Solar Companies — Supercharge Your Lead Generation & Digital Marketing in 2022

If you are relying on cold emails, cold calls, referrals, or paid ads to sell your product & service, then you will fall short of your sales goals in 2022.

Before I share with you how to supercharge your digital marketing strategy for the new year, I first need to go over methods you’ve tried or plan on trying and why they’re not the most effective ways to generate high quality B2B leads.

Cold Calling

Cold calling is how I got started in sales over a decade ago. Before the rise of social media, it was quite effective.

Today, businesses lines?&?people’s cell phones have spam filters, spam blockers, and caller ID notifications. Cell phone companies also know when you’re using your phone cold call. They will mark your number as “Potential Spam” on the caller ID for the end user.

Beyond that, it leaves a bad taste in the mouth of potential clients. You called them out of the blue representing a company. If you aren’t a fantastic cold caller, you’ll annoy them and lose any possibility of selling them your product & service in the future.

Then there’s list building. How can you put together a hyper targeted list of decision makers that include an accurate number? You may purchase a zoominfo license, but that gets expensive. You can manually search for companies in your area, but that will take forever. You can spend more time google companies that sell data & lists. It’s time consuming and ineffective.

Ultimately, cold calling is not an effective way to generate new business anymore.

Cold Emailing

Cold emailing is a common tactic my clients used before working with me. Purchase a list of emails from zoominfo or elsewhere, use mailchimp or a similar service to automate the process of sending emails, then let it run while managing the *crickets* responses.

The problem here is twofold. On one hand, you want to automate the email prospecting to save time. This means non personalized & generic emails to hopeful decision makers. The typical response rate is less than 1%. On the other hand, you may want to personalize the emails. While an effective email campaign can increase response rate, it will become a manual (and daunting) task. You should be spending your time on calls with decision makers closing deals, not crafting emails.

What about paid ads?

Your friends over in the resi space run ads on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Google, and YouTube to generate leads. Can this work for you?

Residential solar companies are looking for homeowners. That means they need an effective Business-To-Consumer (B2C) lead gen strategy. Homeowners aren’t difficult to find on Facebook. Running ads is one of the ways large successful companies like Sunrun, Better Earth, and Tesla Solar grow.

Being on the B2B side of the solar space however, you need to connect with decision makers in the geolocation and industries you’d like to target. You need an effective Business-To-Business lead generation strategy. Is it possible to run ads to find B2B leads? Yes.

Is it an effective use of your time and money? Probably not.

If you try running Google ads, you’re assuming that decision makers at, let’s say a solar company or manufacturing facility are searching for renewable solutions. It’s probably not on their radar. If you try Facebook ads, you can try targeting an area that has, say a lot of manufacturing facilities in the area, but what odds you’ll connect with somebody who can greenlight a commercial project?

If Meta (Facebook) is the king of B2C, then LinkedIn is the king of B2B.

LinkedIn is the?worlds largest professional network on the internet.

LinkedIn is quickly approaching one billion users. A feat only achieved by Meta. The United States has over 178 million active users. There are roughly 258 million adults 18 and older in the U.S. which means about 70% of American adults are on LinkedIn!

Why should this be exciting to you?

If you’re a C&I solar or roofing company that means there are millions of professionals that own or work for businesses you can sell your product & service to!

If you’re a utility scale solar company, that means theres thousands, if not millions, of state and local government entities, counties, cities, and more you can find.

If you sell to other solar companies then there are over 440,000 individuals in America on LinkedIn (I just checked)

What’s even better is that, unlike the methods mentioned earlier in this article, you don’t have to solicite people to earn their business! On LinkedIn somebody has to accept your connection request in order for you to send them multiple messages. If a prospect does not wish to connect with you, they can simply decline your request. But if they accept, I believe you have earned the right at the very least to strike up a conversation!

How To Supercharge Your LinkedIn organic outreach in 2022.

My company Solarlink, actually provides this service. I’ll share more about what we do at the end of this article. But if you’d like to learn how to do this yourself, then keep reading!

Update Your LinkedIn Profile

Your LinkedIn profile is your landing page, your sales page, and should contain information about who you are, what you do, and?why you’re connecting with people.

Steps to give your profile a needed facelift:

• Add a high quality headshot
• Add a cover photo representing you and your company
• Clearly state who you are and why you’re connecting with your target audience in the About Me section
• Add your calendar booking link to your About Me
• Add your place of employment and calendar link to the Experience section

Find Your Target Audience

The most efficient way to find your target audience is with LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Sign up for a one month free trial.

1. Head to Sales Navigator, located on the top right of your profile
2. Click all filters →lead filters
3. Use the filters to find decision makers in the geolocation

Here’s an example of how to pull decision makers in a specific geolocation and specific industries. I targeted a few sub industries under manufacturing in California. It pulled over 33,000 leads!

4. Once you build your perfect audience, you, or a sales development representative should add 20–50 people per day, every day. As new connections start coming in, they should send an introductory/welcome message introducing who you are and why you connected with them. The goal should be to provide enough information to generate interest.

5. Book an introductory meeting and start your sales process!

Final Notes

If you follow the above steps, you will connect with your target audience. If you stay consistent and ontop of your prospecting and follow up game, you will generate interest and book meetings with decision makers.

My company?Solarlink?specializes in B2B lead generation for companies and reps in the solar and renewable space. The above is only part of the amazing service we provide. You can definitely go and implement the strategy over the break.

Or, you can book a call with myself personally and I can show you how we can supercharge your B2B lead generation going into 2022! We have a limited time 2 week trial where we waive our set up and management fees, so trying us out is nearly risk free.

You can book a?call with me here.

You can check out some case studies from?clients who we’re working with here.

Or, you can shoot me a message on Linkedin!

Thanks for reading! :)

About Michael Zampiglia

Michael Zampiglia has been in the solar space for about 5 years. He got started in door to door sales at Vivint in the resi game and did that from 2017–2018

From 2018–2019 he worked at a friend digital marketing agency and learned everything marketing. From running Facebook & Google ads, to building websites, to building systems, funnels, and more.

In 2019 he started is first digital marketing agency where he worked strictly with residential solar companies and helped them with their lead gen efforts through paid advertisiting.

In 2020, Michael started his own residential solar company called Net Zero Energy based out of California. At one point he had 20+ reps going door to door in Califiornia and Arizona.

In 2021, Michael shifted primarly to doing marketing in the B2B solar space. Commercial, industrial, utility, battery storage companies, and more. Pretty much anybody in the renewable space that targets other businesses. Michael’s vast knowledge in solar, combined with his marketing knowledge and degree in business & computer information systems gives him a unique set of skills that has allowed him to build the most effective and affordable B2B lead generation service in the game.

To learn more,?please visit the Solarlink website.