-
Freedom Forever is one the largest and fastest growing solar installation companies in the U.S. The custom internal software platform has and continues to be one of the most critical aspects of the business’s rapid success – within the last handful of years revenues have doubled year over year — earning Freedom Forever five consecutive years on the Inc. 5000 list. With this type of rapid growth, the product and software teams play an essential role in managing the increased sales and install volume that keeps the business rapidly at pace.
Freedom Forever Leads Management
Project Background
Freedom Forever’s Sales Portal includes a number of software tools developed for our internal marketing team as well as our partner solar dealers and their sales teams. One unique aspect of selling solar is that a deal isn’t truly closed until the panels have been installed. This makes the relationship between the sales rep and installer important — neither party makes money if the job is not properly installed and working. For this reason, Freedom Forever has exclusive partnerships with dealer companies supporting them through the entire process as well as sourcing and distributing leads to the best reps and dealers in exchange for being their go-to installer for all sales.
This project focuses primarily on the relationship between our external sales teams and the marketing arm of Freedom Forever — specifically the Freedom Generated lead appointments we source and send to partner sales dealers. The following are useful definitions related to the project:
Leads Dashboard: A light CRM for sales users (execs, managers, and reps) to manage and nurture leads until they are converted to projects and sold.
Leads Pipeline: A tool used by the marketing arm of the business where they receive new lead appointments, captured through the marketing funnel. The Leads Pipeline is used to qualify and dispatch new lead appointments to sales reps. Dispatched appointments are sent to the Leads Dashboard.
Dealer Generated Leads: We user the term Dealer Generated Leads to refer to leads the sales dealers sourced themselves via their own marketing. They must be transferred to our system manually or via API in order for the sales users to close those deals and submit projects for install with Freedom Forever.
Freedom Generated Leads: Appointments/leads generated and qualified through the marketing arm of our business. Freedom Generated Appointments benefit our dealers because we use our own marketing resources to capture and qualify leads and set them up with appointments, cutting out time and money they spend on marketing and door knocking.
-
The overarching business goal in relation to our Freedom Generated Leads is to be as efficient as we can in distributing the appointments we’ve sourced. We also want to ensure we send appointments to the dealers and reps with the best chance of closing those leads based on their closing percentages (number of appointments/number of sales over the last 60 days). We invest our resources in sourcing these appointments and make around $4k more per sale from Freedom Generated Leads compared to Dealer Generated Leads.
Ensuring the marketing team is able to successfully handle a large increase in marketing spending and lead volume.
-
Over a relatively short amount of time, the workflows the marketing team were using to dispatch appointments via the Leads Pipeline had changed and they were continuing to evolve rapidly. (I joined the product team just as they were overhauling a large update to the Leads Pipeline tool, parts of which became outdated due to the evolving work flows and strategies.)
Our challenge was finding the best solutions to improve their work flows in time for an expected increase in sales volume.
The Process
Our process to address and improve the success rate of our spending on leads and being able to handle a doubling of our sales volume began after we had grown and restructured our software departments. The software engineering team was broken up into three teams of developers, each focusing on a suite of tools. Each dev team was paired with a product manager and a product designer. I was assigned to Sales Operations, so working with our Product Manager, we began to tackle the enhancements and updates needed for Freedom Generated Lead distribution and management. The general steps of our process included:
Rediscovery
Problem Identification
Solution Exploration, Testing, and Validation
Re-discovery
Weekly meetings with the marketing executive stakeholders.
Shadowing the marketing team to understand their updated workflows, discover pain points, and identify other enhancements or quick wins.
Validated designs we had in progress and designs we could repurpose.
Iteration #1
Problem Identification
Business Problems:
Marketing spending was not netting enough revenue
Spending was going to be increasing, sales leads expected to double
Closing percentage for Freedom Generated leads were hovering in the single digits around 9% on average.
Software Problems:
New work flows no longer aligned with some of the tool’s features
The data the tool was surfacing related to Sales Reps’ closing percentages didn’t align with the marketing team’s data.
Users were relying too much on manual tasks and spreadsheets taking up too much of their time.
The appointments they spent time assigning to the best reps in the correct territories were getting re-assigned by sales managers and/or were not being actioned or worked, effecting the success close rates of Freedom Generated appointments.
Software flows gave them a loophole to hold onto lead they weren’t actually working.
Marketing team had no quick visibility into sales rep’s availability.
Solution Exploration, Testing, and Validation
Cut Out the Middleman & Merge the Two Tables:
As the marketing team’s workflow evolved, we tried a simple tweak to the flow to improve Freedom Generated Appointments.
Originally, a batch of appointments would be assigned to a Dealer and distributed among one or two Sales Mangers (based on the Dealer’s overall closing percentage). The Sales Manager would then need to assign out each appointment to their best sales reps. Therefore, we had initially focused on enhancements to our more external users to help Sales Managers distribute appointments to their team via the bulk assign drawer.
Results:
After initiating and testing that solution, the results based on user feedback from the marketing team was improved overall but additional issues. Since internal manager news their team’s availability they were better able to avoid sending reps appointments they couldn’t take. Through looking at the data closely we were also able to see that Sales Managers were often overriding the marketing assignments in a number of some cases — therefore appointments were not going to their best reps but potential based on other personal motivations or preferences.
Therefore appointments still seemed to be slipping through the cracks and further tweaking and testing was required.
Iteration #2
Make Sales Reps Actively Accept or Decline Each Appointment:
Next we implemented new flows and designs, so a Sales Rep would have to accept or decline each appointment dispatched to them (within a three hour time frame of the assignment).
If they declined an appointment or did nothing after three hours, the declined or expired appointments would go to the Sales Manager to action themselves or re-assign to another Sales Rep.
Sales Rep Mobile Flow
Sales Rep Tablet Views
Sales Manager Views
Results:
Positive results were clear after we implemented and tested this for about two weeks. However, Sales Managers were getting backlogged and not getting to the re-assignments of the appointments their reps declined, leading to more still slipping through the cracks.
Iteration #3
Cut Out the Middleman Again & Remove their Permissions to Re-Assign Freedom Generated Leads:
Next, we tested a flow where the declined/expired appointments would go back to the marketing team to re-assign.
We also decided to remove the ability of Sales Managers to re-assign Sales Reps on Freedom Generated leads so the marketing team was fully controlling the distribution of Freedom Appointments directly to the best Sales Reps in each territory.
Results:
Immediate positive results were seen after the first week of implementing this update, increasing the Freedom Leads close percentage from 9% to 14% - a huge increase in production.
Iteration #4
Fine-tune the tool to further increase efficiency:
With proven results we knew we’d landed on the correct workflow. Now we needed to further enhance it for the marketing team’s workflows. The following enhancements were rapidly implemented:
Update the table view with additional statuses to include Accepted, Declined, and Expired results of each round of dispatching, thus allowing the team to easily filter and identify leads that required re-assignment.
Display more history around who had previously declined an appointment, so they weren’t accidentally sending the same appointment to an unavailable sales rep.
Automatic check a Sales Rep’s availability based on their other appointments assigned or created on our platform.
Iteration #5
Future Enhancements
With the core work flows updated and validated, the next step is better syncing of our data metrics with the marketing team in order to fully automate distributing Freedom Generated lead appointments in order to handle the expected increase in lead volume.
Next, we cut out the “middleman” and tested a flow where the marketing team would assign appointments directly to Sales Reps based on their territory location and their closing percentage, skipping the top level Dealer/Sales Manager.
Original Leads Pipeline Bulk Assign Drawer
Enhancements to Leads Dashboard Bulk Assign Drawer
