What you are buying, what separates a good lead from a bad one, and where the money leaks.
A solar lead is a person, not a record in a spreadsheet. When an installer buys a lead they are buying the right to have a conversation with somebody who owns a roof, pays a power bill they are not happy about, and has put their hand up.
That sounds obvious. It matters because most of what gets sold as a solar lead in Australia fails at least one of those three tests. The contact cannot be reached. They are renting. Or they filled in a form to see a savings calculator and have no memory of asking anybody to call them.
So the first question to ask any lead supplier is not what it costs. It is what has to be true before something counts as a lead at all.
A shared lead is sold to three or four installers at once. It looks cheaper per unit and it is almost always worse value, for two reasons that compound.
The first is speed pressure. When four companies get the same contact, the job effectively goes to whoever dials first, so you are paying for a race rather than an opportunity. The second is worse. The homeowner now has four quotes and no way to tell the companies apart, so the only lever left is price. You bought the lead and then discounted the job to win it.
An exclusive lead costs more per lead and usually costs less per install. That is the number that pays your wages.
SMS verification takes seconds and removes a large share of the junk before it ever reaches an installer. A verified mobile means the number is real and the person is reachable. It does not guarantee a job, but an unverified form fill guarantees nothing at all.
Beyond verification, the qualification that actually predicts a sale is narrow. Do they own the roof, or can they authorise the install. Do they want a quote, as opposed to browsing. And is there enough detail underneath, the power bill, the roof type, the timeline and the trigger, that your first call can be about their situation rather than twenty questions.
Across the installers we work with, close rates on exclusive, verified solar leads run between 10% and 25%. The spread is wide and it is almost never about the leads.
The strongest predictor is speed to first call. A lead called within five minutes converts at a multiple of the same lead called the next morning. The second is follow-up discipline: most installers call once, get voicemail and never try again, which throws away leads they already paid for. The third is whether the quote turns up when you said it would.
If you are at the bottom of that range, look at those three before you look at the lead source.
Three leaks account for most of the disappointment installers have with lead generation.
Retainers are the first. Paying a monthly fee on top of ad spend means you carry the risk and the agency carries none. The second is shared leads, for the reasons above. The third is buying volume you cannot service. A pack of leads that sit uncalled for two days is money set on fire, and it is the most common mistake we see from installers scaling up too fast.
Buy what your team can actually call. Increase it when your close rate holds.
If nobody in your business can reliably call a new lead within minutes, buying leads is the wrong product. Pay per appointment exists for exactly that situation: the enquiry gets generated, called, qualified and booked into your calendar, and you turn up to close the job.
It costs more per unit and it removes the single biggest cause of wasted leads. Which one is right depends entirely on whether you have someone free to pick up the phone.
Exclusive, verified and sold once. Leads or booked site visits.
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