Best Practices for selling non-solar or non-storage projects

Many OpenSolar professionals sell non-solar or storage projects such as HVAC, Heat Pumps, EV Chargers, Roofing, etc. If you offer these products and services, you can still utilize OpenSolar’s platform to support your sales effort. 

Here’s a rundown of the best practices and considerations to keep in mind.

Project Creation and Management  

Because it might be difficult to utilize one project for many different scopes of work — for a variety of reasons — it is recommended that you create new projects for each individual project. 

Best Practices:

• Utilize the “Assign Existing Contact” functionality to quickly add your existing contact(s) to newly created projects. 
• Utilize Project Tags. Custom tags can allow you to easily sort and filter by, say, “Heat Pump” projects within your Projects dashboard. . 
• Customize Project Workflows, Stages, and Actions. Customize your project management workflows to match your project scope. These workflow configurations can be selectively applied at the project level. 

Add your Product Image in Design Studio

Unless the visual of your project scope is best represented by a site image of your customer’s property, you may wish to make an update in the Design Studio. 

Specifically, you can upload a custom image (e.g. product shot of your EV Charger) by toggling over to the “Manual Mode” > Image. You can now show the product shot in your proposal template instead of the customer’s property. 

Pricing and Other Components

Because your other scopes of work may have different pricing/costing considerations, you may wish to customize your pricing/costing schemes to accommodate these projects. 

Secondly, there may be considerations around A) how your pricing configuration supports your existing workflow and B) how you display non-solar products in your proposal. These considerations will inform your decision to use either Pricing Adders or *Other Components — or both —to quote non-solar projects. Please see the matrix breakdown below to visualize the way in which pricing adders and other components display in both your proposal and contract. 

*You must have at least one “other component” in your design in order to generate a proposal. (In the event that you do not have modules, inverters, or a battery) 

Best Practices: 

• Build out your Adders Library to account for all ancillary products and services. You can label pricing adders as “non-generic” or “roofing” (via the “price treatment” dropdown) and this will give you access to certain integrated loan products where you can roll non-solar items into your solar loan.
• Utilize Auto Apply functionality where possible to expedite pricing (i.e. if “Other Component” requires a certain pricing adder for every project)
• Keep in mind that your sales team may be accustomed to a certain style of pricing within OpenSolar, and so new processes may come with a learning curve. 

Customize your Proposal and Contract Templates

You may wish to create and customize new proposal templates for non-solar projects. By doing so, you can provide relevant information to your customers and remove anything unnecessary (i.e. savings/ROI related to solar, etc). 

If you have separate contract templates for these projects, you can also upload these to streamline your sales process. 

You can leverage these newly created proposal and contract templates from the “customize proposal” button. 

Pro Tip: Add your Product Shot from the Design Studio by selecting “Manual Mode” Design Mode > Image.

Send Standalone Invoice (OpenSolar CashFlow)

If you collect cash differently for a non-solar or storage project (e.g. 100% upfront), you can accommodate the payment collection via OpenSolar’s CashFlow. To do so, you’ll want to do the following:

1. Configure a new CashFlow configuration scheme
2. Apply this configuration to a new payment option (e.g. “Heat Pump Cash”)

Final Considerations 

You may utilize some, all, or none of these best practices as you quote and sell non-solar and non-storage projects in OpenSolar.  

If you have any questions, please reach out to us at support@opensolar.com.