Sign Solar Panel Installation Proposal Template Made Easy

Sign solar panel installation proposal template

greetings and welcome to the pitch a solar builder side project in which we connect you straight to PV system and service providers this is where we'll explore new ideas and chat awkwardly about their innovations so you don't have to the pitch today I think is a timely one this is the team that originally started the remote sales business of Sun Jemma T and they have now launched a new product called open solar is a suite of free tools to fully digitized solar installation business from phone or remote sales to design finance customer relationship management it's a pretty sweet suite of products and here to explain it is co-founder Andrew birch e birch hey Birchy hey thanks for the invite to join first I wanted to start with the intriguing aspect of open solar in that it's free can you I guess maybe just speak to how you made that possible yes Adam prior myself two co-founders Adam was the guy he invented remote solar design 13 years ago so and we sold 15,000 systems remote and online at some jeopardy got a lot of experience on how to build software to do remote sales and so Adam and I three years ago thought that we can have a big impact on the climate icon and the industry if we built a new tool that captured all those lessons learned created world-class software but instead of using it just ourselves and one company we made it available to everyone and then we had this wack morning we were in a shopping center and said the talking about revenue models and that can we're both kind of geeks and we looked at both extremes like we figured we could charge a lot of money for this because it's going to be we think the best software in the market and other extreme was free and we got really intrigued by the idea of free and then you ask the question why could we pay our bills because that would be amazing to make this free to everyone around the world because we have you know 10 years to have a planet to live on from co2 perspective so we came up with the idea of making it free to everyone single out white-label amazing software and the revenue model is we have partnerships with the hardware folks and other partners we pay monthly fees to exhibit their product in this digital environment so it's good for the Installer as well because they get to use all the collateral that the hardware folks would provide and that's how we pay the bills to make it free to the installers coded that's you know every you know really promoting this in the state's now because we'd love the solar industry it's been a quarter of my life you know all my friends work in the solar industry in the States and we think it's important that they can access a tool and I completely for free this saves them money and lets them do really professional remote sales the other there's a several very intriguing aspects of what open solar is from beginning to end and you know you kind of as part of the pitch is that it is an end-to-end proposition from a solar design and sales perspective so let's start at like the very beginning that front end can open solar be a part of generating leaves or finding new new customers or getting people into my sales design funnel it starts by having the ability on your own website and this is looking at the support page to show you how that form would look I would be created you put the embed the lead capture form on your insight so you're able to drive traffic through all the sort of classic online and local marketing tactics that you can to drive traffic to your eyeballs to your own website your own logo your own brand and from that capture leads digitally straight into your own branded CRM so the approach is if you can drive traffic efficiently and you're getting an immediate view of who's requested elite you have two full functionality to create stages prioritizations allocate sales people capture the customer information and then go into the project page and abroad data you can configure the actions required at any one point in the system and have them time-stamped so as you're pushing a customer through the process you can click whether a job is done or or has not been completed you can design the system you can add utility information all the product information you would need we've got a great partnership with the really great team in California from the utility API today to get the energy information in and take us all the way through to terminate with our partnership with Natron to generate the plan set even Co sale you can do all the infield stuff like you need and digitally get customers to send imagery to you so you can upload files pictures of service service boxes service entrance placements all sorts of things that come straight into the cloud here and then when you design a system and email it to the customer you get notified when the customer opens it up so there's a number of different approaches you can use in remote sales you can click on the button in that project zone and email them the design you've set and they will receive a link to the proposal you can configure this and standard or configure it projects and say what you want to save that customer when they open it the customer sees this lovely view of the multiple systems you've designed for that home all of this is branded obviously in the local installer the clients branding they can decide what numbers they want to show that you create numerous templates templates they can configure if they want to show more or less of this content but ultimately the consequent customer can see it email self-educate look what the system see what the system looks like see what it looks like at different sizes and costs this is the content area where our clients on the hardware side present the information it's got digital nice digital content that helps customers educate online in the remote environment with videos and product explanations that they can use you know in the comfort of to understand why certain panel or battery might be better than something else yeah all of that kind of digital collateral to educate then if we also have live chat night so if you have chat enabled as an installer you can do cool things like just put the link through so you can connect straight to them with a video link like we're doing right now so that guy gets through a lot of the the messiness of how do we set that conversation up in a digital environment so basically instead of the more traditional kind of static PDF here's your proposal or the several different options maybe I've designed for you this is a more interactive like poke around and so can the customer then I guess could you do both things where the customer is kind of on their own at their leisure kind of trying to understand this but then also it you have the ability to step in or have that scheduled to then walk them through it because I can see both being interesting that's exactly right so we've seen our our users are generally doing a bit of both and really kind of learning what works for them and for different clients and using all different aspects of this so yeah you can get a request designer system call or email the customer and set up an appointment and just set up a screen share in advance so then you send them this and you working it with them together and welcome through it there's obviously benefits to that from controlling their what the customer sees and helping them live you know understand the financials and you know what comes next but equally you know it's nice to send a very quick proposal I let them look at it at their own leisure and offer up the schedule chat in that or a live chat or you can see in the project zone when a user has viewed this so you've got a complete history of how long they've used it how often and when and so you can also use that to sort of try more of a following up tactic and of sales and then the really nice thing is you can be live with the customer and it's you know open solar we designed it fresh not a linear process to a PDF that you then send so I think you're seeing a lot of tools right now with PDF driven sales processes trying to get Abdul remote selling by showing them that online we came at it from a different perspective we really sent this around the digital proposal so that you can come on with the customer and if the customer says you know what and actually you know I I'd quite like to you know add add some panels on this side of the property or you know I'd like to add a battery to that or take a battery off one you can do that live with the customer and then go straight back to the digital proposal we're going to save this one and see that live with the customer in the digital zone so it's a very kind of a fight we like to think way of really engaging the customer helping them design the system themselves and solve their actual needs on the battery aspect I know that you know especially for solar installers who are maybe looking to add storage as a component of you know their business it's designing for storage is more difficult or more complex so when you say add a battery is that it are you does it is your system doing all of those complex situations too is there just like mainly focusing on you know backup we were born in Australia we started first in Australia before we started in the US and in Australia are you seeing a 15% 20% in many markets of systems now with storage because you don't have net metering so I'm the battery economics are actually really compelling because you could hide retail rate load with little celery so we've designed it to Matt do all the maths on the back end for battery so it's not just showing the customer how nice it is to have a battery and what the benefits are you can choose to include to configure the template or any individual proposal to show as much or as little data as you want but if you choose to show them all this information then yeah you can walk them through battery just discharging processes you know seasonal weekend with or without batteries what the math looks like it clearly all the financials and then in the control zone you can basically just decide you know in each template you can decide how you want to edit your your template so you can show more or less to the customer and reorient the flow of all the different content that we just looked at and really control into how you sell and what what numbers you like to show the customer so it's completely configurable as well if there are piecemeal ways that someone could use open solar if they wanted to yeah so we you can use as much or there's so much in this tool Adam and the development team I think of the weak and biased of course everything they're the best in the world and certainly the most experienced in the market and we've built this to do everything we know you need as a u.s. solar installer so he can do a lot of stuff but you can choose to just use the design tool you know in studio and present your your systems digitally you can still do you can do PDF as well so you know looking at an example here you can configure your PDF and all your brand with all your image and content so you can do all that in an open solar you can configure it with all your contracts so that it speaks to your CRM contracting with your T's and C's so you can have customers go all the way to digital signature and even credit card payments in in many markets so once you've once you do that in the project zone the nice thing about using one of the benefits of using the CRM to this full is it can then tie into your workflow so in the control zone you can also configure your workflow and that means that when a customer signs you can have you know stages set out and then we'll show you that the contracts been saying that what status of payments are so there are benefits to that and also you know the CRM itself like you can do filtered reports and ranking and prioritizing you can you know assign projects you can classify them prioritize them look at different stages so it does a lot of the stuff you would want from a CR but you can run a separate CRM if you want I'm just curious do you have because you've obviously been you know this has been live and running and rocking and rolling in Australia so you have a lot of examples of how this is gone can you maybe frame it for me of whether it's an anecdote or an average of the how much you shorten that end end process from lead through possible closing or maybe improve closing rates for sure so to speak to that experience we've seen and also just what we saw in the ten years before so I don't be very transparent so that firstly the cost the investment of this it's absolutely free and it's free forever that's the commitment that we made to the market when we started the cost is really just the investment of getting set up if you configure the tool how you want it and get your workflow set up you you get your logo and your branding your welcome messages your testimonials yeah your team trained and on-boarded into the and all of this is done in the control zone you know you could face you spend couple of hours to getting it really well set up once you've done that in studio you're designing a system in you know in really in in it's 10 to 15 minutes on average so it's get a lead designer system get it out the door that saves hours of time if you're doing physical face-to-face selling and design and and the design integration into this end-to-end journey saves you know literally full FTE like employees worth of cost now obviously most likely that means you can sell twice as much not half your employees but we've had amazing testimonials from them from an experience in Australia and now also in the states with photo selling you know 20 30 % more from just the conversions from a really slick proposal and capturing people quickly in the process and saving thousands of dollars of expenses per month on effects because they're more effective and more efficient and then of course saving you know up to $3,000 a user on software before you even think about getting off some of the other paid CRMs that some folks use on the design side on this what we're looking at right now where are we getting images from and are there like partnerships you have in place to I guess like like an ear mat for example I think they're a part of what you offer yeah exactly so there the partnership model which is you know we think it's on top of the software bar you think it's really really valuable to provide to every size of solar installer the tool kit of the scale of a scale business so what that means is it in the open solar product you can you can choose to upgrade to near map an organ solo which has these very beautiful oblique images and we're launching some really exciting and there's videos online can maybe show a link to and this if possible that shows you how you can do 3d designs in a 3d environment using digital surface map data and then show that show you the customer the the proposal and high res digital images the near map are really the world leaders in so you can yeah so you can partner through open solar to get access to all these kinds of tools I mentioned the partnership utility API so you can automatically get the data the utility usage data in which is also interval data what you think we're the only people to have integrated which is important for battery calculations and really accurate financial estimates and we've also got Natron so in the project zone when you've sold the customer and you've finished the design we've got a nice interface with Natron so you can choose to have that project delivered to you I will think is that the lowest cost in the market through that partnership to generate your plan set and then with all the hardware content we're adding now lots of partners we think of the next few weeks and months to have more of that digital content in the my energy zone so that you can show customers the nice videos and branded collateral which helps you sell more so we're really about you know partnering with all the best highest quality people in the industry so that you can sell more effectively and save as much cost as possible so I I guess my last question then after we've kind of gone from beginning to end here and poked around what what doesn't open solar do I mean there's got to be is there anything that I haven't asked you yet or something that maybe you're even still working on or yeah what we've just a nice - the market is we're launching this quarter the what we call or controller 3d and that will allow you to model these systems not just using obliques and top-down images but using this virtual world experience and you can be with a customer live it screen sharing on the phone looking at this virtual world experience of their home and paint panels on automatically get the the exact angle right like automatic shading calculations which to question is the piece that isn't live today and I can solid that we're delivering very ship very soon that will do automatic panel level shading and a really nice customer experience that you can then present to users and these you know beautiful high-res images if you know if you're an ear map user and you can show customers you know life over the phone and online what it looks like and what it feels like to the customer which is very engaging which helps conversions and sales well very cool thanks for walking us through it in the pitch today Berkey yeah not at all is to put one last piece in the pitch is all about digitizing your business today to survive curvy but also to reduce costs to increase your scalability we also need to digitize permitting which the industry is doing through the solar app consortium which open source started two years ago and is now just going live with National Renewable Energy Laboratory so if we can digitize our companies digitize permanent solar costs a dollar 30 in Australia for residential and it's a 20 percent penetration so for the US community that's what we got to do we got to get cost and scale up to 20% penetration in the next few years no arguments here all right well awesome the folk thanks to Birchy and thanks to all of you for checking out the video today we'll have more of these remote product snapshots coming your way so be sure to hit that subscribe button to keep tabs follow us on Twitter Facebook Linkedin read us the old fashioned way at solar builder mag comm you know or don't I'm not the boss of you but anyway thanks for checking us checking us out today until next time