A CRM for a residential solar installer has to do four jobs that generic home-services CRMs were never designed for:
- Store and surface the rendered roof photo of each lead's house with panels installed. The visual is the sale.
- Carry system-specific economics on every lead card — system size in kW, 25-year production in kWh, federal ITC, and projected savings — not just a name and a phone number.
- Model a multi-stage solar pipeline: scanned QR → site-survey deposit → survey complete → proposal sent → contract signed → permits filed → install scheduled → PTO (permission to operate).
- Cluster leads by geography and utility territory. Net-metering rules, interconnection queues, and rebate eligibility all change at jurisdiction boundaries. A list view of leads is fine; a map view is essential.
Generic CRMs can be forced into this shape, but every adaptation costs friction. Here's what a solar-native CRM should have and why each piece matters.
Features a solar CRM should have
Rendered roof on every lead card
When a lead's name surfaces in your dashboard, you should immediately see what their roof looks like with panels on it — the same image they saw on the postcard or scanned on the customer portal. Solar Launch attaches the AI render to every contact automatically. No manual upload.
ITC and savings math attached to every lead
Every lead card should show estimated system size in kW, gross install cost, 30% federal ITC, net cost, and 25-year savings. These numbers drive the call. They should never live in a separate spreadsheet.
Solar-specific pipeline stages
Standard stages: Scanned QR → Paid site-survey deposit → Survey complete → Proposal sent → Contract signed → Permits filed → Install scheduled → Install complete → PTO. Compress these into "Lead → Estimate → Won/Lost" and you lose the visibility that makes solar pipelines manageable.
Map view by utility territory
You should be able to see at a glance which utility territories have clusters of paid deposits, which interconnection queues are backed up, and which neighborhoods are ripe for a follow-up campaign. Solar Launch's map view shades leads by deposit status and stage.
Auto-population from rendered campaigns
Every postcard you mail through Solar Launch creates a lead record automatically. You don't manually import a CSV. When the homeowner scans the QR, the lead enriches with scan timestamp, deposit-paid status, system-size tier viewed.
Realtime updates
When a homeowner pays a site-survey deposit, your dashboard updates without a refresh. Solar Launch uses Supabase realtime — deposit events appear within seconds, so reps can call while interest is fresh.
Why Solar Launch's CRM is different
Solar Launch wasn't built to be a CRM — it was built to be the complete acquisition + sales workflow for residential solar. The CRM is the natural output of that workflow:
- You don't enter contacts manually — they appear when a homeowner scans a postcard or pays a deposit.
- You don't tag leads by source — Solar Launch knows which campaign each lead came from.
- You don't manually move leads through stages — deposit-paid, survey-complete, and contract-signed events trigger stage changes automatically.
- You don't write neighbor follow-up workflows — same-block postcards fire from the install-complete event on the same data model.
The trade-off: Solar Launch is opinionated about how a residential solar business should run. If you want a generic CRM you can shape into any business, use Jobber. If you want a deeper post-sale ops + financing pipeline at scale, run Solar Launch alongside Sunbase or Solo. If you want the acquisition workflow built for solar specifically, Solar Launch is the only tool that combines AI rendering, USPS postcard mailing, Google Solar API savings math, and deposit-paid CRM in one place.
For a deeper feature comparison, see our full solar software guide.
The CRM that ships with the renders, the savings math, and the deposits.
No setup fee, no monthly subscription. $1 per mailed solar quote.
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