The Best CRM for Solar Companies: Features and Comparison

Are you looking for the best CRM that suits your business in the solar industry? Look no further, as we will help you with that search today as we go through the best CRMs that offer integrated solutions for solar businesses.

A CRM, or customer relationship management system, is a critical tool for any solar company. It helps you manage your interactions with customers, keep track of important data and increase productivity by introducing workflow automation. In this blog post, we will discuss the features of various CRMs and compare them to Google Sheets, Pylon and Open Solar, and recommend the best options for solar companies.

If you're not sure about which CRM to use, get in contact with us. With a free 15-min consultation, we'll help you make an informed decision.

What are the benefits of using a CRM for solar businesses?

Firstly, let's take a look at some of the ways using a CRM software can benefit your solar business.

Improved customer retention levels

Perhaps the most important benefit is improved customer management. With a CRM, you can keep track of your interactions with customers, sales data, and other important information. This information is critical for understanding your customers and improving your business. By having customer data and customer interactions recorded, this allows your team to easily access customer information, have a unified communications point and improve the entire process from initial contact with the customer to closing the deal.

Increased revenue and profitability

Another important benefit is that CRMs can help increase sales and revenue. With a CRM software, you can track your sales data and performance and build a sales pipeline. Analysing this information is critical for understanding what works and what doesn't work in your sales process. Additionally, CRMs often have features that help you close deals faster, such as automated follow-ups and reminders.

Improved operational efficiencies

CRMs often offer API integrations with other software, such as your accounting software or email marketing platforms like Xero and MYOB. Solar designs from platforms such as Pylon and Open Solar can even be seamlessly integrated with a CRM account.

Having API integrations helps to automate tasks and save time. This can save a lot of time for your team, improve efficiency and allow them to focus on more important tasks.

What is the best solar CRM software?

With so many CRM software out there, it can be tricky to narrow down the one that will be the best for your solar business.

We researched into some of the best solar CRM that can help keep unify your sales, installation and operations teams.

Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM is a cloud-based CRM software that offers a wide range of features to help businesses of any size manage their customer relationships. It includes features such as contact management, sales automation, lead management, deal management, and more. Additionally, Zoho CRM integrates with over 500 other business applications, making it a very versatile tool.

Some of the key features of Zoho CRM include:

1. Contact Management: Keep track of your contacts and their information in one place. This includes basic information such as name and contact details, as well as notes on interactions, tasks, deals, and more.
2. Sales Automation: Automate your sales process with features such as lead capture forms, automatic follow-ups, deal management, and more. This helps your sales team to focus on closing deals rather than mundane tasks.
3. Lead Management: Capture leads from various sources and track their progress through your sales pipeline. This can easily integrate your qualified solar leads into one place.
4. Deal Management: Manage your deals and sales opportunities in one place. This includes tracking the progress of deals, setting reminders, and more.
5. Omnichannel CRM: Keep in touch with your customers that reach out to you over email, social media and live chat in the one system.

To test it out, Zoho offers a free edition of their CRM which is designed for small home businesses. Or you can try their full CRM with a free trial for 15 days before committing to a paid plan. Paid plans start at $22 AUD per month per user.

HubSpot CRM

HubSpot is another incredibly popular CRM and and it does everything a CRM needs to do including API integration, building sales pipelines and keep track of all your leads.

HubSpot offers some great CRM tools for free, and you get features such as contact management, business application integrations and email scheduling in a basic plan.  However, to use the whole bundle of their CRM features, it does get pricier and is more suitable to larger or B2B companies.

A couple of the key modules of HubSpot that are suitable for a solar business are:

1. Sales Hub: The free Sales Hub gives you the options to give specialized quotes, call and email scheduling for potential leads. The paid option will give you additional features such as creating deal pipelines, sales goals and conversation routing.
2. Marketing Hub: The free tools the Marketing Hub offers are email marketing, ad management and list segmentation. The paid plans will also offer tools to execute marketing automation, improve your SEO, marketing campaigns and content strategy.

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HubSpot has flexible plans where you can purchase one single module, or bundle them together, or their entire suite of modules. The whole CRM suite starts at $67 AUD per month per user, and you are welcome to a 14 day free trial.

Capsule

Capsule CRM is a great tool for smaller businesses as it offers a range of features at a more affordable price. Capsule CRM is a great tool for smaller businesses as it offers a range of features at a very affordable price. Additionally, Capsule CRM integrates with over 500 other business applications, making it a very versatile tool.

1. Sales tools: Capsule offers comprehensive sales tools such as sales pipeline and includes potential values of these sales opportunities.
2. Task Management: You can automate a series of tasks that begin after one another, repeat tasks, and be able to create tasks for appointments and phone calls.
3. Reporting: You'll be able to monitor all aspects of your sales cycle, reports on won and lost opportunities and filter reports based on time period.
4. Integrations: Capsule CRM hosts a number of integrations such as Xero, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace and they also have an API which you can use to integrate with a custom third party application.
5. Contact Management: Data can be easily compiled about each customer, company and organisation that you do business with.

Capsule CRM starts at about $26 AUD per user per month, and offers a lengthy 30 day free trial to test out all their features.

Pipedrive

Pipedrive is another great CRM for solar companies. And it's easy to see why with all of the features that are on offer. It is a very sales focused CRM, and will able to track and organise calls and emails across devices.

Some of the features that make Pipedrive great for solar companies are:

1. Visual Sales Pipeline: This gives you a great overview of where every deal is at, and what needs to be done next in order to close the deal. You can also track individual deals, set reminders and add notes.
2. Forecasting: With forecasting, you can predict your future sales based on your current deals in your pipeline.
3. Deal management: Pipedrive has a comprehensive deal management system with features that are dedicated to lead generation, qualification, nurturing and prioritisation. Their CRM allows you to improve sales momentums and boost conversion rate, which is important when trying to keep solar leads engaged.

Pricing starts at about $22 AUD per user per month for the "Essential" Plan, and they offer a free 14-day trial.

Google Sheets as an alternative to solar CRM

Google Sheets is great for companies that are just starting. It's free, easily shareable, easily editable, can produce graphs, reports, and easily understandable by most business owners.

Google Sheets offers many of the same features as a CRM, such as sales pipeline tracking, deal management and contact management.

Free CRM templates for Google Sheet can be found online, and many offer the same features as a CRM. A good Google Sheet CRM template should include a sheet for contacts that keep track of contact details and lead source, a sheet to track deals and deal value, stage and likelihood of closing, and a sales sheet which fleshes out sales timelines and revenue projections.

However, the downside to using Google Sheets is that it does not provide the UI-friendly features, advanced sales tracking and forecasting and comprehensive integrations with accounting systems and marketing automations. If you're looking for these kind of features, a CRM may be a better option for solar businesses.

What if I already use a solar design software such as Open Solar or Pylon?

You might be wondering if you should bother with a separate CRM if you're already using software such as Open Solar or Pylon who already offer a CRM software.

We'll take a look at Open Solar's free CRM, and compare that with Pylon's more expensive CRM option.

Open Solar

Open Solar offers a CRM module as part of their software suite.

Open Solar's CRM features include contact and opportunity management, task management and automation, reporting and forecasting. Open Solar additionally integrates with financing options such as Plenti and Brighte which might make quoting proposals easier.

Open Solar has an API which allows you to integrate with your system and import leads, trigger outreach based on customer action and sync project statuses. What Open Solar's CRM does not seem to offer is the ability to forecast sales, create sales pipelines or useful integrations with accounting systems or marketing software.

If you want a basic CRM, or are already an Open Solar user, it may be worthwhile trialing this solar CRM.

Pylon

If you already use Pylon, you might want to consider using their paid CRM.  Pylon offers a solar CRM features that allows you to analyse your sales performance, track deal pipelines, stay on top of KPIs, integrate apps with Zapier and import solar leads from sources such as SolarQuotes, SolarChoice, Facebook Ads and Google Ads.  

They are a bit more of a pricier option at $49 per user per month for one team, or $99 per user per month for unlimited number of users and teams. Pylon offers a free trial to see how the solar CRM can integrate with your business.

To summarise, CRMs offer a lot of features that can be very beneficial for solar companies. Some of the best CRMs for solar companies include Zoho, HubSpot, Capsule and Pipedrive. Free CRM templates for Google Sheet can be found online, but bear in mind that Google Sheets isn't as fleshed out as paid CRMs that have been designed for making significant improvements to operations within a business.

If you're already using software such as Opensolar or Pylon, it might be worth considering one of the CRMs that they already integrate with.

Conclusion

Solar companies need to decide what features are important to them when choosing a CRM, and whether a free or paid CRM makes more sense for their business. There is no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to CRMs, so you should take the time to evaluate the options before making a decision. Ultimately, it is important to weigh up the pros and cons of each CRM to decide which one would work best for your business needs.