How Solar CRM Software Can Help in Any Season

You don’t need to run your solar roofing business the same way in every season, and solar software can help with that.

For example, you may find it’s more difficult to sell customers during their busy summer—or vice versa, your team may sell more when the days are longest and hottest. Or, you may have steady seasons year-round but find customer spending rises and falls during certain holidays or other calendar-based trends.

Whatever the factors creating ebbs and flows in your unique solar business, you may need to create more flexibility through new strategies and tools. 

Solar software features can help you pivot more quickly when adjusting tasks in your day-to-day business. That way, you can ride whatever waves are coming, and get the most revenue possible for your company. Here’s how.

1. Shift to Alternative Lines of Service

If your team is having trouble selling or installing smaller solar roofing jobs in the winter, try specializing in secondary services that complement your more seasonal services. 

For example, some solar companies handle not only solar panels but also battery backup and gap, which involves insulating attic space to make it more energy efficient.

You could also consider looking for less frequent but larger sales. One benefit of selling commercial jobs can be the ability to schedule installation a little further in the future, which can be a big benefit from a seasonal perspective.

Here’s an additional tip. Taking on different types of clients can come with a learning curve, and the right solar roofing software tool can make it easier to scale up. 

Look for a tool that has advanced features you can turn on from your administrator account without extra fees or hassles.

2. Guide Your Team

Your team becomes more effective as you leverage solar roofing software. In any challenge, the better the communication, the better the outcome. So when business gets more challenging during certain seasons, make sure you have communication teams that support your on-site and office employees.

By keeping the lines of communication not only open but simple and accessible, you’ll improve everything from task flows to record-keeping. 

For example, in our JobNimbus app, you can record call notes and send notice to a team member using a mention (typing the @ symbol followed by the person’s name). The note becomes part of a customer’s record. It’s just one way you can up your communication.

3. Make Every Hour Count

Many studies show that workers are most productive during daylight hours. In the winter, your full-time employees will work at least one-third or one-fourth of their eight- or 10-hour day in darkness! 

So, while it may sound like a small detail, sometimes improvement is all about the margins! Here are a few ways you can use a cloud-integrated calendar in a solar roofing software tool:

• Schedule work lunches. There it is, smack dab in the middle of that precious stretch of winter daylight: lunch! Consider scheduling lunches once a week where you offer training or other important meetings. Even if you spend a little on lunch, you’ll probably recapture it via significant productivity!
• Leverage shared calendars. Shared calendars can support your sales team and take the guesswork out of your sales workflow. That way, no one person is waiting for a notification. Your processes keep moving forward.
• Leverage shared Boards. Having a visual status board that shows where every customer or job is in the pipeline helps everyone know what to work on next. As a bonus, you can design those workflows however you like, so you can strategically move higher-level tasks to be done in daylight hours during winter months. It’s worth playing with!

4. Increase Automation

By automating a solar roofing software tool year-round, you’ll build space in your schedule for “nice-to-do’s” rather than packing it brim with “must-do’s.” You’ll create a larger chunk of time to play with as trends shift for your business.

Good solar roofing software leaves automation control in your hands. That way, you can make seasonal adjustments as needed right from your administrator-level account.

In other words, with the day-to-day tasks and other workflow details set and out-of-the-way, you can pivot with finesse. For example, as new solar technologies roll out, you can get on board with those that make sense to you because you’ll have more bandwidth to adopt those new products or methods.