The owner likes the proposal and forwards it to whoever runs the numbers. That person asks three questions, in roughly the same order every time, and two of the three are usually answered by an assumption nobody wrote down.
A commercial solar proposal rarely dies in the room where it was presented. It dies a week later, quietly, on the desk of a controller or a CFO who wasn’t on the walkthrough and has no particular feeling about solar either way.
That person isn’t hostile. They’re doing the job of testing a capital request, and they will test three numbers. Every one of those numbers is already in your proposal. The question is whether you put it there on purpose.
In short
- The escalation rate behind the savings curve. Published data doesn’t show the smooth annual climb most models assume.
- The share of the bill that’s demand and not energy, because that’s the share the array barely moves.
- The remaining life of the roof under a system that will sit there for decades.
The rate you assumed power prices climb
Most savings models assume the utility rate climbs a steady amount every year for twenty-five years. Three percent is common. It’s also the single easiest thing in the document to attack, because the person reviewing it can look up what actually happened.
The federal figures don’t describe a smooth climb. The average price of electricity to commercial customers in the United States was 10.43 cents per kilowatthour in 2016 and 10.59 cents in 2020, which is close to flat across five years. It then rose to 13.41 cents by 2025, a jump of about 27 percent in the second half of that decade.
Averaged across the whole period the increase works out under three percent a year, so a three percent assumption isn’t dishonest. It’s just a shape nobody has actually lived through, and a controller who plots the real series will notice that five of those years went nowhere.
Show the payback at more than one rate. A model that survives at zero escalation is a model that doesn’t depend on the argument, and a proposal that volunteers the flat case before anybody asks for it stops being a sales document and starts being analysis.
Demand charges, which an array barely moves
A commercial electric bill has two engines. Energy is billed on kilowatthours consumed. Demand is billed on the highest fifteen-minute or thirty-minute peak in the month, and on many commercial accounts it’s a large share of the total.
An array cuts energy well. It cuts demand only if the peak happens to land when the sun is up and the sky is clear, which isn’t something anybody can promise. A cloudy afternoon at the wrong moment can set the month’s demand charge whatever the array produced the other twenty-nine days.
Proposals that express savings as a percentage of the bill, without separating the two, are the ones that produce an angry call in year one. The building sees a bill that dropped by far less than the headline number, and the contractor spends the next two years explaining a distinction that belonged on page one.
Pull twelve months of bills, split the two lines, and state the offset against each separately. Where storage or a controls strategy is the honest answer for demand, price it as its own option instead of folding it into an optimistic single figure.
Get in front of the owner
Abstrakt sets appointments with the owners, facility managers, and directors of facilities weighing commercial solar, so your team spends its week on roofs and in front of the people who sign instead of building lists. The site visit, the proposal, and the job are yours.
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How much life the roof has left
This is the one that gets a proposal shelved instead of argued with, and it usually comes from somewhere the solar contractor never sees. The owner forwards the document, somebody asks the facilities side what shape the roof is in, and the answer is eight years.
A system designed to sit on that roof for decades now carries a removal and reinstallation somewhere in the middle of its life. That cost is real, it’s large, and if your model doesn’t contain it then your model and their model disagree by a number nobody has written down.
Getting ahead of it’s straightforward. Ask for the roof age and the last inspection on the first visit, before anything is modeled. Where there’s life left, say so in one line and move on. Where there’s not, price the removal and reinstall as a visible item, or say plainly that the roof work should come first and that you would rather build on a new roof than over an old one.
Contractors avoid raising it because it slows the sale. It slows the sale either way. Raising it yourself is the version where you’re still in the conversation afterward.
What a proposal that survives this looks like
| The number | What a reviewer does with it | What to put in the document |
|---|---|---|
| Escalation rate | Looks up what rates actually did | Payback at your assumed rate and at zero, side by side |
| Demand versus energy | Compares the promise to an actual bill | Offset stated separately against each line, from twelve months of bills |
| Roof life | Asks facilities, not you | Roof age, last inspection, and the removal cost if the dates don’t work |
Three rows. A proposal built this way is longer than the one your competitor sent and reads as though somebody expected it to be checked, which is the impression you want on the desk where it gets decided.
When not to send a proposal
A building whose owner can’t name the decision process, whose roof age nobody knows, and whose last twelve bills are unavailable is a building where a proposal is a guess dressed up in a spreadsheet. Sending one anyway produces a number that moves later, and a number that moves later costs more credibility than the delay would have.
Ask for the bills and the roof date, and offer to come back when they’re in hand. Contractors who do that lose a few weeks. The ones who skip it lose the argument in month thirteen, in front of the person who signed.
See it in your market
Commercial solar lead generation covers who we call, what a set appointment looks like, and what you keep.
Where commercial solar leads actually come from
A proposal only matters once you are in front of an owner, and that is the part most installers find hardest. Commercial solar rarely comes from inbound enquiry. The buildings worth quoting are not searching for an installer, and by the time they are, somebody else has usually been talking to them for months.
So the work tends to go to whoever was already in the conversation. That means reaching owners, facility managers and directors of facilities directly, and staying in touch through a decision cycle that can run a year or more.
It is slow, consistent outreach rather than a campaign, and it is the first thing that gets dropped when your crews are busy installing.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do commercial solar installers find new projects?
Most of it comes from direct contact with owners and facility managers rather than inbound enquiry, because buildings that could host an array are rarely looking for one. The installer already in the conversation when the budget appears tends to get the work.
Is cold calling worth it for commercial solar?
It still works for this buyer, because facility and operations people are reachable by phone and rarely respond to email from companies they do not know. What has changed is that it takes consistent volume over months, which is where most contractors run out of time.
Should a solar installer hire a salesperson or outsource appointment setting?
The in-house comparison is not a salary against a retainer. It is salary plus payroll taxes, benefits, software, ramp time and somebody to manage them. Outsourcing trades that for a fixed monthly cost and a faster start. Which is right depends on whether you can keep a salesperson busy and managed.
Keep going
- Commercial solar lead generation
- How to write a commercial solar proposal that gets approved
- What to say when you cold call a facility manager
- Outsourced SDR services
- When commercial building budgets are actually set
About this article
Jeff Winters is Chief Executive Officer at Abstrakt. Reviewed by Neil Erker, Chief Marketing Officer. Abstrakt sets appointments for commercial solar contractors and the wider trades, and the patterns here come from that calling.
Jeff Winters is the CEO of Abstrakt Marketing Group, a U.S.-based B2B lead generation and appointment-setting company that books qualified sales meetings for clients across the commercial trades, IT and managed services, manufacturing, and B2B services. He has spent his career building and running outbound sales programs at scale, and he breaks down what actually works in sales and lead generation on Abstrakt's podcast, The Grow Show.
