Sales Automation for Solar That Moves Deals Past the Paperwork Stage

A homeowner agrees to a five kilowatt system. The design is done, the price agreed, the customer enthusiastic. Then the file needs a property document, a recent electricity bill and a signature on the net metering application. Someone asks for them once, on a call, on a Thursday.

Nine weeks later the deal is still open. The customer has not said no. Nobody asked again in a way that named the missing item. Meanwhile another installer knocked on the door and started the same conversation from zero. This is the shape of most lost solar deals, and none of it is about price or technology.

The document collection chase comes first, because it unblocks revenue already sold. It names one pending item per message, repeats every two days, and escalates to a call task after the third attempt. Survey scheduling comes next: a booking confirmation, an evening-before reminder, and an access note about the terrace, the meter room and who must be present.

Then the proposal chase, counted from the day the design went out. Then financing follow-up on its own slower track for customers awaiting a loan sanction. Then commissioning-driven sequences: a thirty-day check-in, a first-billing-cycle follow- up that is the natural moment to ask for a referral, and annual cleaning reminders.

Three trigger types cover nearly everything. A stage change, such as entering documentation. A date field, such as survey date, submission date or commissioning date. And an absence, such as no activity for fourteen days, which catches the customer who quietly went cold. Entry filters on system size, property type and financing flag decide which sequence a record joins.

Stop conditions matter more here than in most industries, because a solar customer is usually mid-process rather than undecided. Receiving the document, a stage change, any reply or a manual pause must remove the record at once. Nothing is worse than a customer who sent the bill copy on Monday and gets three more requests for it.

Build the document collection sequence in week one. It is the least glamorous automation here and the only one that visibly moves stuck revenue within a fortnight. Add survey reminders next, since every aborted site visit costs a technician half a day. Add the proposal chase in month two, and service reminders once historical commissioning dates are clean.

Keep three things manual for good. Any feasibility judgement about a roof, because implying a site is suitable before the survey is a liability. Any generation or savings figure, which must come from the actual design. And any call with an installed customer whose output has dropped, where a scripted message reads as evasion.

Enquiry to survey, survey to proposal and proposal to advance are the obvious three. The one that matters most is a fourth: average days in documentation, split by pending item type. That single report names the real bottleneck and tells you whether to collect that document earlier. Then track referral share and the proportion of past installations under a cleaning contract.

Automation cannot shorten a discom approval, improve a module supply date or make a bad roof suitable. It removes the human failure on top of those delays: the document nobody chased, the survey nobody confirmed, the customer nobody updated. It is not design software or a monitoring platform, and it is only as good as the dates coordinators record.

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