Plumbers
Most plumbers are one bad month away from a quiet diary, and the reason is almost always the same: every job is a stranger. The fix is not more adverts, it is a handful of accounts that call you without searching.
How solar installers find customers when the subsidy changes
Solar is the only trade here whose demand curve is set by politicians and wholesale energy prices. Building a business on either is how installers go from a two-year waiting list to redundancies.
Where the work actually comes from
Domestic solar demand is violently cyclical. Energy prices spike and enquiries triple; a subsidy scheme closes and they halve overnight. Installers who scale headcount to a boom and buy leads at boom prices are the ones who disappear when the cycle turns, and the cycle always turns.
The stabilising factors are all the same shape: work that does not depend on this month's incentive. Battery retrofits to the systems installed three and four years ago. Servicing, monitoring and inverter replacement across an installed base. Commercial rooftops, where the buyer is doing arithmetic on a twenty-year asset rather than reacting to a headline. And EV charger integration, which arrives with the same customer.
Commercial solar is the most under-served part of the market in most countries. A warehouse, farm building, care home or factory has an enormous roof, a large daytime load and a finance director who will read a payback model seriously. The sales cycle is longer and the deal is larger, and crucially it is driven by a spreadsheet rather than by a grant deadline.
The channels that produce work
- Your own installed base, which almost nobody works. Every system you have fitted is a warmed customer for a battery retrofit, an inverter replacement, a monitoring service, an EV charger or a panel addition. They already trust you, the roof survey is done, and the sale takes a fraction of the effort of a new customer. Most installers have this list sitting in an invoicing system and never contact it.
- Commercial rooftops, sold as a financial model. Warehouses, factories, farms, care homes and cold stores have large roofs and high daytime consumption, which is the ideal solar profile. The pitch is a payback period and a rate of return, delivered to a finance director or an owner, and it survives policy changes because the arithmetic does.
- Referral, structured rather than hoped for. Solar is a high-consideration, highly visible purchase — the neighbours can literally see it — and satisfied customers are asked about it constantly. A formal referral arrangement with a real incentive consistently outperforms bought leads in this sector, and it costs nothing until it works.
- Partners who meet the customer first. Roofers, electricians, architects, developers, estate agents and heat pump installers all encounter households and businesses making energy decisions before you do. A reciprocal arrangement with a few of them produces qualified enquiries at zero acquisition cost.
The accounts worth approaching
Every trade on this site has a commercial customer base sitting behind the public one — businesses that buy repeatedly, book in advance and pay on account. They are also, conveniently, a list: each one has a website, a phone number and usually a named contact. These are the ones worth a deliberate approach.
| Who | Why they repeat |
|---|---|
| Warehouses, factories and logistics operators | Very large roofs and heavy daytime demand, which produces the fastest payback figures in the market. |
| Farms and agricultural businesses | Barn and shed roofs, high pump and refrigeration loads, land availability and a culture of long-horizon capital investment. |
| Care homes, hotels and leisure centres | Continuous daytime consumption, long ownership horizons and rising energy costs that make the case without any subsidy. |
| Property developers and construction firms | New builds increasingly require renewable provision, which puts solar into the specification across an entire development. |
| Facilities and estate management firms | They advise multiple sites on energy spend and can put you in front of several owners at once. |
Searches that build that list
Each of these is a business type run against the towns and cities you cover. One search per line, every location at once.
- warehouses, logistics companies, manufacturers
- farms, agricultural businesses
- care homes, hotels, leisure centres
- property developers, construction firms
- facilities management, energy consultants
What quietly empties the pipeline
- Buying leads at boom prices. Shared solar leads are among the most expensive and most resold in any trade, and the economics only work while demand is peaking.
- Never contacting past customers. An installed base is the cheapest, warmest market a solar company owns, and battery retrofit demand is sitting in it untouched.
- Selling on subsidy rather than on payback. When the scheme changes, a business built on the incentive has no argument left; one built on arithmetic still does.
- Treating commercial like a bigger domestic job. Finance directors want a model, warranties, insurance-backed guarantees and references from similar sites, not a doorstep quote.
Questions
01 How do solar installers get commercial customers?
By approaching businesses whose consumption profile suits solar and leading with numbers rather than with panels. Warehouses, factories, cold stores, farms, care homes and hotels all use most of their power during daylight, which is what makes the payback work. Build a list of those businesses in your region, approach the owner or finance director in writing with an indicative model based on their roof area and sector, and expect a long sales cycle — the reward is a job worth many domestic installs and a reference that opens the next one.
02 Are bought solar leads worth it?
Rarely, and least of all when demand is high. Solar leads are among the most expensive and most frequently resold in any trade, so you are typically quoting against three or four installers on price for a customer who filled in a form on a comparison site. They can bridge a quiet period, but any installer whose pipeline depends on them is running a business whose costs rise exactly when competition does. Referral, installed base and commercial approach all cost less and convert better.
03 What happens to solar demand when a subsidy ends?
Domestic enquiries fall sharply and then partially recover as the market reprices, while commercial demand barely moves because it was never driven by the scheme in the first place. The installers who ride it out are the ones with servicing revenue, a battery retrofit pipeline into their existing customers and at least some commercial work. It is the clearest argument in this trade for not building the whole company around whichever incentive is current.
04 Should solar installers offer batteries and EV chargers?
Yes — they are the natural second and third sale to a customer you have already won, and they are far less exposed to subsidy cycles. A battery retrofit to a four-year-old system needs no new customer acquisition, no new roof survey and very little persuasion, and EV charger integration reaches the same household at the moment they change car. Both keep revenue flowing in the periods when new installations slow down.
Selling to solar installers instead?
Solar installers buy panels, inverters, batteries, mounting systems, design and proposal software, scaffolding, finance products and lead services. The sector is well-documented online with strong websites and LinkedIn presence, so pairing Maps with web search and LinkedIn produces a fuller list than Maps alone.
Other trades
Electricians
Electricians have an advantage almost no other trade has: a large slice of their market is legally required to hire them on a schedule. Most never build a business around it.
HVAC contractors
This trade has a structural problem no amount of advertising solves: demand arrives in two spikes and disappears in between. The businesses that survive it sell maintenance, not repairs.
Roofers
Roofing has the worst reputation of any trade and the highest-value jobs in domestic work. Both facts point at the same strategy: stop competing with door-knockers and start selling to people who buy roofs on purpose.
The commercial half is a list
The accounts above all publish their contact details. GoLeadX searches a business type across every town you cover, crawls each site for the address, verifies it, and hands you a CSV. A search takes about a minute.
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