The short answer
The KPIs that run a solar company are speed to lead, contact rate, appointment set rate, sat rate, close rate, cost per sat appointment by source, average job value, gross margin per install, review count and rating, install-to-commission time, referral rate and pipeline stage age. Twelve numbers, most of them weekly.
- 01Cost per sat appointment by source is the single most decision-changing number.
- 02Track rates between stages, not just totals. Totals move with volume and hide everything.
- 03Weekly for the sales funnel, monthly for cost and margin, quarterly for the rest.
- 04A metric nobody acts on is a cost, not an asset.
Most solar dashboards show thirty numbers and change nobody's behaviour. The useful set is smaller, and the test for inclusion is whether a bad reading would make somebody do something different this week.
Weekly: the funnel
| Metric | What it tells you | When to act |
|---|---|---|
| Speed to lead (median) | Whether you are first | Anything over 15 minutes |
| Contact rate | Whether follow-up is working | Under 40% |
| Appointment set rate | Whether qualification is working | Falling two weeks running |
| Appointment sat rate | Whether bookings are real | Under 70% of set |
| Close rate on sat | Whether the sales process works | Below your own baseline |
Track these as rates between stages, not as totals. Totals move with lead volume and will tell you that a terrible month was fine because you bought more leads. See solar sales pipeline stages.
Monthly: the money
- 01
Cost per sat appointment, by source
Channel spend divided by appointments that actually happened. The single most decision-changing number in a solar company, and almost nobody calculates it. See how much do solar leads cost.
- 02
Cost per closed job, by source
The same again, one stage further. This is where cheap lead sources are exposed as expensive.
- 03
Average job value
Moving up means your mix is improving or your pricing is holding. Moving down quietly is worth catching early.
- 04
Gross margin per install
Revenue minus equipment, labour and subcontract. Revenue growth on falling margin is the classic way a solar company grows itself into trouble.
Monthly: reputation and delivery
- Net new reviews. Should roughly track your install count. If it does not, the request automation has broken. See how to get more reviews for solar installers.
- Average rating, watched for drift rather than for a decimal point.
- Install to commission days. The gap that generates most customer complaints.
- Referral rate. Jobs originating from a past customer, as a share of all jobs. The best single proxy for whether customers are actually happy.
- Pipeline stage age. How long deals sit. A pipeline full of ninety-day-old proposals is not a pipeline.
What should you stop tracking?
- 01Total leads. Meaningless without the rates underneath it, and it is the number most often used to declare a good month.
- 02Website visits. Sessions do not pay wages. Track enquiries and the enquiry rate instead.
- 03Social media followers. No demonstrated relationship to solar revenue at installer scale.
- 04Email open rates. Increasingly unreliable to measure and not worth a decision.
- 05Quotes issued. High quote volume with a low close rate is a cost, not an achievement.
How do you make the numbers exist at all?
Most of these require one thing: every lead has a source, recorded automatically, and it survives into the appointment and job record. If source is typed by hand, it will be blank or wrong for a third of your leads and every per-source number above becomes a guess.
That is a systems requirement rather than a reporting one, which is why it belongs in the software conversation. See choosing a CRM for a solar company and do solar companies need a CRM.
Turning numbers into a weekly meeting that is short
The reason most KPI work dies is that it becomes a reporting exercise rather than a decision one. A format that survives looks like this, and it takes twenty minutes.
- 01
Five numbers on a screen, not a deck
The weekly funnel rates, this week against the four-week average. Nothing else. A deck takes an hour to build and nobody reads it twice.
- 02
One question per number
Is this better or worse than the four-week average, and why. If nobody knows why, that is the action: find out before next week.
- 03
One thing to change
Per week, not per number. Five simultaneous changes mean you learn nothing about which one worked.
- 04
Write down what you expect to happen
Before the change. Then next week you find out whether you understood the business or got lucky, and that distinction compounds.
A metric nobody acts on is a cost. Twelve numbers somebody looks at beats thirty on a dashboard nobody opens.
Stop reading, start booking
Volt builds and runs the system this article describes: the site, the follow-up, the inbox and the review funnel, for $297 a month.
No contracts. Cancel anytime.
Common questions
- What is the most important KPI for a solar company?
- Cost per sat appointment by source, because it is the only number that fairly compares lead channels and it usually contradicts what cost per lead suggests. Speed to lead is the close second, because it is the cheapest to improve.
- How often should I review solar KPIs?
- Funnel rates weekly, cost and margin monthly, reputation and delivery monthly, and a full review quarterly. Weekly reviews of monthly metrics produce noise and bad decisions.
- What is a good close rate for solar?
- Industry benchmarking commonly puts lead-to-sale between 8% and 12%, with stronger operators above 15%. Your own trend matters more than the benchmark, because close rate depends heavily on lead source mix.
