you must have been in business for at least three years, have appropriate licenses and insurance, agree to a background check for the owners of the company, and have quality reviews on at least one leading reviews site.