The CRM for solar installers with a 90-day sales cycle
Proposal, site survey, financing and permitting as stages, with a cadence that keeps the homeowner warm for months.
- Unlimited seats
- Your own database
- AI waits for your approval
Solar is the only trade on this site where the deal can die twice after the customer has said yes: once at financing, and once in the months between signature and permission to operate. A pipeline that stops at Sold tells you nothing about either. This page is about building one that runs the whole way to the meter being switched on, and about the follow-up that keeps a homeowner from cancelling while they wait.
A quarter at a residential installer
Three things every sales manager recognises, and what gets configured for each.
Bought leads go cold inside a week
A lead from an aggregator has been sold to more than one company and is worth the most in the first hour. Two days later it is a stranger who is annoyed with everybody. Configure the inbound webhook so the lead is a record the moment it arrives, with an owner, an escalation task, and a day one, three and seven cadence.
Proposals are sent and then silence
The design goes out, the homeowner opens it twice, and the rep has moved on to the next appointment. Configure Proposal sent as a stage with a follow-up cadence over several weeks, so the second and third conversations happen on a schedule rather than when the pipeline gets thin.
Signed jobs stall in permitting and nobody calls
Between contract and switch-on sit the site survey, the structural review, the permit and the utility interconnection, and each is a wait the customer experiences as being ignored. Configure the post-sale stages with an update touch on each move, so a customer waiting eleven weeks hears from you three times.
The cancellation window is the number nobody puts in the CRM
Most trades measure a pipeline to the sale. In residential solar the sale is roughly the halfway point, because a signed contract cancelled during permitting costs more than a lead that never converted: you have paid for the design, the survey and the commission.
That makes post-sale stages part of the sales pipeline rather than an operations concern. Site survey, structural or engineering review, financing approval, permit submitted, permit approved, installed, inspection, interconnection, permission to operate. Each is a stage with a date and an owner, and the moves are what trigger the customer update. Nobody cancels because a permit office is slow. They cancel because for six weeks nobody told them anything.
Financing deserves its own stage for the same reason. An approval that comes back short, or a homeowner whose credit changes between signature and install, kills the deal at a point when everyone has stopped watching it. A stage with an expiry date on the approval makes that visible while there is still time to restructure the offer.
What we configure for you
A working setup for a residential solar installer, inside the first 14 days.
- 1
Pipeline stages
One long pipeline rather than two short ones: Lead, Contacted, Appointment set, Proposal sent, Financing approved, Signed, Site survey, Permit submitted, Permit approved, Installed, Interconnection, Permission to operate, with a cancelled stage carrying a reason.
- 2
Channels
Your mailbox connected over IMAP, aggregator and web leads posting to the inbound webhook with the source and the lead cost recorded, Calendly appointments landing as meetings, and the LinkedIn queue for the roofer and builder referral side.
- 3
Cadences
A day one, three and seven speed cadence on new leads, a proposal follow-up over several weeks, a milestone update sequence on the post-sale stages, and a referral cadence that fires once a system is switched on and the customer is actually happy.
- 4
Agent policy
The Inbox agent set to review, so it drafts a status update or an appointment reply and a person approves it. Guardrails cap touches per contact at three days apart and hold sends to business hours, which matters when your leads are consumers.
- 5
Knowledge-base voice
Your equipment, your warranty terms, your finance partners, your service area, your typical timeline by jurisdiction and your licence line loaded as knowledge, so no draft states a saving, a payback period or an incentive you did not authorise.
Your stack, and what sits beside it
The design tools produce the proposal. We run the pipeline it moves through.
| What you run | What it keeps | What SalesCrew adds |
|---|---|---|
| Aurora Solar | Remote shading analysis, system design, production modelling, the proposal itself | The pipeline the proposal moves through, and the follow-up after it is sent |
| OpenSolar | Design, proposal and integrated financing options | Milestone stages after signature and the update cadence that stops cancellations |
| SolarNexus | Project and workflow management for installers | The sales pipeline in front of it, plus cold and referral outbound |
| Your financing partners | Credit decisions, dealer terms, loan documents | Nothing. We record that a stage was reached, never the credit decision behind it |
| Lead aggregators | The leads you buy and their delivery | The lead lands with its source and its cost, so cost per installed system by source is a query |
| Your electrician and roofing partners | The work and the referrals | Partner contacts with a cadence, so referral sources are worked rather than remembered |
These connections run through webhooks, CSV import and the API. There is no native Aurora or OpenSolar app listing, and we would rather say that plainly than call it an integration it is not.
Purchased leads are where this industry gets into trouble
When a solar-specific platform is the better choice
A configurable CRM (SalesCrew)
- Stages that run all the way to permission to operate, so a stalled job is visible before it cancels
- Long cadences that keep a homeowner warm through months of waiting, pausing on any reply
- Lead source and lead cost on every record, so cost per installed system by source is a query
- Unlimited seats, and one Postgres database per company you can dump whenever you want
- No design tool, no shading analysis, no production modelling, and no proposal generation
- No native Aurora or OpenSolar connector — webhooks and CSV only
- Speed-to-lead SMS is the single most valuable thing for bought leads, and it is on the roadmap
- New product with no solar customers yet and no third-party reviews
The solar platform (Aurora, OpenSolar, SolarNexus)
- Design, production estimates and a proposal a homeowner can act on, which is the core of the sale
- Financing options presented inside the proposal itself
- Workflow built around the permitting and installation reality of this trade
- Vendors who understand utility interconnection and incentive programmes
- Follow-up on a sent proposal is usually a task rather than a cadence that runs and stops on a reply
- Cold and referral outbound is not what a design platform is for
- Per-seat pricing across a sales team that turns over quickly
- Your pipeline data lives in their system, and export is a report rather than a database dump
Speed to lead, and the honest state of it here
No trade on this site depends on the first sixty seconds more than this one. A purchased lead is often sold to several installers at once, so the company that makes contact first is frequently the company that sets the appointment, and the rest are calling someone who has already booked with a competitor.
Today SalesCrew creates the lead the moment the webhook fires, records the source and cost, assigns an owner, raises an escalation task if nobody has touched it, and drafts the first email for a person to approve. The day one, three and seven cadence starts on its own.
What is not here yet is the automatic text within a minute of the lead arriving, and for this trade that is the sharpest gap on the page. It sits in the phone and speed-to-lead pack on the roadmap, along with numbers, inbound routing, missed-call text-back and appointment reminders that send. If instant SMS on bought leads is the reason you are shopping today, buy something that does it now, and look at this again when that pack ships.
There is a second call pattern worth designing for, and it is the quiet one. Customers in permitting call to ask where their system is, and every one of those calls is a warning sign that your update cadence is not running.
Where this gets used
Three jobs an installer does every week, described as mechanism.
Working a bought lead on day one
The aggregator posts to the inbound webhook and the lead exists immediately with its source and cost. An owner is assigned, an escalation task fires if it goes untouched, and the day one, three and seven cadence runs until the homeowner replies.
Keeping a signed customer calm through permitting
Each post-sale stage move triggers the next update in the milestone cadence. The Inbox agent drafts it from the stage and your knowledge base, a person approves it, and the customer hears from you at week two, five and eight rather than not at all.
Asking for the referral at switch-on
Reaching permission to operate puts the customer into a referral cadence, which is the one week of the whole process when a homeowner is genuinely delighted. Replies land in the shared inbox and every touch is logged against the record.
What sales managers ask first
- We buy leads. Does that get us in trouble here?
- It can, and not because of the software. A homeowner who filled in a form on a comparison site has consented to something, and whether that covers your company calling and texting them depends on the disclosure they saw and on records the vendor holds. Get the consent evidence in writing before you buy. SalesCrew records the source on every lead, enforces suppression and opt-out, and has DNC scrub at audience freeze and a consent gate on call start on the roadmap. The consent is yours to prove. This is not legal advice.
- Can it text a new lead within a minute?
- Not yet, and this is the most important limitation on this page for an installer buying purchased leads. Two-way SMS and the speed-to-lead auto-reply are in the phone pack on the roadmap. Today the lead is created the instant the webhook fires, the owner and escalation task exist immediately, and the first email goes out drafted and approved. If instant SMS is your buying reason, we would rather you knew that now.
- Our cycle is 90 days or more. Will anyone still be following up in month three?
- That is what cadences are for. A proposal follow-up over several weeks and a milestone update sequence through permitting both run on a schedule and both stop the moment the customer replies. Suppression is checked when an audience is frozen and again at send, so nobody who opted out is contacted by a sequence that started before they did.
- Does it connect to Aurora or OpenSolar?
- Not natively. The mechanism is webhooks, CSV import and the API, and we say that rather than claiming a connector we do not have. In practice the design tool produces the proposal and posts the event, and SalesCrew holds the stage and runs the follow-up. Design and production modelling stay where they are; we are not building a design tool.
- How do we handle dealer fees and pricing in the pipeline?
- As deal values and fields you configure, not as anything this product calculates. SalesCrew does not price a system, model a payback period or compute a saving, and no draft will state one unless you put it in your knowledge base. Numbers about a homeowner's future bill are exactly the claims that get installers into trouble.
- What does it cost, and what happens if we leave?
- Core is $299 a month with unlimited seats, Local is $499, Outbound is $699 and Agency is $1,200. An installer buying leads at volume usually wants Outbound for the sender pool and the campaign agent. The trial is 14 days and a card is required to start it. If you leave, you take a full Postgres dump plus CSVs, because your company's instance is a separate project. It goes read-only with export available, and a person deprovisions it after 90 days.
Which tier fits a solar installer
Outbound if you buy leads at volume. Local when the speed-to-lead pack ships.
Outbound at $699 a month adds the sender pool, the Instantly send provider and the campaign agent to everything in Core, which is what an installer running paid and cold volume needs. Core at $299 covers the pipeline, the shared inbox, cadences and the data bank with unlimited seats. Local at $499 is the phone, SMS and speed-to-lead tier and ships with the roadmap pack described above, which for this trade is the one worth watching.
Related
Start with the proposals that went quiet in month two
Import last quarter's unsold designs and your stalled permits, and watch both cadences line up in review.