The industry, 2024 to now
Thirteen chapters on what happened to residential solar, and what is still standing. Watch it before you read anything else on this page.
Question 01
How many proposals are open right now?
You can get that number. It takes a minute in the CRM.
Question 02
Harder. You have a feeling about two of them, and the feeling has been wrong before.
Question 03
How would you know?
That is the one. A PDF gives nothing back. No opens, no time on page, no idea which number stopped them.
The answer
Send a recorded walkthrough of their roof, their usage and their numbers. Then watch who opened it, how far they got, and what they played again.
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Send a recorded walkthrough of their roof, their usage and their numbers. Then watch who opened it, how far they got, and what they played again.
The conditions
Nobody sold a $40,000 system in 2019 the way they will sell one in 2027. The porch got harder, the PDF stopped getting opened, and the homeowner started doing their research before you ever showed up. The method did not fail. The conditions moved.
Section 25D ended for residential systems installed after December 31, 2025. The price objection you used to answer with a tax credit now has to be answered by you, out loud, in the homeowner's own numbers.
Knock crews, marketplace fees and lead resellers all cost more than they did in 2022. You know your own cost per acquisition better than I do, and you know which direction it moved.
They read the guides, they collect three quotes, and they sit with it for a week or two. The kitchen table stopped being the place where a $40,000 decision actually gets made.
The idea for 2027
Every quote in that pile is a PDF.
A PDF cannot tell you anything.
Send the presentation, not the paperwork.
That is the whole thing. Nobody in your market is sending it, and the tracking that comes back turns your Monday morning call list into an order of operations. The rest of this page is how it is done, what is built with you, and how you will know it worked.
The 2027 pipeline
Here is what each one actually costs you.
Front end grind
Built the industry · 2015 to present
The approach
Reps walk territory and open cold with a scripted pitch, hoping to earn a sit-down before the door closes.
What the homeowner feels
Interrupted and guarded. They are deciding whether to trust you before you have finished a sentence, and most of that decision is not about your product.
What it costs you
High rep turnover, expensive territory saturation, and a cost per acquisition that climbs every season.
Back end chase
Still standard · 2021 to present
The approach
Email a 14-page technical proposal, then chase it with calls and texts until they answer or go quiet.
What the homeowner feels
Buried. They open a document full of kilowatt-hours and offset percentages, do not want to admit they are lost, and stop replying.
What it costs you
Reps burning hours on leads that already went cold, and margin given away as discounts to restart a stalled conversation.
The method
Built for 2027
The approach
A recorded walkthrough of their roof, their usage and their numbers, sent to their inbox and watched on their couch on their schedule. Every view is tracked, so you know who is ready before you pick up the phone.
TrackedWhat the homeowner feels
In control. They pause, rewind, pull in a spouse, and come back with real questions instead of an excuse to get off the phone.
What it costs you
One rep's afternoon instead of a canvassing crew. It is the system I ran as the single salesperson behind $2.5M+ in solar and storage.
What comes back
This is the part a PDF cannot do. Hold the button and watch one evening at #4417 in Phoenix, the top row of the board at the top of this page.
Four events, one evening. Ghosted until the clock reaches them.
The clock runs from 7:00 to 9:30 PM. What she did in those two and a half hours is the whole pitch.
Your rep opens Monday knowing this homeowner watched the battery section three times. That is not a cold call anymore. That is a conversation with a known question.
Any tool can hand you that timeline. Knowing what to do with it on Monday morning is the part we train.
Press and hold, or hold the space bar, to play a recorded evening of viewer activity.
The case study
March 2020, my sales team went to zero. There was no door to knock on and no kitchen table to sit at. So I recorded myself walking each homeowner through their own proposal. Their roof. Their usage. Their actual numbers. Then I sent it to their inbox instead of a PDF.
Two years later I was the only salesperson at a company that went from under a million dollars a year to more than two and a half. Two owners, one install crew, and me. In 2022 the manufacturer handed me the Enphase Platinum Installer award in person.
I am not going to tell you door knocking is dead. It built this industry. I am going to tell you what happened when I stopped.
2.5xAt least. Revenue in one year, same company, same market, one salesperson.
Where this goes next. That was one company, one operator, one market, and your market is not mine. So I am not handing you that number as a promise. I am going to write your baseline down in week zero, build the same system on your pipeline, and show you the movement in your own numbers before the quarter is out. That is how a company grows on purpose instead of on a good season.
What came back
These are the replies to walkthroughs I recorded. Not one of them is about a panel brand, a warranty, or a price. They are all about finally understanding the thing they were being asked to buy.
★★★★★
Best video overview ever.
Homeowner
★★★★★
I have never seen a proposal done this way before.
Homeowner
★★★★★
Completely blown away.
Homeowner
★★★★★
I stopped it and had my wife watch the video proposal. She watched it five times. We are ready to sign the contract.
Homeowner
Why it works
A homeowner can rewatch a video. Nobody rereads a PDF.
Watching someone explain your own roof is not the same as reading a spec sheet. The replay counts are the proof, and they come back to you by name.
★★★★★
No pressure. I could watch the video on my own time, at my convenience.
Homeowner
★★★★★
Brian, this truly made my investment worth it. I know more now about what I am buying and how my system works.
Homeowner
★★★★★
Truly the best way to market and sell. Sign me up.
Solar company owner
Run your own number
Same hours, four to ten times the reach.
A sit-down proposal costs a rep most of an afternoon. A recorded walkthrough costs them the length of the walkthrough. The gap is the whole argument.
Run the numbersMarketplace leads
Open the homeowner's side of a marketplace and your quote is sitting in a row with three others. She can compare price, panel brand, warranty length and a star rating. Every axis she can see is a number, so the lowest number wins by default.
The walkthrough adds the one axis nobody else sent. A person who explained her roof.
I ran this on marketplace leads and on leads we sourced ourselves. The marketplace lead is the one it helps most, because that is the buyer doing the most comparing. The two minute intro video and the email campaigns inside the program are written for exactly these lists.
There is also a book. The EnergySage Playbook is this argument at full length — 117 pages on response time, the walkthrough structure, the financing menu after the credit expired, and a 90-day rollout. $99, or take the free two minute audit first and find out whether you need it.
The program
Four weeks with your owner and your sales team. Your pipeline, your proposals, your numbers. Not a seminar and not a video library you never open. One solar company per state.
Week 01 2 days · 2 hours a day
Your baseline written down before anything changes, then the studio built and wired into the CRM you already run.
Week 02 2 days · 2 hours a day
Where a rep stops sending videos and starts reading them. Scoring, telemetry, and the dead leads worth waking up.
Week 03
Live fire on real deals, with the follow-up running itself behind your reps instead of depending on them.
Week 04
Your numbers against your own week zero baseline, with ownership in the room, then the assets that keep working after I am gone.
Eighteen phases across four weeks. The outline and the agreement itself are both in the portal, free, before you talk to anyone. The session-by-session curriculum opens the day you start. Open the portal.
Built and handed over with it
An email campaign that introduces the homeowner to the rep they are actually going to be working with, by name and on camera, before anyone talks price.
A short video built for first contact: the one that goes out to EnergySage leads and to the enquiries landing in your company inbox. Same video, both doors.
Every send reports back. Who opened it, how far they watched, what they replayed, and who clicked through. Your Monday list orders itself.
Short videos for the clients who want to run them on their own channels, cut from the material you are already recording.
Two sessions a week, two hours each. Sixteen hours live with your team. Owners in the room for weeks 1 and 4. One solar company per state, held for twelve months. Plus the recordings, and the campaigns above built and running before we finish.
Book the callMeasurement
Training that cannot be measured is a seminar. We write your numbers down before we start, then watch the leading indicators move first and the revenue follow. We compare you to you, not to somebody's industry average.
Week 0, before we start
Weeks 1 to 4
Day 30 to 60
Day 90 and beyond
Keyshould riseshould fallwritten down first
The arithmetic
This is not a promise about your close rate. It is a clock. A sit-down proposal costs a rep most of an afternoon once you count the drive. A recorded walkthrough costs them the length of the walkthrough. Move the sliders to your own numbers and watch the gap.
Drive time, parking and the reschedule are inside the first number. The second one is you, a screen and their proposal.
The one that proved it. The biggest single sale I ever put together came out of a recorded walkthrough. The year that system was running, the company took EnergySage Installer of the Year.
Straight answers
No. There is a piece of software involved and it is the cheap part. I will tell you exactly which one to get and how to set it up in week one. Reading what it sends back and running Monday morning off it is the part that is not for sale in a subscription.
Some will not. The four weeks are built so the first one who does gets a result the rest of the room can see. That is a much shorter argument than the one you are having now.
You do not need to. It is one rep's afternoon spent on the proposals already sitting in your pipeline, not a new channel to feed. Week one we scope it to the deals worth the recording.
Week one you will see open rates and watch time on proposals already in your pipeline. Close rate moves later, around day thirty to sixty. That is the honest order, and it is why we measure the leading indicators first.
Most companies do. Usually it is a screen recording with no structure, sent once, and nothing comes back from it. The four weeks are about the structure and the follow-up, not about learning to hit record.
Most owners do. The walkthrough is a screen recording of the homeowner's own proposal with your voice on it. Your face is optional, and when it is on it is a small circle in the corner.
The method does. The pacing changes, because a commercial buyer has a committee and a longer read, and the walkthrough has to survive being forwarded to someone who was not on any call. We adjust it on the call.
An owner who shows up, at least one rep who wants it, and access to the proposals you are already sending. That is the whole list.
That is exactly why we write your baseline down in week zero and split the comparison by lead source and season. If you cannot tell the difference afterwards, the measurement was built wrong.
Then you will know inside four weeks instead of four quarters, and you will have your own baseline numbers written down either way. Plenty of owners have never had those on paper. That is worth the time on its own.
Who is behind this
I started in solar in the door-to-door era, driving to houses and sitting at kitchen tables. When that stopped working I did not go looking for a better script. I changed what the homeowner got after I left.
Four years of recording walkthroughs later, I know which parts of it a sales team picks up in a week and which parts take a month. That is the whole reason the program is four weeks and not a weekend.
I do not sell solar anymore and I do not sell leads. I train the people who do, and I take a small number of companies at a time so the four weeks are actually mine to give.
One call
Twenty minutes. I will ask what your close rate is now and what a homeowner gets from you after you send a proposal. If the answer is a PDF, I will tell you the first thing I would change, whether or not you ever buy anything.
Pick a time
Thirty minutes on your calendar.
The times you see are the times I actually have. Choose one and it is booked, no back and forth.
Book the callOpens my calendar in a new tab.
Four weeks, your pipeline, your numbers.
Book the call