28 September 2026 · 6 min read · Oscar Markham
Your solar quote is being compared to three others
Almost nobody buys solar from the first installer they speak to. The quote you send lands on a kitchen table beside two or three others, from companies the customer cannot distinguish, for equipment they have never heard of, at prices that are probably within a few hundred euro of each other. Whatever happens next is decided by what is on those pages.
The customer is not qualified to compare you
They cannot evaluate a panel, an inverter or a mounting system. They have no way of judging whether your design is better than the cheaper one.
So they compare what they can read: the total, how quickly you came back, whether the document looks like it was written for them, and whether anything in it made them feel understood. That is the actual competition and it has little to do with the specification.
Show their roof
A layout drawing of the panels on their own roof does more than any amount of technical detail. It proves you designed something for this house rather than quoting a package.
Include which roof planes you are using and why, and what you are deliberately not using. A competitor who has quoted the same total without explaining the design suddenly looks like they guessed.
Give generation and savings honestly
Optimistic figures win the job and lose the review. Realistic figures for their orientation, their pitch and their county, with a note on what you have assumed about their usage, are more persuasive to the kind of customer you want.
Say what happens to the exported units and roughly what they are worth. Most quotes skate over this and most customers do not understand it, so explaining it plainly is a differentiator that costs nothing.
Answer the question they are too polite to ask
What if it breaks. That is the fear underneath the whole purchase and most quotes do not touch it.
Warranty on panels, on the inverter and on your workmanship, stated separately, plus what actually happens if they ring you in year four. An installer who addresses it directly removes the main reason people delay.
Speed reads as competence
A quote the same evening, or the next morning, tells the customer how you will behave for the rest of the project. One that takes nine days tells them something too.
This is consistently among the most-cited reasons Irish homeowners give for choosing one tradesperson over another, and it costs nothing but process.
Then follow up once
Most installers send the quote and wait. A single call three days later, asking whether anything needs explaining, recovers a real share of jobs that would otherwise drift.
Not a discount call. A clarifying call. The customer is usually confused rather than unconvinced, and the installer who resolves the confusion is the one who gets the work.
Written by Oscar Markham, founder of Dublin Growth Digital. We run lead generation for Irish estate agents and trades, reported every Friday in enquiries and booked work.