Three things have to be true. Everything else is context that helps you sell.
A solar lead either clears these three or it is not a lead. There is no partial credit.
Verified and reachable. The mobile is real and SMS-verified. If nobody can reach the contact, nothing else about the record matters.
Owns the roof. A homeowner, or a business decision-maker who can authorise the install. A renter who loves the idea cannot sign anything, and a middle manager who has to take it upstairs is a much longer sale than the record suggests.
Wants a quote. Actively interested in solar and battery and asking for a price, rather than having downloaded a calculator or entered a competition. Intent has to be explicit.
Miss any one of the three and the lead should not reach an installer at all.
Past the three gates, a handful of details do most of the work in telling you how a job will go.
The power bill. The single most useful number on the record. It sizes the system, it sets the savings case, and it tells you immediately whether the job is worth a site visit.
Roof type and storeys. Tile against tin, single against double storey. It changes your install cost and therefore your price before you have left the office.
What they want. Panels, storage or both. Job value moves substantially depending on the answer, and so does the conversation.
Timeline. Immediately, a few months, or still researching. This does not disqualify anybody, it just tells you where the lead sits in your follow-up.
The trigger. Why now. A bill that jumped, an outage, a tariff change, a new build, a neighbour who just had it done. The trigger is the opening line of your first call, and it is the most underused field on any lead.
For commercial solar the criteria shift. Monthly spend replaces the quarterly bill. Usable roof space matters more than roof type. And two questions decide whether the job is real at all.
Site tenure: do they own the building, and if they lease it, how long is left. Nobody funds a twenty-year asset on eighteen months of lease.
Approval path: who signs. A facilities manager with a budget is a different prospect to one who has to build a board paper. Knowing which one you have got changes how you pitch and how you forecast.
Some questions feel rigorous and predict nothing. Asking a homeowner what budget they have in mind before they know what a system costs produces a number they invented on the spot. Asking whether they have had other quotes tends to invite a bluff. Asking them to self-rate how serious they are is worthless, because everybody says very.
Behaviour predicts. Stated intent, much less so. A specific trigger and a real bill figure tell you more than any scale of one to ten.
A verified homeowner with a real bill who is six months away is not a bad lead, it is a lead with a date on it. Most installers throw these away and then buy new ones, which is an expensive habit.
Put it in a follow-up sequence, call it when they said to call, and reference the trigger they gave you. That is the cheapest pipeline you will ever build, because you already paid for it.
Exclusive, verified and sold once. Leads or booked site visits.
Five quick questions, then we get you live.
Get solar leads