The Solar Sales Leap: Stop Knocking on Doors, Cold Calling, and Buying Leads and Start Using the Internet to Grow Your Solar Energy Business

"In the rapidly changing PV industry, The Solar Sales Leap is a must-read for anyone involved in the task of marketing solar power to residential homeowners. Curren summarizes here what many PV installers are failing to recognize when trying to capture the attention of a qualified residential solar power prospect.”-- Joe Sadonis, Solar Consultant, Paradise Clean Energy

The Solar Sales Leap will help anyone who works in marketing, sales, or management at a residential or commercial solar contractor to sell more solar with the powerful new tools of online outreach.

These days, even while solar panels are getting cheaper and cheaper, the cost of acquiring a new solar customer remains high — around $3,000 on average for a residential installation, according to GTM Research. This raises the price of installations and cuts into the profit of solar installers.

If solar sales and marketing was effective it would be cheaper and easier to get a new solar customer. But traditional tactics, most of which have been used for decades, from door-knocking to cold calling to direct mail, don’t work well anymore. In some cases, by destroying consumer trust, outdated outreach can backfire for solar sales.

Why? Blame it on the Internet.

No Patience for Cold Calls and Door-to-Door Sales

Suffering from an overload of information through phones and computers, not to mention cable TV and satellite radio, the average American consumer today gets thousands of marketing messages a day. That’s why more and more people are blocking ads on their computers and on their phones. Busy consumers have even less patience for solar telemarketers or door knockers than they do for ads.

That’s why today, people are not just blocking the ads. Potential solar buyers are also hanging up on the cold callers, slamming the door on the canvassers, and tossing out the direct mail unread. And that means lost sales for solar installers.

Pushy marketing tactics create distrust for the solar industry. And that distrust is fanned by monopoly electric utilities who use stories of solar scams spread around the news media and online to throw mud on the rooftop solar industry. As scare stories spread they'll create distrust and make homeowners and commercial property owners think twice about working directly with solar installers.

The Solar Sales Leap is a practical guide to help solar installers survive and thrive in today’s market by using the power of the Internet to build trust with homeowners and commercial property owners.

The book is also a manifesto calling for the industry to remove the biggest roadblock to solar’s growth by bringing the industry’s marketing out of the 1970s into the 21st century.

Different than Other Books on Solar Marketing and Sales

While there have been books published previously on solar sales and marketing, The Solar Sales Leap is the first book to introduce Internet marketing to solar companies.

It’s a detailed guide to help solar installers make the transition online with concrete advice to create content they can use to establish themselves as trusted advisors rather than sales bullies. The book covers such topics as:

• How all marketing today has become Internet marketing
• Why going online is much more than getting a Facebook page or putting up a website — it’s a change of mindset
• The secrets to building a website that will generate solar leads online
• Why solar installers need to distinguish themselves from competitors in order to make sales
• Blogging as the secret weapon to build a successful solar brand

An experienced commercial solar sales rep, Erik Curren is also a veteran of Internet marketing with more than 20 years experience helping companies reach customers more effectively online. In 2009 Erik founded the Curren Media Group with his wife Lindsay. Today the agency's mission is to make online marketing techniques from other industries available to solar companies through customized programs to generate sales leads and build strong solar brands. Erik lives in Staunton, Virginia with wife Lindsay and their two college-aged daughters. Erik has been elected twice to Staunton's city council, he's spearheaded an effort to bring more solar power to the city and he also serves on several local and statewide boards in business, community development, non-profits, and the arts. In his off hours, Erik teaches writing at the college level, reads everything he can on the American Revolution, brews beer at home, does "primal workouts," and is often seen around town wielding a scythe in the local community garden ("less noise, better abs workout"). Erik considers it his personal mission to help solar companies put PV panels on as many homes and businesses as possible to make sure that the coming clean technology revolution delivers power to the people and not just to big corporations and electric utilities. A champion of distributed generation, Erik believes that helping families, communities and businesses to make their own clean power is the best way to create a 21st-century energy system while gaining the most benefit from solar power to create jobs and help protect the environment. Erik is now writing a second book on solar, The Solar Patriot: A Citizen's Guide to Helping America Win Clean Energy Independence. He expects to publish the book in the fall of 2017.