So, you have successfully generated leads. Congratulations!
But, you are not done yet as out of many leads only a handful of them will become your customers. To help you successfully qualify solar leads, we will navigate you to some of the effective techniques that will help you increase your conversion rate in no time. Let’s get going!
No matter how sure your sales team is, not every lead will convert into a paying customer. That’s a hard fact.
Qualifying solar leads is a crucial part of the sales process and 61% of B2B marketers face difficulty in generating and qualifying high-quality leads. Furthermore, 67% of sales are lost due to failure to qualify leads properly.
Although lead generation is vital for every business, lead qualification helps you determine whether a particular lead is worth pursuing or not. This can save your most valuable asset i.e. time.
Being a ferociously competitive niche, wasting your money and efforts on the wrong solar leads are just not reasonable. If this prevails for longer, you will end up spending a lot of money and time which will only amplify your concerns.
After understanding all the dos and don’ts of solar lead generation, you need to work on customer persuasion to buy your solar services. To minimize your worries and qualify solar leads, you need to understand the entire process of lead qualification. So, let’s get started!
What is lead qualification?
Lead qualification is the systematic process of determining whether a lead will convert to a customer or not. It helps in finding and connecting with sales-ready leads quicker.
This evaluation is done based on willingness and financial ability to make a purchase. To get this estimation right and qualify solar leads, your sales team needs to gather all the information about your prospects through various lead generation processes including solar sale proposals.
Table of Contents
How does lead qualification work?
As already discussed, not all leads will become your customers. You need to segregate the right leads from inappropriate leads to qualify them. The entire lead qualification process involves scrutinizing incoming leads, segmenting them according to their potential, follow-ups, and much more to convert the prospects into customers.
Here, knowing the difference between qualified and unqualified leads greatly helps your sales team to qualify solar leads.
Qualified vs. Unqualified solar leads
Based on the position of the lead on the marketing funnel, they are divided into two groups i.e. qualified leads and unqualified leads.
- Qualified solar leads: These are the people who are aware of the benefits of solar energy. The marketing team gathers the list of qualified leads via blog posts, email campaigns, whitepapers, e-books, webinars, quizzes, etc.
- Unqualified solar leads: Unqualified solar leads are the people who are not enough nurtured to opt for solar installation. These prospects are considered unqualified due to reasons like being unsure about the solar system, finding your services high priced, having no interest in green energy, cannot afford solar panel installation, etc.
Once you have gathered the list of unqualified and qualified solar leads. The next step is listing qualified leads after excluding unqualified leads.
It might seem risky to let go of any kind of lead, but being in a solar business requires you to find as many new customers as possible who are interested in green energy.
If you ascertain that a particular lead is unlikely to convert, you should stop pursuing them. This saves a lot of your time and effort on poor leads which is good for your solar business.
Why it is important to qualify solar leads?
Solar lead qualification is necessary to determine whether the gathered solar leads list is interested in purchasing your products or not. Determining qualified prospects helps your sales team to make communication more precise and personalized. This process holds a lot of importance in qualifying solar leads as follows.
Talking to the right people saves time
Solar lead qualification helps you save a lot of time and effort on incorrect prospects. This process helps you connect with the right people who are interested in solar services and are ready to invest in the installation.
Offers personalization
Nurturing qualified leads offers personalized engagement as they receive relevant information about their interest. You can churn out 50% more sales-ready discussions after fostering qualified leads.
Boost revenue by improving closing rates
Working on qualified leads boosts revenue as it improves sales close rates. Make sure that your sales and marketing teams are aligned in the solar lead qualification process.
Check More-How a Reliable Solar Lead Source Can Reduce Your Cost Per Action
05 popular frameworks to qualify solar leads
To avoid wasting your time, effort, and money on unworthy leads, you need to understand all the lead qualification frameworks. Once you gain all the know-how of each framework, you can pick the most appropriate one. Here we go:
BANT (Budget, Authority, Needs, Timeline)
Introduced in the 1960s by IBM, BANT is a popular framework that fosters your lead generation efforts. In this framework, you need to answer the following questions to qualify solar leads:
- Budget: What is the budget of leads for the solar installation?
- Authority: Does a particular lead have the authority to make a decision or purchase a solar system?
- Need: How intense is the need of your prospects to go solar?
- Timeline: How sooner or later is a prospect going to make the solar purchase?
CHAMP (Challenges, Authority, Money, Prioritization)
CHAMP is opposite to what BANT frameworks say. This lead qualification framework focuses more on the prospective challenges rather than the solar purchase. Here are the following questions associated with the CHAMP framework.
- Challenges: What is the actual need of the lead and why they are not satisfied with their current solution?
- Authority: Does the lead has the authority to purchase the solar? If not, how the prospect with the buying authority can be reached?
- Money: Does the budget of your prospect align with the price of solar installation you offer?
- Prioritization: How soon will the prospect is going to act? Are they considering other solutions as well?
MEDDIC (Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Identify Pain, Champion)
Developed in the 1990s by the Sales MEDDIC Group, this lead qualification framework works best for pursuing complex processes like selling solar to companies and enterprises. It includes figuring out what customer is keen to get from your solar services. The associated questions in this lead qualification framework are:
- Metrics: How does purchasing a solar system impact the finances of both parties?
- Economic buyer: Who is creating the budget for the prospect’s company?
- Decision criteria: What things do the economic buyer require to know for approving the solar installation for the company?
- Decision process: What aspects do the economic buyer considers to approve the solar system?
- Identify pain: Which type of need does your solar services or products solve for your prospects?
- Champion: Who is the employee or person in the potential company that will help you with solar sales?
GPCTBA/C&I (Goals, Plans, Challenges, Timeline, Budget, Authority, Consequences and Implications)
Developed by Hubspot, the GPCTBA/C&I framework majorly focus on addressing changes in the prospect buying behavior. This framework tackles the modern buyer’s behavior who has enough knowledge about the solar products available on the internet. As the prospect is very informed about solar, to add value to your conversation, here is the list of information you want to gather from the digital era prospects:
- Goals: This step includes asking your prospects about their long and short-term objectives.
- Plans: Once you know the goals of your leads, find out what steps they took to attain them. Try gaging what worked or what didn’t, then make suggestions for improvements.
- Challenges: This is a very important step in this framework. It includes finding out the challenges and persuading leads to opt for the solutions they haven’t tried i.e. solar installation.
- Timeline: Knowing the period when your prospect is going to make the final purchase is very crucial. Whether they will buy solar services soon or right now, these leads should be on your priority list.
- Budget: Finding out their budget for solar purchases is crucial to qualify solar leads. Try asking appropriate questions to gauge their budget.
- Authority: In the BANT lead qualification framework, determining whether the prospect is a decision-maker or not held a lot of significance. However, GPCTBA/C&I tells that the prospect can give a thorough insight into the decision maker’s selection process.
- Consequences and implications: In this step of lead qualification, you will try finding out the lead’s idea of consequences or concerns if they purchase a solar system. You will share how green energy would affect their lives positively. Know their goals and show them how your services will allow attain them, like reducing their utility bills.
How to qualify solar leads effectively?
Nothing is more disappointing than following up with a prospect who is not interested in your services and doesn’t convert into a customer. Here are a few steps to qualify solar leads successfully:
Understand the lead profile
The lead qualification process is the most important method to push a prospect closer in the sales funnel. To qualify solar leads you need to work on your buyer profile before even beginning with the lead generation process. To create an ideal lead profile, you need to ask some questions:
- Who do you want to work with? For example, homeowners, companies, enterprises, or other commercial properties.
- What revenue do they make in a particular timeframe?
- What issues or challenges are they facing right now?
- What industry do they belong to?
- Whom you are targeting? Homeowners, businesses, managers, executives, or owners of the company.
To obtain the most qualified leads, your sales team needs to have in-depth knowledge about their target customers. Once you know the characteristics and traits of your ideal customer, you can generate a system that evaluates leads and entirely shift the focus of your resources to those leads who match the traits.
Using the above-mentioned details, you can create a buyer profile for your solar services with the help of your marketing and sales team. Based on the data, you can save a lot of time, money, and effort to qualify solar leads.
Check More-SEO for Solar Companies – Tested Step-by-Step Guide
Identify the difference between interest and intent
Once you have the buyer profile ready with you, utilize customer relationship management. Using CRM, you can identify and track the lead’s activities. You can segregate the leads that are worth pursuing. If someone is contacting you through forms, chat, or even leaving comments on your blog post, this means they have an interest in solar installation services.
If leads are visiting your product pages and querying about the price of solar solutions, this means they have the intent to make the purchase. Here, who has the high odds of converting into a customer? The person who has the intent to invest in the solar. Try labeling such leads on the basis of the interest and intent in the solar services and vouch accordingly. This will help you qualify solar leads more.
Make sure the lead is appropriate
Although using CRM software helps you find the qualify leads with a high scores, you cannot rely on technology entirely. You need to make sure that you are investing your money, efforts, and time in the correct lead. Otherwise, neither the sale will happen nor your hard work would pay off.
For example, if you are selling residential solar panels but the lead is the neighbor or colleague of the prospect, you should not conceive it as a waste. Instead, you can use these people as solar panel leads that will assist you in reaching the actual prospect or get in touch with the decision-maker in the house.
Pick the correct lead qualification framework
As already discussed in the previous section, there are a few important lead qualification frameworks that help you qualify solar leads. To get the best solar leads, you need to pick the right type of framework among BANT, CHAMP, MEDDIC, and GPCTBA/C&I.
Based on the selected framework you can generate smart questions to move the lead closer to conversion. The right lead qualification process brings you even nearer to earning a paying customer.
Get the vital information
If you are selling solar services to a company or business. Try finding out as much information as possible. You can visit the website of your prospective company. Learn their ability to make solar purchases and know their staff. You can vouch for one of their staff members to know their intention to invest in a solar system.
Concluding Thoughts
Generating solar leads is crucial for solar business but converting leads into paying customers holds absolute importance.
Buying solar leads is not the only option to gain quality solar leads. Learning all the techniques and frameworks helps you qualify solar leads. It aids the sales team in promoting your solar services in a more personalized manner and makes their efforts successful.
Connecting directly with the people who are already in the sales funnel have high odds of becoming your paying customer. This way you can improve your conversion rate and amplify your profits.
Always focus on two things i.e. providing the best service and finding new customers, this will help you make your solar business successful.
All the aforementioned methods will help you qualify solar leads and make huge revenue in a flash. Try them out and let us know which technique helped you the most.
Until then, Happy hunting!
