CRM for solar companies
The solar CRM market is crowded, and almost all of it is sales software: lead capture, a proposal with a savings estimate, an e-signature, a commission report. The problem is that in solar the signature is the beginning of the hard part — site survey, design revision, permit, financing funding milestones, installation, inspection, permission to operate. Most installers run the sale in a vertical CRM and the project in spreadsheets, and the customer experiences the gap as three months of silence after the most enthusiastic sales process of their life.
Where the generic CRM breaks:
The pipeline ends at signed. A signed contract is not revenue. Between signature and permission to operate sits every cancellation window, and a customer who hears nothing for six weeks cancels. The sales CRM shows a won deal; the business has a project nobody is visibly running.
Design changes orphan the contract. The site survey moves panels, the system size changes, the price changes. In a sales CRM the proposal is a PDF from a past conversation, so the signed document, the current design and the installed system quietly stop matching.
Financing milestones are invisible. Solar financing pays out against milestones — approval, install, inspection. When the CRM does not track which milestone each project has evidenced, money that has been earned sits unclaimed, and cash flow problems get blamed on sales.
Commission paid on the wrong event. Pay reps at signature and you fund cancellations; pay at PTO with no per-project visibility and reps stop trusting the numbers. Either way the commission argument is monthly and the CRM cannot settle it.
The data model that actually fits:
Project. The object that begins where the deal ends, carrying survey, design version, permit, install, inspection and PTO as explicit stages with owners — the record that answers a customer's call in one look.
Design version. System size, layout and price as a versioned record tied to the contract, so a survey-driven change produces an amended agreement instead of a mismatch discovered at inspection.
Financing milestone. Each payout event with its evidence requirement and status, so funded-but-unclaimed money is a visible list instead of a quarterly surprise.
Permit and inspection record. Application, issuance and inspection dates per authority, because the authority having jurisdiction sets the schedule and the installer who cannot see permit age cannot forecast installs.
Commission event. Rep, amount and the project milestone that triggers it, so commission is computed from the same record that runs the project and the monthly argument ends.
Our verdict: Keep a vertical solar sales tool if your reps already live in one — proposal generation with savings modelling is genuinely hard to build and not worth rebuilding. The gap worth building is the project spine from signature to PTO: stages, design versions, financing milestones and the customer-facing status that stops the cancellation-by-silence problem. That is the half of the business the sales tools do not model, and it is where installers actually lose money.
There are dozens of solar CRMs. Why build anything?
Because nearly all of them compete on the same third of the workflow — lead to signature. Compare them and you are comparing proposal engines. The stretch that determines whether a signed deal becomes revenue, and whether the customer refers you, is the project half, and that is the part left to spreadsheets.
What causes most post-signature cancellations?
Silence, more than price or remorse. The sale is high-touch and the project is quiet, and the contrast reads as something going wrong. A status the customer can see — surveyed, permitted, scheduled — removes the silence without adding calls.
How should commission be structured against cancellations?
Split across milestones rather than paid whole at signature — a portion at signing, the rest at install or PTO. The design question is visibility: a rep who can see each project's milestone status accepts the split; one who cannot assumes the office is hiding money.
Does this apply to heat pumps and retrofit work too?
Directly. Any job with a rebate, a permit and financed milestones has the same shape: the sale is quick, the project is the product, and the paperwork sequence decides the margin. The stages differ by program; the spine is the same.
Last reviewed 27 August 2026