What is waiting two days to answer a solar enquiry actually costing you?
A rooftop solar enquiry does not arrive the way a clinic enquiry does. The homeowner has usually already decided they want solar and is now working through a process that takes weeks: a loan being sanctioned, a structure check on the roof, and three or four installers quoted side by side. A reply that lands in eight hours is not competing for attention on the spot, it is arriving into a process that was already running. That does not make slow replies free, but it does change what losing a lead means, which is why this page argues with the calculator rather than just running it.
Presets are illustrative starting points, not industry benchmarks. Replace every number with your own.
- Extra deals per month
- +2.9
- Close rate today → target
- 4.0% → 7.7%
- Deals per month today → target
- 3.2 → 6.1
- Lead intent gone cold before your first reply
- 50%
How it works: close rate at a given wait = your instant-reply close rate × 0.5^(wait ÷ cool-off time). Cool-off time is your assumption for how fast a lead loses interest; the low and high figures use double and half of it. This is a planning model, not a measured result. To find your real cool-off time, compare the close rates of leads you answered fast against leads you answered slowly in your own CRM.
The preset is a starting point, and a coarse one
It opens at 80 enquiries a month, a ₹1.2 lakh system and an 8% close rate on an instant reply. Do the arithmetic before trusting the output: 80 × 8% is 6.4 installations a month if you answered every enquiry on the spot, and every rupee the calculator produces is a share of that 6.4. Those three numbers are illustrative starting points chosen to be arguable, not measurements of anything. Replace them with your own enquiry count, your own average system size and your own close rate, and the output becomes an argument about your business rather than a statement about solar installers.
Where a solar enquiry actually comes from
They do not all arrive through one channel, and the channels are not equivalent. A marketplace or aggregator enquiry tends to arrive the same evening the homeowner has contacted two other installers, so the base close rate is doing quiet work in there and may be too generous. A referral arrives carrying someone else's credibility and a different expectation of how fast you will reply. A showroom walk-in is a conversation you had in person, and a delay measured from when it happened is not comparable with a delay measured from when a form was submitted. The calculator has one close rate and one response time, which means it flattens all of that. Split your own numbers by channel before you argue with the result.
The customer's timeline is not your response time
This is where solar is genuinely awkward. The homeowner is already inside a process they drive, not one you control, and you cannot see it from the other end. Two things follow. A slow reply can be decisive, because the first installer to book a survey is usually the one doing the work that wins the job, and a site survey is the point at which the deal stops being theoretical. A fast reply can also be wasted, because a quote sent to someone who is three weeks from comparing anyone is not competing for anything. The model cannot separate those two cases, because it only knows your side of the call, not theirs.
Test the assumption against your own pipeline
Before treating the output as a number, check whether your own data supports the decay. Pull your closed and lost deals and sort them by how long the first reply took. If the enquiries you answered inside an hour closed at a materially different rate from the ones you answered the same day, the shape of the model is doing real work and the rupee figure is worth arguing about. If the two groups closed at a similar rate, the cool-off assumption is flattering the tool, the figure is an upper bound, and no process improvement will recover it. The preset's 480-minute cool-off is the input most worth replacing and the hardest to replace honestly.
The cool-off assumption is the weakest number on this page
The curve assumes a lead goes cold because nobody answered. In solar, the person who is not answering may simply have gone to get a loan sanctioned, decided the roof is not ready this year, or settled on a quote you never saw. In those cases a slow reply is not a lost sale, and the rupee figure will overstate what faster replies would have earned you. Read it as an upper bound unless your own pipeline shows the delay is what loses the deal. The ₹1.2 lakh average also hides the gap between a small residential array and a large commercial installation, so run it per segment.
The same model, opened on a different trade
Questions buyers ask first
Our leads come from a marketplace where the homeowner contacts three installers the same evening. Does that break the model?
It stresses the base close rate more than it stresses the reply time. Those enquiries are already being parallel-processed before you see them, so an 8% instant-reply close rate is probably too generous. Lower the close rate before you lower the response time, otherwise you will spend effort fixing a number that was wrong to begin with. The decay still applies to whoever replies first, so a marketplace lead is a case where the delay genuinely is what loses the deal.
We close on a site survey rather than on the first call. Does a fast first reply still matter?
Yes, but only at the start of the chain. First reply is what gets a survey booked; the survey is what produces a quote; the quote is what the homeowner compares against the others. Speed does not need to be uniform along that chain, and measuring time-to-survey instead of time-to-first-reply will hide the problem worth fixing. What matters is that nobody is left without an answer while they are still deciding whether to take the next step.
Should we answer solar enquiries at night and on Sundays?
Only if you can do it honestly. Evening enquiries often mean the homeowner is comparing quotes they received that day, and a reply that acknowledges them and gives a firm time for a real conversation is worth more than silence. A reply at 10pm promising a site survey by Friday and delivering it is worth having. What does not work is an auto-responder that implies availability you do not have, because an enquiry handled perfunctorily is often worse off than one simply left alone.
How do I find a cool-off figure for my business instead of guessing one?
From your own CRM, by comparing the close rate of leads answered within an hour against leads answered later the same day. That is a number about your pipeline, and it is the only version of it that means anything. If you cannot pull those two groups today, run the range end to end and quote yourself the low figure rather than the middle one, then treat the middle one as a ceiling until you have the data to replace it.
Make the first reply a recorded event
In NoxOrigin an enquiry becomes a lead with a source rather than a note in someone’s notebook. It gets an owner, and the next action is a dated work item on the opportunity rather than a calendar entry in one person’s account. Shared customer conversations stay attached to the customer record, so a reply waiting on someone is visible to the business rather than to one phone.