Send the proposal from Nearmap on OpenSolar
This module is ideal for:
Nearmap on OpenSolar Admins and Team Members
At the end of this module you will:
Your design’s done, your proposal template is ready, now all you need to do is shoot it off to your customer so they can sign it off and pay that deposit.
In this session we’re going to take a look at some final setup, and then what the proposal you’ll send to your customer actually looks like. You’ll see the different ways you can send it and what happens when they accept it.
Let’s go!
Check site details
Back in the Module “Design with Nearmap on OpenSolar”, you had the opportunity to do some admin before you started placing panels on the roof. Before you generate your customer’s proposal, you have another chance to get some customer and site details into the system.
- Head over to the Projects Zone and bring our project into view.
- To the right under Site Details, you can select useful characteristics of the project such as the type of roof, number of storys, etc.
As you saw in Module 2 - “Set things up”, any costs associated with theses characteristics will be calculated into your proposal.
- Scroll down to the Electricity Usage section to enter bill information and electricity usage. You can even enter hourly billing intervals, say for commercial jobs.
If you don't have a bill, , it's fine, just leave it as default and OpenSolar will calculate based on the local usage data source. - On the right, under Electricity Utility, choose the customer’s current tariff from OpenSolar’s database of tariff or create your own tariff if you need.
- Upload any spec sheets to the proposal by clicking the UPLOAD button towards to the bottom right. Drag and drop your file, head over to file tags and type in sales, choose "Sales Proposal - Equipment Documentation", and that'll ensure that the spec sheet that you've attached will embed itself into your interactive proposal as a link, or it'll be a page within the PDF version of your proposal.
Take a look at the proposal
You can go straight from your design to the proposal: Click My Energy then Save & Continue.
If you have logged out you can either:
- Click on My Energy and find your project.
- From Projects Zone, click the Interactive proposal icon against your project.
The proposal URL you can see here is a secure shareable link. It's good to note your unique project ID at the end. At the top of the proposal is your logo and beneath that is a message to your customer from you (you enter this against the project itself in the Projects Zone). And then your company’s about us blurb, (which you set up in Company Basics in the set things up video.)
If you continue to the proposal, this is what it looks like for your customer.
- Across the top are some key featured figures – OpenSolar has about 25 to 30 that you can choose from, but you can only display up to four.
- To the right are your system options. If you’re offering multiple system designs, all you customer needs to do is click on a system, and the related information for that system (including the image) displays in the proposal body.
- The customer can arrow through the images: the Vertical image and any Oblique images you designated at the design stage to appear on the proposal.
- Scrolling down a bit you’ll see the payment option. This example only has cash. If you had included other payment options, there’d be a drop down for your customer to click and select their preferred payment method.
- The system hardware section displays the components of the system you click. Your customer can view details, specs and even play a promotional video of the selected hardware, if it’s included in the component setup.
- System performance displays the seasonal solar output of the selected system. Click the link to view daily performance by season, week, day and weekend. Again, you add this drill down feature when you set up the proposal template.
- The electricity bill savings sections lets you showcase to your customer the savings of their new solar system compared with their most recent power bill. And they can drill down to view details. If you don't have a previous bill for the customer, that's absolutely fine because OpenSolar will base its calculations and projections on the usage data source for that location. If you added any tariffs at design stage, they’ll be included here.
- The Net Financial Impact is derived from the type of payment option that you've selected. In this example it’s the cash option. Your customer can drill into that information by launching the detailed annual financial table from the link.
- A neat animation displays how the systems works, including energy feedback into the grid. Here you can see the two systems, one with and one without battery.
All of these helpful graphs are customizable. So if you don't want to include any in your proposal, you can remove them from the proposal. Jut check back in on the previous module - “Create a Stunning Proposal”.
PDF version
If you don't also want to use the interactive version of the proposal, you can generate the proposal to PDF, and then just send it out by email.
Towards the bottom of the interactive proposal you'll find a Download Proposal button.
Check project details
Before you send that proposal to your customer, there are a few things you need to check.
- Head over to the Projects Zone.
- Select your project if you haven’t got it already in view.
What you see here is a preview of what the customer is going to proceed with. On the top right hand corner here, you have a mini CRM and these little stages here are the stages of your project. - As you've completed the system designs, you can click on that. This will date and timestamp that item to help you keep track of your project.
- On the left is the contact information. If you didn't put it in at the beginning, you can enter it at this stage, just by clicking the + button and entering the details. If you already have the customer in the system, you can "Assign from Existing Contact" and just start typing their name.
Once you've assigned the contact across, hit SAVE and the green SEND INVITATION button will be enabled for you to send the interactive proposal to your customer.
Send the proposal to your customer
Once you've pressed SEND INVITATION your proposal is now with your customer. You'll receive an email confirmation that your customer has viewed it.
Here’s where the CRM is super helpful, but not essential if you have other ways of managing your projects. We’ll take a quick look now.
Over on the left is a Planned Activity section. You could set yourself a task with a reminder to follow up the customer.
- Press the + button then select “call (outbound)" then enter something like “Follow up the proposal”.
- Now you can create a task for yourself with a reminder by simply assigning this follow up to yourself and adding a schedule, say nine o'clock tomorrow morning, it might be a 15 minute conversation.
- Once you save there’ll be a reminder task for you in the CRM.
Anything that you do will be recorded here in the project history. And then once you're going ahead with the sale, the following items will be populated for you: the assigned team member, the valid until, any tags assigned to your project, the contract date, the sold system, any notes and any transactions that have happened with your sale.
Accepting the proposal
It’s a brilliant proposal, and our customer is going to accept. Here’s how they’d do it. From the interactive proposal, all they need to do is press Accept Proposal. After this a dialog appears summarizing the amounts payable and presenting the terms and conditions. Then they simply read your terms and conditions, enter their credit card details, sign off and press Confirm and Pay. If you don’t offer credit card payments, or the customer prefers another payment method, they can do an offline payment by entering bank details, PayPal, BPAY or pay ID before they sign off and confirm and pay.
Closing
Congratulations! You’ve just learned how to set up Nearmap on OpenSolar for your business, how to use Nearmap imagery to create an accurate design and how to create and send an impressive proposal. We are not done yet. We’ve saved the coolest to last. Please have a look at Module 6, where you'll learn how, with Nearmap’s 3D digital surface model, you can create your solar design in 3D and analyze the shadowing on your systems any time of day, any day of the year.
