HubSpot: A possible Answer to Your Solar Tech Stack Hopes and Dreams

If you’re reading this, odds are you own and/or operate a solar company and you have CRM PTSD.

You’ve probably lived in Spreadsheetsville (as we all have), or you are currently living in Spreadsheetsville and looking for a way out.

Finding the perfect CRM is probably a fruitless effort, because none of them are perfect. Sometimes it feels like finding the right CRM is an exercise in ticking most of your boxes and keeping your team members from inciting a mutiny, than actually discovering that holy grail that will do everything for you.

Like most solar installers, Ipsun Solar lived in Spreadsheetsville and then in a program with limited functionality and no open API (BuilderTrend).

We have no regrets, because spreadsheets are fine when you’re doing less than 50 jobs per year, and a more basic CRM is fine when you’re doing only slightly more than that.

When you really need to invest in a CRM is when you realize that you just can’t keep track of things anymore, that your team is growing to more than around 15 people, and your growth is consistent and significant.

Ipsun Solar reached this point around 2 years into its founding, and we were fortunate enough to choose HubSpot, which has helped us scale tremendously.

Initially it was used just for sales and marketing, with operations continuing to live outside of HubSpot.

Once we saw that we could do everything in HubSpot, we moved all functions there, including:

• a) Sales and Marketing
• b) Operations,
• c) O&M
• d) Feedback Surveys
• e) Reporting
• f) Workflows and Automations

What we spend on HubSpot pays for itself many times over, which is what you would hope from any piece of software.

What makes HubSpot truly special is that it has the maximum amount of functionality with the most intuitive user interface, and the least need for developers, coders, or IT specialists.

Most people who are moderately tech savvy (even those who have never coded anything in their lives), can build out all the different functions in HubSpot, with the help of their extremely knowledgeable helpline.

HubSpot also has a community of 85,000+ members where you can trade and “upvote” ideas for feature requests, so HubSpot’s developers know what to prioritize next.

HubSpot also has a very flexible open API, which you can connect to any number of external programs (e.g. Celigo, Netsuite, Sunvoy, TSheets, etc).

This means that you can have your ERP, for instance, living in Netsuite for accounting and inventory purposes, while the rest of your operations (Sales, PMs, etc.) are living in HubSpot.

HubSpot doesn’t have user limits so you can have your entire company in the software without any additional cost.

The “kanban” style makes it easy for everyone to understand and use, and the workflows mean you can create mind blowing automations for just about anything you can imagine.

Did I mention reporting?

The reporting in HubSpot is unbelievable.

Ipsun Solar has over 500 reports on every topic imaginable (see our blog on the Top 5 reports we use).

There is virtually no limit to the reporting you can do, and the impact to the business from having that information is as hard to measure as it is profound.

We have reports on sales over time (both residential and commercial), including weekly, monthly, quarterly, in comparison to the same week and month last year, as well as breakdowns by salesperson, sales cycle times, and conversion rates.

We can generate a report for our distributors to see our sales volume by solar module and inverter for forecasting and planning purposes.

There are reports on our backlog, so we know exactly what it is at any given time, as well as how long it’s taking our team to go from any one stage in our process to any other stage.

Every department has advanced reporting that continues to evolve on a nearly daily basis.

Sunvoy is also a HubSpot Partner, which means we can help solar installers implement HubSpot for their businesses.

Being a HubSpot partner agency involves far more than simply selling the software and showing off the badge.

We use HubSpot every day, whether we're writing a blog, making advanced reports, or supporting our sales team.

We are experts in the HubSpot for solar installers, and we test out all our functions before you recommend them to you.