For most solar installers, a hybrid approach, buying leads selectively to scale fast while building owned channels for long-term margin, is the right starting point. The call changes if your sales team can't follow up within minutes, or if your cash runway can't absorb a few months of inconsistent lead flow. Whichever path you choose, put a short response SLA in place today.
TL;DR:
- Contact hot purchased leads within minutes and warm inbound leads within one hour; route prospects missing two or more qualification answers to nurture.
- Before buying, require timestamped consent language, a Do Not Call scrub report dated within 30 days, and written refund terms for invalid leads.
- Pilot one or two channels for 30 to 90 days, then scale only when cost per booked appointment stays stable across two cycles.
- Watch appointment to install rate alongside lead and booking costs, because weak conversion can expose a sales process problem rather than a channel problem.
Table of Contents
- Buying Leads vs. Generating Your Own: Which Fits Your Business
- A Prioritized Playbook for Generating Solar Leads
- Channel Creative and Targeting That Actually Convert
- Turning Leads Into Booked Appointments: Qualification and Routing
- What Solar Leads Really Cost, and When They Pay Back
- Staying Compliant: Consent, Do Not Call, and Recordkeeping
- How an AI-Driven Growth Partner Runs This Playbook
- A Straight Answer on Buy vs. Build
- Get a Pilot Running Instead of Guessing at Channels
- FAQ
- Sources
Buying Leads vs. Generating Your Own: Which Fits Your Business
The right model depends less on preference and more on three things: how fast your sales team can respond, how much cash you can commit before results compound, and how much tolerance you have for compliance risk tied to someone else's calling practices.
Companies that fit buying leads typically have idle sales capacity, a short runway to hit install targets, and no existing content or ad infrastructure. Buying fills the pipeline immediately, but every purchased lead carries someone else's compliance history. The FTC's amended complaint against K F J Marketing and related defendants alleges telemarketers placed over 1.3 million calls to numbers on the Do Not Call Registry and then sold those contacts to solar installers. That case is a reminder that the installer, not just the telemarketer, can face exposure for leads sourced through non-compliant outreach.
Companies that fit building in-house usually have an existing brand, a sales team with capacity to nurture longer cycles, and the patience to let organic and paid-search channels mature over two to three months. Building costs more time upfront but produces leads you fully control and can resell data on, with cleaner consent trails.
Hybrid fits almost everyone else: use purchased leads to keep crews busy while owned channels ramp, then shift budget away from vendors as your cost per booked appointment from owned channels drops below your blended purchased-lead cost.
Each model demands different operational groundwork:
- Buying: a CRM that can tag lead source and vendor, a dedicated intake rep for same-day callbacks, and a documented process for returning or disputing bad leads.
- Building: a content or ad budget held separately from sales payroll, a landing page built for mobile conversion, and a tracking setup that attributes bookings to the channel that generated them.
- Hybrid: both of the above, plus a monthly review that compares cost per appointment across vendor and owned sources side by side.
Before paying any vendor, run a short vetting checklist. Ask for a sample consent record showing the original opt-in language and timestamp, a Do Not Call scrub report dated within the last 30 days, and a written refund or replacement policy for leads that fail basic qualification (wrong phone, non-homeowner, outside service area). A vendor that can't produce these on request is a vendor you should not buy from, regardless of price per lead.
A Prioritized Playbook for Generating Solar Leads
Running a disciplined 30 to 90 day pilot beats throwing budget at five channels at once. Prioritize tactics by how fast they produce a signal, then scale only what proves itself.
- Search ads on high-intent keywords (30 days, small daily budget): target phrases tied to cost and savings rather than generic "solar" terms, since searchers using cost language convert at a noticeably higher rate.
- Satellite-targeted direct mail or digital lists (30 to 45 days): use rooftop and property data to identify homes with suitable orientation and square footage before spending on outreach, which cuts wasted contacts compared to blanket canvassing.
- Small social video tests (2 to 3 week sprints): run short-form video ads showing real installs and savings estimates to a geofenced audience, then measure cost per lead before expanding spend.
- Localized SEO (ongoing, 60 to 90 days to show movement): build city and county-level pages around installation costs, incentives, and permitting, since this channel compounds rather than resetting with every budget cycle.
- Door-to-door canvassing (ongoing): pair reps with a qualification script and a tablet-based lead form so field data flows into the same CRM as paid and organic leads.
Pro Tip: Run every new channel as a two-to-four week pilot with a fixed budget cap before deciding whether to scale it, not after a single week of noisy data.
Measuring lead quality matters more than counting raw volume. A simple qualification script, run by phone or embedded in a landing page form, should capture: does the prospect own the home, what's the roof age and material, what's the average monthly electric bill, and how soon are they ready to move forward. Track three numbers per channel: cost per lead, lead-to-appointment rate, and appointment-to-install rate. A channel that produces cheap leads but a low appointment rate is usually more expensive than it looks once you divide total spend by actual bookings.
Scaling rules keep budget decisions objective instead of emotional. Scale spend on a channel once it holds a stable cost per booked appointment across at least two consecutive pilot cycles. Pull back the moment cost per appointment rises for two cycles in a row without a clear external cause (seasonality, a changed incentive, a competitor's price move). Once a purchased-lead channel's cost per appointment consistently beats an owned channel's, that's a signal to lean on buying short-term. Once an owned channel catches up and starts beating the vendor on cost per appointment, that's your signal to start shifting budget toward building your own pipeline for the long run.
Channel Creative and Targeting That Actually Convert
Each channel needs its own hook, offer, and follow-up rhythm. Reusing one ad or script across channels is the fastest way to waste a pilot budget.
- Search: target high-intent phrases like "solar panel cost," "solar installer near me," and "solar tax credit 2026," and build a landing page with a visible savings calculator, a short form (name, address, electric bill range), and a trust element like licensing or years in business above the fold.
- Social: open video ads with a specific hook in the first three seconds, such as a real monthly bill comparison or a homeowner stating their payback period, then target lookalike audiences built from past customers in similar home-value brackets.
- Satellite and direct outreach: collect roof orientation, shading, square footage, and estimated system size before a rep ever knocks or calls, then hand reps a one-page summary per address so the first conversation references the homeowner's actual roof instead of a generic pitch.
- Follow-up sequences: text within minutes of a hot lead opting in, follow with a phone call inside the hour, and layer in a short, educational email sequence over the next five to seven days for anyone who doesn't book on the first contact.
Turning Leads Into Booked Appointments: Qualification and Routing
Every lead that enters your pipeline should answer four questions before a rep spends real time on it: do they own the home, what's the roof condition and age, what's their average monthly electric bill, and how soon are they ready to install. Leads missing two or more of these answers should route to a nurture sequence instead of a live sales queue.
Set a response SLA and automate it where possible:
- Contact hot, purchased leads within minutes of delivery, since response speed is one of the biggest levers on whether a purchased lead ever converts.
- Contact warm, inbound leads (site form fills, chat requests) within one hour.
- Auto-tag any lead with a duplicate phone number or address already in your CRM to prevent paying for or working the same homeowner twice.
- Build exclusivity rules into vendor contracts: require written confirmation that a lead was sold to your company only, not shopped to three competing installers simultaneously.
A short list isn't enough on its own. Beyond intake rules, track a small dashboard weekly: cost per lead by source, lead-to-appointment rate, appointment-to-install rate, and average days from first contact to signed contract. Appointment-to-install rate is the number worth watching most closely, since it reveals whether your sales process, not just your lead source, is the bottleneck.
What Solar Leads Really Cost, and When They Pay Back
Cost per lead varies widely by channel and by how tightly a lead is qualified before you pay for it. Paid search tends to run higher per lead than social or canvassing-generated leads, but it also tends to convert at a higher rate because the homeowner is already searching with intent. Satellite-targeted lists sit in the middle: moderate cost, but higher qualification quality since the targeting filters out unsuitable roofs before a rep ever makes contact.
Ticket size changes how much CAC you can tolerate. A $15,000 average install with healthy margin can absorb a higher cost per lead than a $6,000 add-on sale, simply because there's more room between cost and profit.
A simple ROI formula: divide total channel spend by number of signed installs to get your blended CAC, then compare that to your average margin per install. For a $15,000 average install, if your blended CAC lands at $600 and your margin per install is $4,000, you're clearing roughly $3,400 per sale before overhead. If CAC rises to $1,200 on the same install and margin, you're down to $2,800 per sale, still profitable, but worth watching if it keeps climbing.
A simple 90-day pilot budget template:
- Month 1: split budget evenly across two channels (for example, search ads and a satellite-targeted list), capped low enough to absorb a full loss without hurting operations.
- Month 2: reallocate 70% of budget toward whichever channel produced a lower cost per booked appointment, keep 30% testing a third channel.
- Month 3: commit full budget to the winning channel, and start a fresh small-budget test on a new tactic.
Staying Compliant: Consent, Do Not Call, and Recordkeeping
Buying or calling leads without clean consent records is one of the fastest ways to turn a growth channel into a legal liability. The FTC's Telemarketing Sales Rule final rule expanded recordkeeping requirements and clarified what counts as acceptable evidence of consumer consent, including call-detail records tied to each contact.
Before buying from any vendor, verify:
- A timestamped consent record showing the original opt-in form, language, and originating URL or campaign ID.
- A Do Not Call Registry scrub report dated within the last 30 days.
- Written confirmation of how long the vendor retains call logs and consent records, since the TSR's expanded recordkeeping standard sets the bar vendors should be meeting.
In-house, keep your own consent logs for every inbound form fill and recorded call, and store them for at least the retention period your state and the TSR require. The FTC's enforcement action against telemarketers who sold Do Not Call violations into the solar space shows regulators are actively pursuing this exact pattern, and installers who bought those leads without checking consent records shared in the exposure.
How an AI-Driven Growth Partner Runs This Playbook
Running pilots across five channels while tracking cost per appointment by hand is where most in-house teams stall. We built our process around AI-optimized SEO that maps keywords and technical fixes faster than manual audits, and precision ad campaigns that test creative variations in real time instead of waiting for a weekly report to tell us what's underperforming.
Our path runs pilot, then scale, then measurement: a short test on one or two channels, a reallocation toward whatever produces the lowest cost per booked appointment, then a growth-ops dashboard that keeps CAC visible every week instead of once a quarter.
Relentless execution means a pilot either earns its budget within weeks or gets cut, not nursed along for a quarter out of habit.
Pro Tip: Ask any growth partner, including us, to show a cost-per-appointment trend line before and after a pilot, not just a final lead count.
A Straight Answer on Buy vs. Build
The hybrid path works because it hedges against both failure modes: an empty pipeline and a compliance mess. Pick one of three next moves this week: test-buy a small batch of leads with a vetted vendor, start building one owned channel, or request a pilot diagnostic to see where your current spend is leaking.
— Vincent
Get a Pilot Running Instead of Guessing at Channels
We run the exact playbook above as a managed service, so you get a tested pilot without pulling your sales team into channel management. We offer multiple monthly plans for companies at different stages of testing or scaling channels, each designed to support various levels of marketing and growth operations needs.
- A pilot starts with a review of your current cost per lead and appointment rate, then a 30 to 90 day test on the one or two channels most likely to beat it.
- You get a weekly dashboard, not a quarterly report, so you can see cost per booked appointment moving in real time.
- Full plan details and service breakdowns are on our pricing page and services page.
Request a pilot diagnostic through Burly Marketing and we'll map your first 90 days before you commit to a monthly plan.
FAQ
How do you generate leads in solar?
Most installers combine paid search on high-intent keywords, satellite-targeted outreach lists, localized SEO, and door-to-door canvassing, then measure each channel's cost per booked appointment before scaling it. A short pilot of 30 to 90 days per channel, with a qualification script and fast follow-up, works better than running every channel at once with no measurement.
What is the 33% rule in solar panels?
If a reader has seen a figure referenced, it's worth asking the source what specific figure it describes rather than assuming a universal standard.
Where can I buy solar leads?
Solar leads come from telemarketing-focused vendors, satellite and property-data targeting providers, and digital lead-generation companies that run paid ads and resell the resulting contacts. Before buying from any provider, request proof of consumer consent, a recent Do Not Call scrub report, and a written refund policy, since the FTC has pursued enforcement against telemarketers who sold leads sourced from Do Not Call violations.
Why are some homeowners removing solar panels?
Public reporting on this topic points to a mix of causes including roof repairs, system or installer issues, and changing homeowner circumstances, rather than one dominant reason. The broader incentive picture still favors installation: the IRS lists solar electric property and battery storage among expenditures that qualify for the Residential Clean Energy Credit, which continues to support new installs.
How big is the solar market right now?
The U.S. installed 43.2 GWdc of solar capacity in 2025, and solar accounted for roughly half of new generation capacity additions that year. That scale is part of why lead competition, and the cost of buying leads, keeps climbing.