Saraswati Stitch®contact@saraswatistitch.comIn residential solar, the installer who calls back first usually wins the job. But qualification is genuinely hard: roof orientation, shading, current bill, and homeowner-vs-renter all decide whether a lead is worth a truck roll. Most installers either chase everything and waste installer time, or respond slowly and lose the good leads to a faster competitor. The useful automation sits exactly on that qualification step.
Speed-to-lead decides the deal
Inbound solar leads go cold within the hour. A form that lands in an inbox someone checks twice a day is a lead handed to whoever answers faster.
Half the leads are not viable
Renters, heavily shaded roofs, and tiny electric bills will never pencil out. Sending an estimator to those addresses burns the one resource an installer cannot scale: qualified crew time.
Estimates require data the lead never gives you
A good first response needs a rough system size and payback, which depend on address, roof, and usage the homeowner did not put in the form.
How it works
- Instant qualification. The moment a lead submits, the system enriches the address (roof size and orientation from aerial data, sun hours by region) and asks two or three follow-up questions by text to fill the gaps, ownership and rough monthly bill.
- Rough sizing on the spot. From bill + roof + region it produces a ballpark system size and payback range, so the first message the homeowner gets is specific, not "a rep will contact you".
- Book only the viable. Leads that clear the threshold are offered real site-visit slots on the estimator’s calendar; the rest get an honest, polite "solar likely won’t pay off for you here", which protects your reputation and your crew’s time.
- Hand the rep a briefed lead. The estimator arrives with the roof data, usage, and sizing already in the CRM, so the visit is a conversation, not a discovery call.
Tools we reach for
- a mapping/solar-irradiance API
- Twilio (SMS qualification)
- the installer’s CRM (HubSpot / Pipedrive)
- a calendar-booking layer
What changes
Installers stop rolling trucks to dead leads and answer the good ones in minutes instead of hours, so the same crew closes more jobs from the same ad spend.