One Solar Installer’s Appointments Got Shorter

I’ve talked more solar installers out of starting a blog than I’ve ever talked into one, and I’ve never once felt bad about a single one of them.

Most business blogs I open are a graveyard. Four posts, all from the same two weeks in 2021, two of them about a trade show and one welcoming a new hire who left in the spring.

They go wrong in the same handful of ways every time, and not one of those ways is a shortage of talent.

So when an installer I’ll call Ray told me on a call that he wanted to start writing, my first instinct was to sell him something else and save the pair of us the disappointment.

What he was actually asking

Ray runs two crews out of a unit behind a tire shop. He books the appointments himself, does most of the sit-downs himself, and he had the question I get from installers more than any other.

Why do people take the quote, say it all sounds great, and then go quiet for five weeks?

He thought the answer was his website, which is what most owners think, and which is wrong about as often as it’s right. So I went and opened it.

What I found when I looked

His site was fine. Tidy work, built by someone competent, nothing broken on it and nothing embarrassing.

He also had a blog, with eleven posts sitting in it going back three years. Certifications, a photo from the county fair, a note about new opening hours in 2022.

I run the same checks on every trade, and the evening I ranked them on blogging, solar came to rest 10 of 47, with 44.5% of these sites publishing one at all. I had this trade filed away with the ones that never write a word, so a showing that far in front of the 37% I get across small business sites meant my filing was wrong and his instinct was better than mine.

Being tenth in your trade at publishing and nowhere at all at getting called back is a specific sort of problem. It was Ray’s, and a new homepage was never going to lay a finger on it.

The four questions

I asked him what people ask him at kitchen tables. Not the clever questions. The boring ones, the ones he has answered so many times that he no longer hears himself saying them.

He rattled off four without stopping to think.

1. What happens to the panels if I sell the house in six years?

2. Does my roof need doing first, and how would I even know?

3. What does my bill actually look like in January?

4. What happens to my warranty if your company goes under?

Every one of those is a reason a person goes quiet for five weeks. Not one of them was answered anywhere on his website, and all four were answered beautifully, out loud, by Ray, at a rate of about six kitchens a week.

Do you know your four? Of course you do. You said them yesterday.

Lawyers do the same thing, handing that answer over on the phone all day and never once writing it down.

What we changed

Nothing about the design. Nothing about the platform, the hosting or the nice photograph of the van.

He recorded himself answering the four questions on the drive back from jobs, and I turned each recording into a page written the way he says it, including the part where he admits the January bill isn’t as small as the salesman two towns over keeps promising.

Nine posts over about five months. Two of them are dull. One of them, the roof one, does more work than the other eight put together.

Those posts also needed somewhere to send a person who had just finished reading at the far end of a Tuesday evening, and his homepage offered her a phone number and nothing else. So we put a form on it: a name box, an email box, and one box that says what you want. She types four lines while the dishwasher runs, Ray reads them at seven with his coffee, and a phone number sitting in a header can’t do that for either of them. 36.5% of these homepages carry a form, and his is one of them now.

What happened after

His appointments got shorter.

That was the first thing he noticed, and he said it to me as an aside, the way people mention the thing that turns out to matter. People were turning up having already read the roof answer, so the first twenty minutes of the sit-down had been done for him before he parked.

Fewer of them went quiet afterwards, too. Not none. Fewer.

Would yours? I don’t know, and neither do you, not until your four answers are written down somewhere a stranger can reach them at midnight without asking your permission first.

A homeowner never sees analytics doing anything at all. On Ray’s screen it’s a list of page names with a count beside each of them, and by last October the roof post was sitting above his own homepage on that list, which is not a sentence I get to write very often. 60.4% of these sites are counting anything whatsoever, and without it the two of us would’ve spent the autumn swapping opinions.

You don’t have to take any of my figures on faith either. The report carries an explorer with two dropdowns under it, and if you set the industry to solar and leave the other one alone, the card that comes back prints every check I run with the number of sites behind it. I did that myself the night before I rang Ray back, because I don’t much trust a number I haven’t watched load.

Why the writing worked and the certifications didn’t

Ray’s old posts were about Ray. The new ones are about the thing keeping a woman awake at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday.

The difference is as simple as that, and it took him a month to believe me, because every instinct an owner has says the website is where you go to look impressive.

Two orthodontic practices wrote the same article about the same treatment, and only one of them got the call.

Nobody has ever picked a solar company because it had a lovely afternoon at the county fair.

Would you? You’d pick the one that told you what happens when you sell the house, because that’s the part you’re afraid of, and because being told straight is rare enough that it starts to feel like proof of something.

When I build a solar website now, that list of questions is the first thing I ask for and the last thing I’d ever cut.

Who this wasn’t for

Not for the outfit buying appointments at a fixed price and perfectly happy with what comes back. You’ve got a machine, it works, and nine blog posts aren’t going to move it a single point.

Not for the installer already posting every month who knows which of his pages pulls. You’re ahead of me, and I’d rather read your site than write about it.

I wrote it for the man who answers the same four questions every week and has never once thought of those answers as something worth keeping. Ray was that man back in March, and he had no idea he was already sitting on the best thing his whole trade does.

And I didn’t write a word of it for the owner who worked out years ago that blogging is a thing agencies invented so they’d have something to bill for. You may well be right about the agencies. You’re not going to be argued out of it by a fellow who audits websites for a living, and I gave up trying somewhere around my fortieth attempt.