[RE-wrenches] NABCEP Sales

[Keith Cronin]

Jessie

Great question and it spawned a few additional questions.

1. How many on the list here do urban only or 97% on grid vs off grid systems?
2. How many urban solar folks today, have segued to mostly micro inverters vs string inverters?
3. How many wrenches here do mostly battery systems?
4. How many folks here have sales engineers or sell systems themselves?
5. If you have a sales team, what are they allowed to do? Go on the roof and measure? Open an electrical panel/meter?

Reason I ask, is the trends seem to be shifting in our area and perhaps because its more urban. Sales folks are trained to do preliminary work- google earth/pictometry etc. 
Then have a baseline for system sizing, prior to the site visit. They contact prospects and go over their needs and get the electric bill prior to the visit.
If the prospects express all of the buying signs or its a referral- hot to trot, many companies here will give a proposal within the second visit, pending the electrician/pre inspection to dial in the electrical and roof verification items to ensure whats being proposed can actually be installed for final proposal presentation. Many companies don't allow sales folks on roofs or near electrical panels for many reasons including liability and lack of background.

So, if you're a small company- all electricians, so to speak, this test and the supporting framework would be very helpful.
For alot of the larger companies- and I mean over 5-10+ sales force, I believe the structure of how they approach prospects has shifted over the last couple of years, especially in light of micro inverters and their relative design simplicity. I believe this trend will continue, as we see more and more micro or AC output modules entering into the marketplace.

For the folks that are doing off grid stuff, I've always found it to be a more unique niche, as its a very technical sale and requires a deeper skill set, as the competence of the sales/designer/installer/service team is usually a small group of people from a small company, but I reserve the right to be wrong about this. I see a future when and where we will all be off grid and there will be a huge market to service the energy storage devices that support our baseline energy from solar or another non firm energy resource to power our futures, as grid saturation and feeder capacities at the utility level will cause us to head in this direction, naturally.
 
Aloha, Keith


________________________________
 From: Jesse Dahl <dahlsolar at gmail.com>
To: Wrenches <RE-wrenches at lists.re-wrenches.org> 
Sent: Sunday, January 29, 2012 8:05 AM
Subject: [RE-wrenches] NABCEP Sales
 

Hello,


I'm prepping for the NABCEP sales exam and was wondering if others on here have taken it?  What are your thoughts?

Jesse
Sent from my iPad!!!
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