Why solar ROI should be shown before the quote

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January 7, 2025

10:56

Why solar ROI should be shown before the quote

This was filmed early.

Finished uploading last night’s content late, ran at 5am, and sat back down by 6:30am to prep this.

Today’s topic is solar ROI — and why most installers wait far too long to show it.

Solar has one of the clearest, most chartable financial outcomes of any home improvement.
And yet, most customers only see their return mapped out after a survey.

We’ve found that when people see savings earlier — visually, clearly, and credibly — everything downstream gets easier. More surveys booked. More quotes sent. Higher close rates.

In this video I walk through how we showcase ROI across our client websites, why interactive charts outperform almost everything else for engagement, and how this builds trust long before a proposal ever lands.

No promises.
No exaggeration.

Just showing the maths properly, sooner.

For context, this video was originally recorded on 4 January 2025, views & strategies may have changed since.

Featuring

Jude Cornish

Chief Commercial Officer

Video transcript

Good morning. We are back. Finished uploading last night’s content at 11:30 p.m., went for a 5:00 a.m. run, and I have now finished preparing the content for today’s video by 6:30 a.m. What a life.

There is nothing that will stop me from making the best solar marketing content in the entire world. This is my one mission. I will complete this mission if it kills me.

Okay, so today we’re going to talk about showcasing solar return on investment on your website.

One of the absolute standout features of all of our client websites is the way we showcase the results they’re able to achieve for their customers. Solar is a great avenue for this because there is such a tangible, financially chartable result, and the forecasts are typically incredibly accurate because of all the technology that goes into it — shading and everything else.

So we can expedite the customer journey and bring the proposal stage much sooner. If you think about it, quite often with a lot of solar companies, the first time someone actually sees a return on investment charted out from that company is when they receive their quote. If people see that far earlier, do you think you’d be able to send out more quotes and do more surveys? You probably would.

There are a lot of ways you can do this, but we’ve found one method to be the best for us. We use a tool called Graphy. We use their charts on every single solar website to demonstrate savings over time.

Charts help people visualize numbers — especially when there are a lot of numbers — because a chart can have 100 data points and it just looks like one line. Whereas if you put that into a table, all of a sudden you’ve got to read through and try to make sense of 100 different data points across four columns.

Here are a few examples: you’ve got a commercial solar return on investment, you’ve got a residential solar return on investment, but you can also use it to chart other data.

And by the way, as soon as some of these clients have online system monitoring, we’re going to be plotting actual savings against forecasted savings as well. That’s where this is going to come into its own. It’s going to be an absolute game-changer because even if actual savings are ever so slightly below forecasted savings — which in the vast majority of cases isn’t true — even if that is the case, it shows the company is willing to stand behind their forecast and be transparent about the results their customers are actually getting. Very, very few companies are doing that.

You can also use it to showcase other important data. This is a chart that showcases energy price volatility in the UK over the last 20 or so years. And the really nice thing it illustrates — even though energy prices have come down in recent months — is how volatile energy prices have become, like up 224% versus the year before.

By the way, all these charts are 100% interactive. You can scroll along and see month-to-month change. You can even hide some of the lines. You can use it however you wish. It’s fantastic.

We also have user behavior testing on a lot of our websites through a tool called PostHog. With that, we can see what people are actually clicking on and engaging with, and these charts outperform pretty much anything else.

Even on mobile devices, you will see people literally tap and hold, scan from left to right, stop and go, “Okay, interesting,” then carry on. They’ll go the entire way through. They will literally watch the return on investment unfold over the 25-year period. It’s incredible to watch.

Back to what I was saying about this chart: it showcases just how volatile energy prices have become, outside of the recent time where energy prices have come down.

Another example: average hourly power usage in the UK — to show the concept of exporting during busy times and importing during the quiet times in the morning. Octopus Flux rates — you can plot out the different prices per kilowatt hour across the day by the hour.

This tool you’re seeing all these charts in — Graphy — is beautiful, interactive, loads fast, is accessible on various devices, and gets very high user engagement, as I mentioned.

I’d highly recommend checking it out.

You also don’t have to limit this to just your website. You can send a direct link to any one of these charts. You can literally send someone the link.

So you could be in a sales discussion and someone asks, “How do Octopus Flux rates work?” Or someone asks, “What’s a typical ROI for a three-bed house like mine?” Ideally you’d have a case study on your website that you send them. But if you don’t have that yet, you could pull the ROI from a good proposal, run that proposal through GPT, get it to give you the table of savings by year, plug that into Google Sheets, plug that into Graphy, and you’ve got a really nice chart mapping out the ROI someone could expect.

At that point, you’ve basically booked a survey. You send someone something like that and they’re going to be so impressed.

And then obviously, you put them into your actual proposals as well. We’ve spoken before about using a tool called Gamma to create your proposals if you’re operating at a smaller volume. You can embed these charts, and people can click in and interact, which is super useful.

If you want me to do a video on how to use Graphy to create these charts, let me know — but it’s very simple. You can probably figure it out yourself.

If you want a copy of this document, enter your email address into the link below. And if you want the implementation of everything that we talk about — we’ll come in, build out the website, collect all your case studies — basically all we need is the system design document and the quote. We’ll run that through a load of our tools and generate as many case study pages as you could ever want, with these charts showcasing your customers’ results and increasing your sales close rate.

That’s what it comes down to: increasing your close rate and increasing the amount of demand you’re getting through any of your digital touch points. That’s what we do.

So yeah, just carry on that same link. You’re going to be asked a few more questions, and that will qualify you to work with us.

Awesome. I will catch you in the next one.

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