28 September 2026 · 6 min read · Oscar Markham
The solar sale takes longer than your follow-up does
Solar is a four-figure purchase that nobody needs to make this week. People enquire, get quotes, think about it, talk to a partner, look at the bill again in three months and then decide. Installers, meanwhile, ring twice, get no answer, and write the lead off. The gap between how long the decision takes and how long the follow-up lasts is where most of the wasted ad spend in this trade goes.
The enquiry is the start of a conversation, not the end
A solar enquiry is rarely a decision. It is somebody gathering information, often quite early, frequently without having discussed it properly at home.
Treating it as a hot lead and pushing produces a polite no. Treating it as the opening of a months-long conversation produces a job, sometimes in the next quarter.
Two calls is not a follow-up
Most installers ring, ring again, and stop. The customer who was in a meeting both times is now gone, and the ad spend that produced them is wasted.
A sequence that runs over weeks rather than days — a call, a message, a useful email, another call a fortnight later — recovers a meaningful share of them. None of it is clever, which is why so few do it.
Give them something to read
Between the quote and the decision, the customer is researching. They will read something. It may as well be yours.
A short piece on how the grant process actually runs, what a realistic generation figure looks like in their county, or what the system needs in year five, keeps you present while they make up their mind. It is also the kind of thing a partner reads over their shoulder, and the partner is frequently the one who has not been convinced.
Winter enquiries convert in spring
People think about electricity bills in January and install in April. An enquiry that goes quiet in February is not necessarily lost.
A list of unconverted enquiries from the previous winter is one of the most valuable things a solar business owns, and most of them are sitting unused in an inbox.
Keep track of them somewhere
The practical blocker is almost always that nobody knows which enquiries are outstanding. A spreadsheet is enough — name, date, what stage, when to contact next.
Without it, follow-up depends on remembering, and nobody remembers in August what they quoted in March.
What this is worth
If you are paying for leads and converting the first fortnight only, you are buying the whole pipeline and using a fraction of it.
Extending the follow-up costs no additional ad spend at all. It is the cheapest increase in installs available to most solar businesses, and it usually beats increasing the budget.
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.