Happy Sunday everyone. Today I’m going to take you through how to create absolutely unbeatable solar proposals in minutes. This applies to both residential and commercial solar projects.

The goal here is to take you from something that looks like what’s on the left to something closer to what’s on the right—without your sales team spending hours every time a proposal needs to go out.

Let’s start with the options most people have today.

Option one: use the OpenSolar or EasyPV export.

This is what most installers do. The main benefit is speed. You already have to generate this document to design the system, so it feels logical to just send it straight to the customer. The data is correct, it’s up to date, and you know you haven’t accidentally left anything in from a previous proposal.

But there are some serious problems.

You look exactly the same as everyone else.

There are only three or four design tools that most installers are using, which means your proposal looks identical to two, three, or even four other quotes the customer receives. If you’ve invested heavily in your brand—and I’m working with a client right now who has a 78-page brand guidelines document—then all of that effort gets completely wiped out the moment you send a boilerplate OpenSolar proposal.

Up to that point, everything has been cohesive. The tone is right. The colours are right. The experience feels premium. Then suddenly the customer opens a document that’s just Arial font, a poorly aligned logo, and default spacing.

Even worse, they’re likely to receive multiple proposals from the exact same software. And what does that encourage them to do?

They skip straight to the price page.

Page 17. £80k. £90k. £107k.
Disregard. Disregard. Disregard.

And that’s a huge problem, because if you’d taken the time to explain why the £107k option is actually the best fit for them, they might have chosen it. But because everything looks identical, they’ve already made a decision before reading a word.

Beyond that, these proposals just don’t look very professional. They’re data-heavy. The charts aren’t attractive. And it’s surprising how many companies still use them without the software providers improving the presentation layer.

Customers feel like they’re just receiving an export from a system. They feel like a number. And the reality is, it’s incredibly easy to avoid that.

Option two: PowerPoint or Keynote.

We don’t recommend this either.

Yes, it’s more on brand, but it’s painfully time-consuming. One of our clients told us their proposal process was taking three hours per proposal and involved two people—one to handle the data and screenshots, another to make it look good.

That means proposals take hours, go through multiple people, and still get sent as a static file. You don’t even know if the customer opened it.

And this completely breaks down at any meaningful scale.

We had a client book surveys within 24 hours of turning ads on. One survey was booked at 9 p.m. If they were using a three-hour proposal process, they’d have been working until 1 a.m. just to prepare for the site visit. That’s not realistic.

Even at relatively low volume—say eight installs per month—you’re likely sending six to ten proposals. At three hours each, that’s 30 hours a week or 120 hours a month creating proposals, many of which won’t even be opened.

It doesn’t stack up.

There are also accessibility issues. Many customers open proposals on their phone. PDFs from OpenSolar or EasyPV are dense, text-heavy, and require constant pinch-to-zoom. For a demographic that often skews older, that’s a real issue. Some customers genuinely struggle to read them.

They tell themselves they’ll look later on a computer, then forget—and you never hear back. You assume the proposal wasn’t compelling, when in reality they just couldn’t read it.

On top of that, manual proposals are hard to scale, hard to automate, and prone to errors. Wrong panel counts. Old screenshots. Conflicting numbers. All things that kill trust.

So what do we actually recommend?

We recommend a tool called Gamma.

In fact, you’re looking at a Gamma right now. All of our presentations and documents are built in Gamma, including the one you’ll receive if you enter your email through the link on this post.

Gamma was one of the first tools to properly solve AI-assisted presentation creation. PowerPoint is trying to catch up, but it’s struggling under years of technical debt. Gamma moves fast, and it shows.

The first major benefit is that it’s 100% on brand, no matter who creates the document. You set the theme once—fonts, colours, headings, imagery, spacing, border radius—and every document follows it automatically.

This is incredibly powerful because it gives your team freedom without sacrificing quality. You can let people create proposals knowing they physically can’t ruin the design.

You then build a proposal template once and customise it per customer in minutes. Swapping images, editing charts, adjusting copy—it’s all frictionless. No right-clicking, no replacing images manually, no breaking layouts.

The editor is intentionally simple. If someone wants a timeline, they drag it in. If they want a chart, they edit the data directly—no Excel required. That intentional restriction is what makes it scalable. PowerPoint gives too much freedom, and over time, decks deteriorate. Gamma prevents that.

But here’s where it gets really interesting.

You can publish these proposals to a custom domain, so they behave like a website rather than a file.

Instead of emailing a PDF, you send a personalised link that works perfectly on any device. Text resizes automatically. No pinch-to-zoom. No downloads.

You can even personalise the URL—using the customer’s name or address. To most customers, it feels like you’ve built a private web page just for them. And that leaves a massive impression.

Even better, you get analytics.

You can see if they opened the proposal.
Which sections they viewed.
How long they spent on each part.

No awkward follow-up emails asking if they’ve “seen slide 17.” You already know.

Over time, this data becomes invaluable. You learn which sections people care about, what they skip, and what actually influences decisions.

For larger teams, Gamma also includes permissions, version history, folders, and organisation. It’s built for scale.

You can also enable comments, allowing prospects to ask questions on specific sections. We’ve tested this. It can be useful, but it can also encourage over-analysis, so it’s something to use carefully.

Finally, for installers doing 20+ installs per month, anything manual should set off alarm bells.

There is a middle ground.

You can automate the creation of advanced PowerPoint or Google Slides proposals using tools like Make.com, pulling data directly from OpenSolar or EasyPV into a templated deck with variables. It’s complex, highly custom, and expensive—likely £10k or more—but at that scale, a 10% increase in close rate more than justifies it.

If you want to explore that, drop me a message.

If you want access to this Gamma so you can see how it works behind the scenes, click the link on this post and enter your email.

And if you want the implementation of everything I’ve shown, continue through that same link. You’ll answer a few questions about your business, and if you’re qualified, you’ll be able to book a call with me.

Have a great rest of the weekend, and I’ll see you in the next one.