Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
experience. Perhaps my favorite story about this comes from our early prospecting in
2008, shortly after we had invented the remote solar-design process. We delivered fully
engineered but paper-based iQuotes to homes in the San Francisco Bay Area that were
appropriate for solar systems. On the mailer we provided a login and a password for our
website that allowed people to learn more or to sign up for a solar system.
We were not expecting much response the week after we delivered these paper-based
proposals, but suddenly our customer relationship management database told us that a
customerhadpaidthedepositforacashpurchase.Wehadn'thadaphonecallorevenan
e-mail from this person to ask us any questions about our proposal—just an order placed
in our system. I was so excited that I had to find out who had just ordered the world's
first online solar solution for his home. I was sure the customer was a savvy digital Gen
X-er. When we phoned him, we discovered he was an octogenarian US Air Force veter-
an who wanted to do the right thing by his kids by going solar. He was happy to pay for
it with cash because he felt the benefits were in his legacy. I savored the moment as a
reminder to never assume anything; our first customer wasn't some slick, techie kid but
instead one of our elders and betters showing the way.
Aside from that great experience, I'm proud of what we've done with remote solar
design because it has broken the mold of the quoting process, which is a costly and cum-
bersome part of the sales cycle in the solar industry. To go back to that vision of two-
thirds of American homes saving money by going solar, you start to get a sense of the
scale of enterprise that's required to serve all of these people. Between 40 million and
50 million homes in the United States should go solar if the homeowner acts rationally
from an economic point of view. To date, the industry has served approximately 200,000
homes, but this is changing—and what's now just a revolt is soon to become a revolu-
tion.
By making solar adoption easy and affordable, our industry can build trust and the
base of reference customers to really grow to scale. As we know, the best indicator of
what one consumer might do in the United States is what his or her neighbor is doing.
At Sungevity we're proactively trying to cultivate what we like to call “peer pride.” The
good news is that this is relatively easy because going solar is a viral phenomenon, one
in which customers are happy to be the contagion.
TwoacademicsatStanfordUniversityshowedthisviralitywithsolarsystemsthrough
a study of their installation in different ZIP codes. They concluded that for every 1 per-
cent of new installations in an area, it was 1 percent faster for the next solar system to be
installed in the same neighborhood. They attributed this to two causal factors: one was
that there was greater customer acceptance of solar as a value proposition because “my
neighbor was doing it” rather than “some crazy hippie” and, second, because the clerk
