Why speed to lead changes solar sales performance

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April 22, 2025

08:11

Why speed to lead changes solar sales performance

Today we’re talking about speed to lead.

Not as a theory.
Not as a “nice to have”.

But as one of the biggest controllable levers in solar sales.

We have clients getting on the phone with up to 89% of the leads we generate.
We also have clients closing close to 20% of those leads.

That doesn’t happen unless they speak to people quickly — and consistently.

This is especially relevant for leads coming from Meta Ads, which are still dismissed far too often as low intent or poor quality. The reality looks very different when response time and follow-up behaviour are right.

Two things separate the best performers:
Speed to first call.
And volume of call attempts.

Neither costs money to improve.
Both compound everything else you’re doing.

This video is a short breakdown of what we’re seeing work across the board, and why speed to lead quietly dictates call rates, surveys, and closes.

For context, this video was originally recorded on 5 December 2024, views & strategies may have changed since.

Featuring

Jude Cornish

Chief Commercial Officer

Video transcript

Bing.

Hello, Mrs. Smith. I saw you were looking to help the environment and you inquired about one of our solar and battery quotes today. Yeah, I know. I know. Awfully quick, aren’t I? I’m like—I’m too trigger-happy on the phone, aren’t I? Yeah, I know. I know. How can I help?

That is how fast you should be dealing with your leads. Today we’re going to talk about speed to lead, and we’re talking about it because it has a huge impact on your lead-to-call rate, your overall survey rate, and your overall close rate as a result.

We have clients that are getting on the phone with as high as 89% of the leads we generate. Eighty-nine percent. We also have clients closing as high as almost 20% of the leads we generate. But that doesn’t happen if they don’t get on the phone with a very high proportion of those leads in the first place.

So how do they do it? How do they get on the phone with so many of the leads they generate—leads that are coming from Meta Ads, Facebook ads, which people often dismiss as unqualified or low quality? Two things.

First, they call the lead incredibly quickly—like I demonstrated with the TV remote. Incredibly quickly. The best performers often have one or more people solely dedicated to calling leads. There’s a great example from Alex Hormozi: a business hired someone for $60,000 a year—about £47,000—and their sole job was to call leads the second they came in. They had no other responsibilities. If there were no leads, they would literally sit there doing nothing.

That business was generating two or three leads a day, so this person’s entire job was to call two or three leads a day. The owner was effectively paying somewhere between £60 and £100 per call made, but they were closing 50% of the leads. Fifty percent. You can imagine how valuable that is. So the first key factor is speed to lead.

That’s why some clients have staff available from around 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. Some start calling at 8 a.m. to catch people before work. Some call on weekends, particularly Sundays, which can work very well. All of our clients have notifications when a lead comes in so they can act as quickly as possible.

The second factor is how many call attempts you make. You might call quickly and not get through—so what next? Our best clients will call up to six times over the first two days, then call once per day for the rest of the week or so. That matters because people are busy. Life gets in the way.

And if you truly believe you have something of great value to offer—which, as a solar installer or renewables provider, you absolutely do—then make the call attempts. Put yourself in the prospect’s shoes: maybe they’re at work or on another call, so they ignore the phone. They don’t recognise the number, and they don’t call back because it isn’t high on their priority list. Later, the phone rings when they’re in the car and they’ve got nothing else to do, so they pick up. That’s what happens when you make multiple call attempts at different times of the day.

People actually want to be called. If they’re putting their information into one of these ads—and the ad isn’t positioned in a misleading way—they’ve registered interest for a reason. It’s your job to reach them. It’s not their job to call you back. A lot of people get this wrong: they try one call, send a message, then wait and hope. They assume that if it’s a high-quality prospect, the prospect will call. But people are busy, and sometimes you have to interrupt them a little. If you’re generating leads properly with the right ads, they won’t mind, because they opted in for a reason in the first place.

So this is a quick video on speed to lead, because any installer can implement this for free. You can do it yourself, or hire someone, and it will massively increase your progression rates. If you increase your close rate, you’re only improving one metric. But if you increase your call-to-survey rate, you increase surveys and deals. If you increase your lead-to-call rate, you increase how many people you speak to, how many surveys you book, and how many deals you close.

It’s one of the most critical things you can improve. Even a 20% improvement could be huge—potentially doubling your business. That’s all for today’s episode.

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Put your solar business on steroids

We've been helping ambitious, reputable renewables companies dominate their competition since 2024.

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