If you’ve been selling solar for any length of time you know that it’s hard work. It requires persistence, perseverance, and skills that range from technical and numbers to good people skills. There’s a lot of hard work that goes into being a solar pro, but you can also make a lot of money when selling solar. However, are you realizing the position that you want to be in and the work/life balance that you desire? This article will give you some things to think about as you plan your career in the solar industry.
There are countless stories about people working 14 to 16 hours a day, driving hours from home to door knock all day, and presenting to homeowners at night. You may have experienced that yourself. Others in the business get leads provided to them from their dealer but are on call at all hours of the day and night. They too are putting a lot of miles on their car. The question becomes, is this lifestyle sustainable long term?
Typical Ways to Try to Advance in Solar
One way to change this is to bring on new people and teach them about the solar business. If you build a team, you may no longer have to door-knock. And now you can get overrides on sales done by that team. There are 3 challenges to this solution, however. The first exists if you are paid in a redline compensation model. Any override you keep may have to come out of your salesperson’s pocket, so they aren’t going to make as much as you do when you sell a system. That could lead to the next challenge. You teach people what you know about being a solar pro and they end up going to find a better compensation deal somewhere else. Or thirdly, the people you train just don’t have the work ethic or they don’t want to wait until installation to get paid, or some other issue, and they quit.
You could of course try and land a management position with your dealer. The problem is that there are typically only so many of those positions to go around. Many times they end up going to people that aren’t necessarily the best performers but that are friends with upper management. Or, you could start your own solar company. This, of course, requires a lot of capital that you'd be putting at risk and it would do nothing to improve the work/life balance. In fact, it will most likely make it worse.
Maybe It's Time to Do Things Differently
So, what’s another solution for solar pros like you? What if you use your knowledge and experience but do it in a different type of solar business model like ours? The differences and benefits of our solar business model are listed below. However, because you learned the solar business one way, it may take you a bit to wrap your head around what we’re doing. Just keep in mind that Uber changed transportation, Vrbo & AirBnB changed hospitality, and Amazon changed the retail industry. What we’re doing is changing the solar industry. And we've designed it so a solar pro like you can use what they know to make far more money than in a traditional solar model.
Some of the Differences & Benefits
- Work from home. No more door-knocking or running leads. We have developed a warm market referral system that made us the top-producing team in Apricot Solar in our first 4 months. And that’s when we were just figuring it out.
- Sell yourself, train a team, and get in a position to get overrides based on the production of the team. Not because a buddy of the owner got the position.
- Use multi-million dollar technology to build designs and proposals and sell to homeowners in 29 states via Zoom. You are no longer restricted by geography. In fact, our goal is to be in all 50 states by the end of 2023.
- Provide each customer with a discounted or even free Vivant Net Zero alarm and smart home system that gets installed within a week of you closing a sale. This partnership has increased our installation rate to over 90%. How many of your present dealer’s sales are getting installed?
- Provide each of your customers with a 25-year production guarantee. If their system doesn’t produce what the contract says it will, it will get fixed, and they’ll get a check for any energy over normal that they had to buy from their electric company.
- Get paid with a compensation plan that is transparent and pays out 62% of the commission stack to the salesperson. And if the price needs to be lowered to beat the competition, everyone participates. The salesperson still gets 62%. The rest gets paid in overrides to people like you.
Our Compensation Plan
Get the Details of our Solar Sales Business Model
As a solar pro looking for a different way to advance their career, are you intrigued at all? If so, visit Solar Sales from Home right now. Read more details and watch our business overview video. If you like what you see you’ll be able to schedule a phone appointment to get your questions answered.