SUNGEVITY SOLAR
SOLAR QUOTING & SALES TOOL
THE PROJECT
We wanted to deliver the simplest and easiest way for people to go solar online.
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The existing sales process had homeowners interested in going solar scheduling an online screen share presentation/meeting with a salesperson, who walked them through a complicated presentation; utilizing a sales slide deck, switching screens to show a .pdf with electricity usage and utility costs charts and graphs and sending documents that had to be signed, back and forth between the salesperson and the potential customer.
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I was tasked with designing a sales tool that would be; scalable, provide a consistent customer experience, be easy to train new sales staff on, and alleviate a mountain of pain and inefficiency inherent to the sales process (which overflowed to our supporting operations and finance teams).
STEP 1 / EMPATHIZE & DEFINE
Let's alleviate a mountain of sales and business operations pain!
I started working with the product manager and sales manager to deep dive into the existing sales process. I created a comprehensive workflow diagram that accounted for key steps in the sales process (customer education about the basics of utility rate increases over time, showing the customers 2-3 Satellite images of their home with different solar panel layouts and power output options, selection of payment options, etc) and mapped that to our business process.
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This was a crucial step that allowed us to discover existing sales and business processes that were inefficient, slow or repetitive, or otherwise unwittingly hampering our customer experience. The project manager and I met with a multitude of stakeholders over many weeks to discover and unpack process pain points and opportunities to improve in support of our new Solar Quoting and Sales Tool.
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Our next step was to interview and observe the highest and lowest performing sales people to understand what made a good sales experience vs a bad experience for our customers. I recorded key points of good sales experienced and noted what to avoid and used this research and data to begin ideation.
Our takeaways:
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Deep understanding of sales peoples pain points
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A clear list of sales management's wants and needs for a software solution
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A good understanding of our customer's pain points throughout the sales and post sales process.
CUSTOMER GOALS
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Get a transparent clear and no pressure understanding of what a home solar power system can do for me and my household
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Share custom solar system design options, financing options and savings with my spouse.
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Easily sign and store documents online.
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Deliver a sales tool to provide a consistent international selling experience.
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Ensure our sales experience is scalable
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Drive efficiency by unifying many different processes into 1 online tool
BUSINESS GOALS
STEP 2 / IDEATE
Explore design possibilities and vet ideas with sales stakeholders
We held a regularly occurring series of working sessions with our top salespeople and the sales manager. Our goal was to map out the best sales process to deliver the best customer journey possible while reducing or eliminating deeper-rooted business process pain points and bottlenecks.
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Earlier in the year, I had expressed the need for large whiteboards to record the multitude of design work I was generating for a number of projects that were running in parallel. I migrated our project work from physical folders and digital notes and digital designs to a physical space that had visibility and could easily be collaborated on. This provided a massive benefit as salespeople were often busy or had to cancel design meetings to focus on closing deals, now we could catch each other and have ad hoc conversations "on the board" to discuss new ideas and review iterative improvements on workflows.
My master project whiteboard with customer user flows, sales user flows, working ideas and most recent versions of designs printed and annotated with the latest comments. This board was a key collaboration tool and facilitated valuable ad-hoc conversations that a "digital/online only" approach would not have.
STEP 3 / PROTOTYPE & TEST
Design Low-fi & High-fi prototypes and test with sales teams
I designed 30+ versions of our online quoting and sales tool in Sketch and created clickable prototypes InVision which we thoroughly tested with our sales teams. I collected feedback from each of these sessions which we rolled into 3 formal rounds of improvements before we delivered our final design for the Sungevity sales tool.
There were many strong opinions and crucial layout, content, and data visualization decisions that had to be made. Based on our user research, I was the proxy voice of our customers and advocated for design decisions that we discovered provided the most clarity and empowerment to customers as they learned about what solar power could do to save their household money, worked through aesthetic decisions about what solar panels would look like on their roof, addressed concerns about rain and snow and hail impacts, and found the right payment choice for them.
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Throughout this process, I championed the concept and benefits of simplicity and the sales manager championed the idea of customer empowerment through choice and decision ownership. These hallmarks of good user experience drove empathy for our customers into every conversation we had with business stakeholders from Sales to Finance to Operations and our Development team and gave us all common language and purpose.
 Welcome PageWelcome page introduces your personal Solar Sales Consultant and gives an overview of the solar experience with Sungevity. |  Step 1 Home Energy ProfileA comprehensive review of your historical energy usage and costs. |
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 Step 2b Select Solar Options Step 2bExplore your solar system designs, financing options and savings (Monthly view) |  Step 2a Select Solar OptionsExplore your solar system designs, financing options and savings (20-Year view) |
 3a Sign My Agreements-CompleteA review of your system selections and new energy usage and savings profile with solar. |  iQuote CompleteReview of next steps in the solar process |
STEP 4 / LAUNCH, ANALYZE PERFORMANCE TEST, LEARN & IMPROVE
Launch Sungevity Quoting Sales Tool and Business Impact
The new design was a hit. The sales team implemented a new tool training program and ramped up their sales folks on the new process and online selling experience and we crushed it! There were hiccups and some additional development work to improve data handling from the sales tool web app to our back end business operations systems - but overall this project was a smashing success. We delivered:
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1 international solar quoting and sales platform.
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1 consistent sales experience.
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Simplified sales training and faster ramp up.
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Enabled business to scale with an additional sales office opening in Kansas City and pilot market entry (with localized instances of our sales tool) in Germany and Italy.
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Layed the foundation for the sales tool to evolve into a full self service online solar purchasing tool.
CUSTOMER GOALS
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Get a transparent clear and no pressure understanding of what a home solar power system can do for me and my household
-
Easily sign and store documents online.
-
Share custom solar system design options, financing options and savings with my spouse.
-
Deliver a sales tool to provide a consistent international selling experience.
-
Ensure our sales experience is scalable
-
Drive efficiency by unifying many different processes into 1 online tool
BUSINESS GOALS