Solar Sales: From Pitch to Power-On

I worked in residential solar in the mid-2010s. From the outside, it looked straightforward: customer signs, panels go up, power turns on.

Inside the business, it felt like a chain of handoffs where small mistakes turned into big delays. The panels were rarely the hard part. The workflow was.

A lot of the pain started early with expectations.

Sales needs a clean story. Engineering needs uncertainty. Site data is incomplete. Utility timelines vary. If you present early estimates like certainty, you create trust debt that the rest of the project spends months paying off.

Then reality arrives in the form of a site survey. Surveys were where assumptions got corrected: roof condition, service panel details, access constraints, shading realities. None of this was shocking in engineering terms, but it was often shocking to customers who had already mentally committed to a timeline and savings number.

From there, projects tended to disappear into the slow middle. Permitting and utility interconnection were administrative, variable, and often outside your direct control. Real work was happening, but it did not look like progress from the customer side. If the communication layer was weak, this phase felt like silence, which is where anxiety and churn grew.

Installation was where you found out whether the upstream handoffs were clean. If survey findings did not flow into the latest design package, crews hit blockers. If materials or plans were out of sync, you got return visits. If permitting packets were not aligned, inspection failed and the schedule slipped again.

Teams that performed well were not always the ones with the fanciest tools. They were the ones that treated interfaces like first-class engineering:

• be explicit about assumptions and what will be validated later
• keep revision control tight so “the plan” means one thing
• treat corrections as normal loops rather than embarrassing exceptions
• communicate customer status in a way that matches reality The industry has evolved since then. The tooling is better, batteries are more common, and consumer expectations are different. Some markets also became more politically and economically noisy around incentives and interconnection.

Even with those changes, the core constraint has not moved much: for a customer, solar isn’t just hardware. It’s delivery. The end-to-end workflow from promise to first power is what people actually experience. If that workflow is unreliable, no component-level excellence saves you.