it's All Around

Streamlining the Renewable Energy Sales Process

The complexity of the economic and technical factors, and the difficulty to model then present them to clients, is the greatest limiting factor to the adoption of renewable energy solutions by new customers.  There are three steps that a renewable energy sales and installation company can take to significantly increase their efficiency in this area and close more projects:

1. Develop a project model that encompasses all economic factors (such as the cost of materials, labor and incentive packages) and technical factors (design and installation factors from the engineering side).
2. Employ a software solution that allows you to analyze models based on specific project details and run bounded linear analyses to maximize and/or minimize factors that are important for that client.
3. Incorporate that modeling software into your proposal generation and client management workflow.

Economics and Technology and the Sales Process

A variety of economic factors including rebates, incentives, costs savings and inflation protection are the driving force in the vast majority of successful renewable energy projects.  The ability to quickly develop and adjust economic and technical models is the key to showing a client the specific factors that make them an ideal candidate and the broader scope of a proposed investment.  In order to do this, engineering and sales departments must work together to develop a two way model that will allow salespeople to adjust models without significant reengineering.

Selling renewable energy should be as simple as saying, “installing solution x will cost you this today, allow you to claim tax-rebate y, and produce $z of power each year, so…”  Unfortunately, it’s seldom clear upfront which economic factors will be most appealing to a client.  One client may be more interested in a quick ROI, while another may be looking for a maximized return over thirty years.  One may be extremely motivated by non-economic pressures while another may be more patient and want to wait for a specific incentive to reappear.  Some may be interested in maximizing the resale value of their installation while others may be interested selling back to the grid and focus on cost per kWh.

Each customer requires reforming the project model to maximize or minimize particular factors while setting constraints on others.  For example, “what’s the best ROI you can offer for a system that outputs at least 500 kW on a given rooftop that has to begin during the next six months?”   Without a coherent model that incorporates all of the technical and economic factors, this process can be extremely time consuming and costly.  Meanwhile, the client may be speaking to other companies or allocating their funds to other areas of their budget.

With a solid model and a software package to calculate it, a sales team could confidently answer this in a few moments.  Further, clients are often reluctant to give salespeople the full picture upfront, which means that a series of proposals, each designed to take into account a newly disclosed factor, are often required to close a single project.

Attaining and Keeping the Competitive Advantage

The ability to quickly issue and reissue proposals that directly address the specific wants and needs of your clients will give you the upper hand competitively and allow your team to reach out to more potential clients.

The first step is to create a sound operating model that describes your sales and installation process.  Sounds simple, but as with all things that should be easy, there are countless complexities.  A company’s model is shaped by everything from its relationships with vendors, to the geological and political landscape of the area to the skills and personalities of the team.  The real work in creating this model is the work of developing a clear, systematic and comprehensive understanding of your business.  The model should be organized into constants that will affect all projects, such as material and labor costs, and variable factors such as kWh, ROI and incentive packages.  You may also want to create different models for various customer types, such as commercial, residential, preferred, etc…

The second step is to implement a software modeling solution that will allow you to quickly analyze scenarios and produce client proposals.   At the outset of a potential project, the sales and engineering teams can use the tool as a central repository for all the information for the project.  For example, the sales team enters the max budget and other factors.  The engineering team inspects the site and determines that they have this much workable area and can support the following hardware options.  Once these baseline factors are entered, various scenarios can be run for the initial proposed project.  The sales team can then proceed to work with the client to refine the plan, providing multiple scenarios with complete projections with very little effort.  In situations where the engineering team would have to verify that a scenario is indeed doable, the information is clearly presented there for them to sign off upon.

The final step is to integrate the software solution into the proposal generating and client management workflow.  Clients react best to professional, branded proposals, that both clearly lay out the information in a simple narrative form and contain detailed appendices providing enough information to satisfy their diligence.  Your model should include many individual values with units as well as detailed tables that project production and economic factors out over the life of the system.  Copying and pasting these variables from a model generator into an office document is both time consuming and error prone.   Integration with you client management workflow will likewise save much time and prevent error for sales teams dealing with large lists of leads.

David Erwin
Partner, Powersimple LLC
Honorary Board Member, Solairo Energy
December, 2009