Name: Optimizing Solar Sales: How to Stay Competitive in the New Era
Uploaded: 2025-08-14T19:17:47.093Z
Duration: 56 min
Description: Optimizing Solar Sales: How to Stay Competitive in the New Era

Transcript for "Optimizing Solar Sales: How to Stay Competitive in the New Era": Hello to folks joining. Welcome to this webinar hosted by Aurora. We'll hang out here for just a couple minutes to let folks trickle in, and then, we'll get started maybe two after. And while folks are joining here, and I can repeat this a couple of times, if you're new to this platform, Goldcast, just wanna make sure everyone kind of knows the, the infrastructure here. On the on the side of your screen, you'll see the opportune like a chat box. So if you guys wanna be able to converse, there's that chat opportunity. There's also a separate tab for q and a. So if you have any specific questions, feel free to drop those in the q and a. We'll be monitoring monitoring those questions, and, we're gonna carve out some time at the end where we can address those. So as we go through the presentation here today, as we go through the demo, feel free to drop those questions in, and we'll do our best to get to all of those, at the back end of the call. And, you know, anything that comes up, feel free to drop it in there. Or if you wanna talk amongst amongst yourselves, feel free to use that chat as well. And we'll give it just another minute here just to make sure that folks could have time to kinda get settled and understand their, environment here. But really excited to be hosting this event today. This is kicking off a new, webinar series that we have. So, I was the lucky one to go first. So, we're excited to get started here. And, with that being said, we'll go ahead and jump right in. So welcome today, everyone. As I said, feel free to use that chat box on the right, and if you have any questions, you can drop them in the q and a. My name is Jason Miller. I'm a senior engagement manager here at Aurora Solar. And, what we're gonna do today is walk you through a presentation really focused on optimizing solar sales, and how we can really build in automation to optimize our sales processes. We're then gonna walk through a demo. So that being said, I'm gonna go ahead and tee up this presentation, and we'll go ahead and get started. Alright. So like I said, welcome to the first part of this webinar series, optimizing solar sales, how to stay competitive in the new era. As I said, my name is Jason Miller. I'm a senior engagement manager here at Aurora Solar. I've been at Aurora Solar for three years, and I've been in the renewable space for about twelve years. I've had a number of different types of roles. I've worked, in on the government side of things. I've worked for utility or, residential and commercial installers. I've worked for a utility company, and now I am glad to be in the software space, and happy to be here at Aurora Solar, and happy to be here with you all today. Quick little rundown of the agenda. We're gonna start by talking about some of the current solar industry trends. Obviously, there have been some major shakes shake ups and changes with the passing of the OBBB. So I would love to do a little bit of a, diagnosis in terms of what we're seeing for the rest of this year, and then looking forward into next year and beyond, and kind of asking certain questions about how we can weather the storm and stay afloat, in this kind of new landscape that we're gonna be entering. From there, in light of all of these changes, we're gonna wanna, do a deep dive into how does automation fit in. How can you really optimize your processes around automation in order to drive efficiency and ultimately, you know, continue your your, growth of your business going forward in this new landscape? So we'll talk about automation. Then we're gonna put it all together and see how Aurora Solar fits into the equation, and we're gonna, present a a demo to you guys. And And the demo is kind of broken up into two main sections. The first part is gonna be more focused on account configuration. So for any, Aurora Solar admins or administrators, how you can dial in your configuration within your settings and database to to build in these these efficiencies and these automation processes, ultimately making it easier for your sales reps and, creating a smoother experience for your potential customers and homeowners as well. And then as I mentioned, we'll have some time on the back end for some q and a. So like I said, if anything comes into your mind, feel free to pop it in the q and a section, on the chat box on the right, and we'll, we'll do our best to address all of those at the back end. So with that being said, let's go ahead and get started. Alright. First and foremost, we've experienced some major changes. So let's take a look at some solar industry trends. So we're gonna talk about what's happening in the industry and why this is such an important topic. I think the the main bold line here is 2025 will end strong. So as I'm sure everyone is well aware by now, the 25 d investment tax credit for us for customer owned systems is expiring at the end of this year. So because of this, we're anticipating a spike in demand from homeowners trying to take advantage of the ITC before it's gone. And there's no way to get around the fact that 2026 may be a tough year, especially for cash and loan purchases, Although the tax credit for TPO or third party ownership remains in place. So as we can see on this graph here, we are, expecting a 17% quarter over quarter spike in in demand for q four, which is a good thing for for folks trying to take advantage of that ITC. However, we'll see that dip both in install you know, forecasted installed megawatts, as well as that year over year growth taking a pretty significant dive in the 2026 next year. But the thing to be a little bit optimistic about is the things are looking to rebound in, h two or q three and 2026. So, you know, we're kind of approaching the eye of the storm here coming up with both a a rise and then a pretty dramatic dip in both growth and installed capacity, but, you know, potential for a quick rebound as well. So, you know, the question is after 2025, looking ahead to 2026 and beyond, where do we go from there? So after 2025, there will undoubtedly be some changes to how solar is sold. And as an industry, we'll need to adapt our businesses and processes accordingly. Because in the long run, solar is not going away. When we look at solar as a macro element, and and and, like, kind of the macroeconomic environment, solar is not going away. The economics just make too much sense for solar. So in fact, as you can see on this graph, after 2026, the residential solar industry is expected to make a rebound. So, you know, we saw that in the last slide where it's starting to rebound on 2026, and that trend is gonna continue especially going into 2027. So as utility bills for homeowners continue to rise and we look for ways to improve efficiency and reduce soft costs, going solar will make more and more sense over time. But the question is, how exactly will the solar industry need to shift in this new era post 2025? So first of all is an increased focus on operational efficiency. On average, variable soft costs, which include things like customer acquisition, design, permitting, labor, and project management, they still account for roughly 40% of the total cost of going solar. The more that we can bring these soft costs down, the better we'll be set up for the long term. Secondly, is that we'll see a higher share of TPO or third party ownership, So think of PPAs and leases. After the 25 d tax credit ends, the share of TPO is expected to increase from 45% this year to almost 70% next year. So where you're able to, having the flexibility to offer diverse financing options for homeowners will be important to adapt as the market changes. And thirdly, battery storage attach rates will continue to rise. With the average attach rate in The US, excluding California, rising from 38% in in 2025 this year to an expected 57% by 2030. So really important to focus on these three main factors, efficiency, TPO share, and offering financial product flexibility, and then understanding that storage attach rates are going to increase, into next year and and then beyond too. So how can you set yourself up for success and stay competitive in the new era? We believe that one of the biggest drivers lies in operational efficiency, leveraging automation and technology to make sure your teams are spending less time on things that, spending time on the things that make the biggest impact to your business and reducing these soft costs where you can, which can set yourself up to be able to adapt quickly and scale efficiently in times of growth. And so for this webinar, we're gonna be looking specifically at the sales process. So where you can optimize and automate your sales operations so that your teams can spend less time on manual work, things like creating a proposal, creating site models and system designs, waiting for designs, calculating pricing, generating sales agreements, and so on, and spend more time on selling and building relationships with customers, which is ultimately where sales reps should be spending most of their time to move projects forward. As someone who has worked in in various aspects of solar sales, both on the the design side, on the sales side, on the project management side, nothing, you know, kind of boiled my blood more than just all of the operational delays, red tape, and, ultimately, you know, that all adds up into creating a poor customer experience. So we we really wanna be able to streamline your processes built on accuracy, trust, and, again, that automation in order to spend less time waiting and fixing and tweaking and getting frustrated and more time having a, you know, a a relationship building experience with these homeowners. I think the biggest thing about being able to deliver value to a customer is to gain their trust. And so when you can, be able to present beautiful, accurate, and efficient, you know, proposals and designs and create a seamless experience for the homeowner, you're gonna build their trust. You're gonna win their business, and you're gonna win referrals in future business going forward. You know, one positive customer interaction can lead to a bounty of of downstream, benefits as well too. So we wanna clean this process up, and we wanna show you how, Aurora can help with that. So, don't take my word for it. We're gonna go ahead and highlight some great statistics that some of our current customers are currently experiencing right now. So I'm gonna go through these one at a time. Starting with sim SimplySolar, they were able to reduce their design time by, up to 60 x. So they went from fifteen minutes for a design down to fifteen seconds. Incredible increase in efficiency. Our World Energy was able to reduce their project change orders for TPO by 75%, which is critical based on what we were just talking about in terms of the massive shift for TPO financing, in this new era starting next year. New Day Solar was able to increase their close rate by 15%, and they were able to reduce six plus hours off of their total project time. I actually had the pleasure of working with New Day Solar. They're one of our newer customers, and they started to see these benefits right away, right out of the gates. Earth Solar was able to, increase the amount of customers that they're spending time with by 25%, which is huge to, you know at the end of the day, it's a numbers game. So the more customers that we can get in front of and feelcom comfortable and confident that we're presenting accurate, beautiful information, that's just going to help, you know, the total deal volume increase as well too. MSS was able to, or they are currently able to have per proposal production accuracy of 98, which is just industry leading. You just can't beat that. And then last but not least, Castleman Solar is is saving up to or even more than thirty minutes, per per per proposal, which once again, the less amount of time that we're, spending on proposals means there's more customers, means that we can spend more time with customers, and really, you know, drive toward building that trust and creating that seamless experience as well. So okay. So I'm, you know, I'm, touting all of the benefits that our customers are receiving, but, like, what how are they actually utilizing this? So I'm gonna highlight some of the aspects of Aurora, that these customers and and all of our customers are able to leverage to really, you know, take advantage of automation and and build out more efficient processes. So number one, proposal, creation. Aurora Solar offers multiple proposal templates that you as an admin can basically enable and customize and set up for your sales reps to use in the field. We do offer preconfigured proposal templates, so there's a bunch that we have off the shelf with different types of fonts and styles and branding and imaging and things like that. But you also have the ability to to customize your own templates as well too. So whether or not you wanna take one of these off the shelf templates and maybe make a few tweaks, you know, add in a logo, if you wanna throw in a couple of extra pages with, like, you know, about our business or our business partners or our our, awards and accreditations, things like that. It's a nice and easy way to use something that's, you know, kind of already ready to go, and you can just make, you know, further tweak and optimize it. The other thing that you can do is you we can build a proposal from scratch too. So if you if you have a current proposal that you that you've used elsewhere that you and your team are comfortable with, you know, whether it's a PDF, a PowerPoint presentation, or, you know, from another platform, we can take that and essentially recreate it in Aurora Solar, which is, very beneficial for, you know, larger sales teams who are used to doing, you know, using a particular, you know, pitch deck, essentially. So that, you know, there's there's not much transition there too. So we have the ability to, you know, like I said, both use these preconfigured as well as build the templates from scratch. The other great thing about having multiple proposal templates too is that you can create, like, maybe a long form version and a short form. I know when I was selling, sometimes I would sit down with homeowners and they would say, like, show me every single detail. I wanna see how the sausage is made. I want to, you know, leave no stone unturned. I've also sat down with customers who are like, you know what? Just show me the design, the specs, the pricing, and I that's all I I don't overwhelm me with a bunch of fluff. So, you know, to have a longer form version and maybe like a three page version, you know, your rep can based on the customer's needs, they can pick the proper proposal template, go in ready to go, and, you know, not waste time for that for that homeowner. Number two. Now we're kind of getting into the, the project process, consumption profile. So this is a really important part of project design. We need to basically enter in the customer's current usage, which because it's gonna dictate how big of a system that we can build. So the great thing about Aurora Solar is we have an integration with Genability. So when you enter that project address, it's gonna automatically pull in both pre and post solar rates based on that address, available utility providers in the area, and it's all happening automatically right there. If you need to update the, the pre or post solar rate, it's also gonna show you a pre filtered list of other potential utility providers and other rate plans that are offered in that that service territory as well. So very simple to update those and make sure that you get it accurate. The other thing too is in terms of entering actual consumption, we give you a number of different ways that you can do it. So whether you have a monthly average, an annual average, maybe you only have a couple of months of bills, maybe you have interval data, and we're always gonna give you multiple different ways that you can input that energy. And the the classic scenario that I like to talk about too is, like, let's say your homeowner only has, you know, two bills that they can find. That's okay. We have the ability for you to input just two numbers, and Aurora will basically run an algorithm and extrapolate and fill in the rest of the months for you. And what it's doing is it's it's, leveraging a local weather data model as well as average usage on the same residential rate plan, to kind of help speed that process up. So even if we're working off a limited data, Aurora can take that and run with it. And the last thing too is we also have an integration with utility API. So if you are a member of of utility API, we can set up that integration. And in that case, all you have to do is enter the residence's meter number, and all of the empirical data will automatically filter in there as well too. Moving into the actual site and system design phase within sales mode, lot of automations that we built here. It's actually all based around automation. So the I think the big one to call out is our AI powered three d site design that's using Aurora AI. It's gonna generate a an accurate three d roof model for you in about ten seconds or less. The great thing about this too, just in terms of putting up guardrails for your sales team, is that reps won't be able to make any adjustments to it. So they're not gonna, you know, move a chimney or delete a vent or things like that. What you see is what you get. We also have automated shading analysis. So you don't even have to worry about drawing trees because if you have LIDAR shading on, it will automatically factor into your shading calculations, which will it'll factor into your radiance and your solar production calculations. So if it's picked up on the LIDAR layer, don't even worry about having to draw it. It will be calculated, into, a bunch of those performance simulation aspects. When it comes to actually placing a system, that's gonna be leveraging Aurora Solar Solar's Auto Designer feature. So, basically, you have the ability to, kind of provide inputs to how you want Aurora Solar to to, create these designs. You can determine the target energy offset. You can, determine the minimum panels per row. You can determine solar access minimum thresholds, things like that, and Aurora Solar will basically build an initial system for you. And then updating it is really easy. All reps have to do in real time is just click certain panels to turn them on or off. They can turn on various arrays, and ultimately, the rep gets to, you know, create that final design to to present to the homeowner. But it's all, you know, everything upstream is all automated, automated, automated, and you can get to that point in about thirty seconds. Once we built our system, we're gonna take a look at pricing. So as an admin, you have the ability to set certain pricing defaults. You know, you can determine your pricing engine, and we're always gonna run automated calculations based on your pricing engine. We'll talk about this more in the demo coming up here. And the other great thing that I love, personally as one of my favorite features is automatic adders and discounts. Basically, you have the ability to build in, conditional logic for adders and discounts around certain system parameters. So think of, like, system size, number of arrays, type of module used, type of inverter used, storage operating mode, is it a ground mount? All these different things, we can build conditional logic and automation around such that if those parameters exist in the project, the adder will automatically apply. The rep doesn't need to worry about remembering to turn it on, so it helps to build, trust in, like, the accuracy of the of the final price that you're gonna be able to quote there. After we set our pricing, we take a look at financing. We have the ability to have, you know, set up default financing settings, but the main thing that I wanna call out here is our integrated financing partners. This is really the direction that Aurora has been moving is is integrating with a number of the major financing institutions in the solar industry. We offer both integrations with partners who offer both TPO as well as loans. And so it's very simple to set these up. Each one is a little bit different, but they're all very easy. Aurora provides clear instructions, and we've got a number of people on staff here who are ready to support with that as well too. So especially as we move into this TPO landscape, being able to integrate with these financing partners and pull an accurate data, across both platforms is gonna be critical and instrumental, in terms of building accurate proposals that customers can trust. And then last but not least, how do we share and how do we close? Aurora is a, huge huge leader in the in the market in terms of these interactive web based proposals. So it's a very simple process in terms of sending these web proposals out. They're interactive, so customers can kinda click around, they can hover over graphs, they can go into three d, play around, they can request a follow-up. There's real time analytics in app that kinda show you how the customer is interacting with that proposal. If they actually wanted a PDF, they can also download a PDF as well. And then we also have our contract manager feature, which is an automated contract generation tool. Basically, you can load in your sales agreement, pre fill it out with, you know, auto fill fields, names, dates, signatures, project details, financing details, things like that. Send that out to any of the parties who need who need to sign that document, and it's really kind of the way to to close the deal in Aurora there. So just highlighting some of the automated features that we have within the sales mode process, and we're gonna go into this in a little bit more detail coming up here as we get into our demo, and I think we are ready for that. Hi there. Welcome to Aurora's webinar series on automation. In this demo, we'll start off by going through the settings and database of your Aurora tenant. Highlighting some of the key automations and configurations you can set up to optimize your sales process. Then, I'll go through a demo of sales mode and show you how they all work in practice. To get started, let's navigate to settings, and we'll first jump into the pricing defaults tab. As an account admin, here, you can determine how to configure your pricing method. Aurora offers three different pricing methods, including price per component, which is a combination of component price and component quantity, flat price, which is a customizable user set currency amount. Essentially, a rep can enter $35,000 for a project, allowing them to quickly update that total project cost, And lastly, price per watt, which is the most commonly utilized pricing method within the industry. You can even select multiple pricing methods, giving your sales team flexibility in how to build quotes and finalize pricing quickly and efficiently within proposals. Lastly, you can also control whether or not you want the price per watt to be edited on projects for reps as well too. Next, we'll jump to the design tab. Here, admins can configure a number of custom settings that will help to streamline automated design within sales mode. To highlight a few, you can select your default map imagery provider, which include EagleView, Nearmap, Google Maps HD, or the best available. Determine whether to automatically place fire pathways, which can help to improve design accuracy, reduce the need for change orders in AHJ kickbacks, and ultimately speed up the time to install. Scrolling down, we can also determine auto designer settings, which include target energy offset, t s r f min, which is total solar resource fraction minimum, essentially setting a minimum threshold for solar access on system design, d default filler row settings, which which helps to determine whether or not you want to consider both portrait and landscape orientations on system designs, and determine a minimum amount of panels per row, in this case, two. Finally, you can also determine if you wanna add inverters to a system design within sales mode, specifying the default inverter manufacturer, and determining whether reps can choose specific inverter models, or let Aurora Solar automatically string the system for them. Moving on, let's highlight the financing integrations tab. In the ever changing landscape of solar financing, leveraging integrated financing products allows sales reps to deliver accurate information seamlessly in proposals, as well as instantly kick start the credit approval process directly within the Aurora Solar app. Setting up an integration with a financing partner in Aurora Solar is simple. Simply click the add button in the upper right hand corner, choose the desired financing partner from the drop down menu. Each financing partner has slightly different requirements to establish the integration, but Aurora Solar provides simple instructions on how to properly enter the required information. Once established, any and all financing products that are enabled in your financier's portal will be available to utilize in the financing page in sales mode. Lastly, let's quickly highlight how to enable lidar shading in Aurora Solar. To do this, we'll jump to the Performance Simulations tab. Here, we can enable the setting to Use Lidar Shading, which will automatically factor in three d objects captured in the lidar layer into solar access, shading, and production simulations. This means your sales reps and designers won't have to worry about drawing trees, obstructions, neighboring homes, or any object that could pose a shading threat, ultimately optimizing the design process and decreasing the amount of time to put together a design and a proposal. Let's now jump to the Database part of your Aurora Solar tenant. The main inputs within Database refer to System Components, which you can see listed here. A critical configuration piece not to overlook is this toggle in the upper left hand corner, specify component availability. By enabling this toggle, you can ensure that sales reps and designers can only utilize the components that you, as an admin, have enabled here within the database, reducing the risk for error and streamlining the design process for sales reps and designers. Next, let's highlight Aurora Solar proposal templates. These proposal templates allow admins to fully customize the branding, data, and overall messaging that sales reps will present to homeowners. Reps can select the optimal proposal template and pages within based on the potential customer, creating an effective sales pitch that will wow homeowners. Here, you can see that Aurora Solar allows admins to create and enable multiple proposal templates, both with off the shelf pre curated versions, as well as the ability to create custom templates. Jumping into one, we can get a nice preview of the proposal template. And if I wanted to make any changes, I can click edit in the upper right hand corner. This will open up the proposal template editor. Here, we can see the infrastructure of how each page is laid out, And we can even add in a new custom page to the proposal template. So let's go to library, and we'll throw in a one by two page. And within here, we can incorporate dynamic content blocks. So we'll go to blocks, and we can add in content such as a logo or a graph. So we'll do pre storage and post storage bills. Maybe we wanna add in a solar model on the right hand side and payments. Moving on, let's now highlight adders and discounts within your database. Here, you can create and configure custom price manipulators, which are important inputs to determine final system cost. Focusing on automation specifically, you also have the ability to create conditional logic around certain system design parameters on when to apply specific adders. So, for example, if we jump into this multiple arrays adder, we can see that conditional logic has been applied, under this conditions part of the infrastructure. With this third option selected, automatically applied based on conditions, we can set the parameters. So in this case, if the array count on a system design is greater than or equal to two arrays, the design will automatically include an adder of 10¢ per watt, reducing the risk for error, and the rep won't have to go and select this adder on their own. This helps to ensure that your pricing stays consistent, reduces errors, and requires less effort for reps to manually select each adder that needs to be applied. Next, let's quickly mention agreement templates. This is where, as an admin, you can utilize Aurora's contract manager feature. You can upload and customize documents here, which your reps will be able to quickly access from sales mode to send out documents for signature seamlessly within the sales motion. Here, we can see a quick preview of what one of these documents looks like. On the left, we can see different roles for this document, as well as some of the pre generated autofill fields. And and within the document itself we get a preview of the different roles and autofill fields. Lastly, let's jump to Jurisdictions. This is where you can create roof setback requirements for system design based on geographic parameters. These can be used in tandem with the fire pathways feature to ensure initial sales designs adhere to actual real world operational design requirements. Let's walk through an example together. So to do this, I'll click the add jurisdiction button in the upper right hand corner. Feel free to give it a name. And under type is where you can determine the geographic parameters. So you can set this at the local level, so at the city or county level, the state level, or even for different countries. For this example, let's go with state, and I'll type something in. And then down below, you can see the different aspects of a roof where we can input these setback requirements in terms of feet. So let's say I wanna add these jurisdictional setbacks in tandem with my fire pathways, and I wanna add an extra buffer of one feet around hips and valleys and obstructions. Ultimately, jurisdictions help to ensure that what's designed initially will match what's actually installed later on. Let's now see how these automations will play out when creating a project in Aurora Solar. So to do so, I'll click the new project button here in the upper right hand corner. Go ahead and enter an address. Give it a name. Now before I do anything else, it's important to make sure that we locate the pink pin on the structure that we wanna design on. Select your property type and click the create button. Now that pop up that we saw is because I've already created a project at this address, but we'll go ahead and create a new project anyway, which takes us into our project dashboard. Now there are three main zones within the dashboard, customer profile, energy usage, and designs. I like to start with the low hanging fruit, so we'll go ahead and enter that customer information as it will be pulled into the proposal. So I'll enter first name, last name, phone number, and email address. And when I'm done, I'll click dashboard and we can see it filled in. Now we can enter energy usage directly from the dashboard, but this is also an embedded part of the sales mode workflow. So we'll go ahead and do it there. To do that, I'll click the sales mode button in the upper right hand corner and select create new design, which will take me into the sales mode workflow. Now sales mode is the experience that is owned by the sales rep, and the end asset of sales mode is the web proposal to share with the customer. As we can see, it's a scrollable experience, and essentially, the whole point here is the rep is gonna work through these shortcut keys on the top navigation bar to enter in information and fill out the proposal. Before I do that though, I also wanna call it the menu in the upper left, which gives me a preview of all the different pages included, and this is even where I can update and customize this proposal template. So if I click edit in in the lower left, it allows me to control which pages I wanna include in this specific proposal template, as well as even change to a different proposal template should I want to, allowing reps to customize and really tailor these proposal presentations for the customer based on their needs. Now to get started, we'll go ahead and enter in energy usage, and I like to start from the left and work my way to the right in terms of these shortcut keys here. So we'll start on the left, and we'll go ahead and enter usage. Now with this usage page, there are two main things to keep an eye on. Number one is ensuring that your pre and post solar utility rates are correct. Based on the address, Aurora is going to be leveraging Genability to pull in residential utility rates for both pre for both pre solar and post solar, and it's gonna do a best guess. Now, if one of these rates doesn't look correct, you can always click the drop down menu, search from a pre filtered list, and it's really important to make sure that you get this correct as it's one of the main inputs that TPO providers are going to be analyzing. Next, you can input your energy usage, and Aurora gives you multiple ways that you can do that. So we can see here you can enter a monthly average, a monthly estimate, something with an existing system, an annual energy estimate, or even interval data. Also, if you happen to have an account with utility API, you can establish an integration and enter the residence's meter number to pull in their monthly usage information. For this example, we'll go with monthly estimate, and the great thing about this option is you don't have to have all twelve months. You only need a minimum of one month of information, and if you enter that, Aurora will go in and basically extrapolate and fill in the rest of the months based on weather data as well as average usage on the same residential rate plan. When I'm done, I'll click the done button, and if we scroll down, we can see how this page is now filled in with information. Moving on, we'll need to get to our system design, which is the main aspect of the proposal build option. So So we'll click that system design button, and we're gonna leverage running Aurora Solar Solar AI to generate our three d roof model. So I'll click run Aurora Solar Solar AI roof, and in about ten to fifteen seconds, Aurora Solar will be able to generate an accurate three-dimensional roof model based on satellite imagery as well as lidar data for the home. So just like that, we can see our roof model's been generated. It is incorporating our jurisdictional setbacks, and we can take a look at this in three d as well too. The other great thing about sales mode is you can leverage both lidar data and take a look in at an irradiance map as well too. So to do that, I'm gonna come down to the lower left hand corner, click my little layers icon, and let's take a look at the lidar layer here. To get a better view, once again, we'll pop into three d and just like that, we can see how it's picking up trees and three-dimensional objects all around the home. And because we've enabled lidar shading, I don't have to worry about drawing any of those trees. They will automatically be factored into my radiance, solar access, and solar production calculations. So to see this, let's go back to top down and we'll turn on our turn on our irradiance map. And just like that, we can see the irradiance map has now been overlaid on the roof. And for example, we can see here that there is shading being picked up toward the eve of these roof faces because of the trees to the south. So again, I didn't have to draw them, but I can feel confident and secure that they are being accurately forecasted and, simulated in solar access calculations. Once I feel good about my roof model, I'll click the keep button right here, and we're ready to place panels. So to do that, I'll click my panel icon here in the, navigation bar to the left, select the module type, determine the orientation, and I'll click place. And this will initiate auto designer to run. And while that's running, you'll notice these new purple boundaries just showed up on the home. That is the automated fire pathway feature, which is really important and critical to layout first because it's going to ensure that your designs are to code, reducing the need for AHJ kickbacks and redesigns. Just like that, we have an initial system output and updating the system design is as simple as just clicking modules where I can click and drag to change the system size. In the upper right hand corner, you can see a preview of the energy offset target. And when I'm done, I'll go ahead and click the finalize button, and that will initiate Aurora Solar auto string feature to run, which will place inverters on the system based on what I had set up in my design settings. When complete, you'll see a finalized energy offset target number here because we are factoring in the inverters, which is new equipment on the system, so the entire performance simulation reran. When I'm done, I'll click done, taking us back to the sales mode workflow. We have a nice three d image of the system here as well as some design summary specs on the left. Next up, we'll go ahead and add storage. Now adding storage in Aurora Solar is simple, determine whether or not the battery is gonna have backup, determine its consumption schedule, and then simply select a battery and determine its quantity. Down below, you can see some graphs that show utility bill savings for both solar only and solar plus battery, as well as a daily operational profile for grid use, and you can see how it looks across different months. Next up, to close out the rest of the proposal build, we'll go ahead and update our pricing. This is where you can update the net price per watt. You can determine adders, discounts, or incentives. And so let's say we wanted to add a service panel upgrade onto the system, the system cost up here on the upper left will automatically update. When done, we'll click done. And the last thing to do is to select a financing product for this system. Now Aurora Solar is always going to default to cash first and foremost, but let's say we wanted to, incorporate a TPO financing product. I'll select from my list of integrated finance partners. This is gonna run an API call which will fetch any of the enabled products in your financer's portal, and on the right hand side, I can go ahead and select one of those financing products. This will then generate a rate table where you can select the proper solar rate, estimated monthly payment, and EPC price per watt. Now it's important to use this reference point of their pre solar rate right now, and then I can select from the list provided here. Just like that, we can see how it's presented within sales mode, and you can even start the credit application process by clicking this apply now button. This will bring you to the financing partner's credit application page, and you'll see how a lot of the information is automatically pulled in from the actual design. Each one of the financier's, credit application page looks a little bit different, but basically fill out the form, click submit, and that will be sent to, the financing partner. Once we're done, we'll go ahead and click done. And as we can see, the rest of the proposal has been filled in, and, we're ready to present it to the homeowner. So in order to do that, you can send it as a web proposal. To do that, you'll click the share icon in the upper right hand corner. It's as simple as just entering their email address right here and click send, and the customer will get a link where they can view a, essentially a carbon copy of the web proposal. Everything is locked in, but it's gonna look just like the sales mode experience and it's dynamic so they can hover over graphs, they can go in three d in the CAD model and play around with it as well. If you wanted to, you could also download and send a PDF of this proposal too. The last thing to do in sales mode is to send the sales agreement. So So let's say the customer has viewed the proposal, they're ready to move forward, they wanna sign some documentation. How do we do that? Well, we're gonna come back to our menu in the upper left hand corner and select the agreements option. Here, I'll select the actual agreement that I wanna use, input some basic information for both the roles on the document, and it'll generate a preview of the document before I send it out. But essentially, what I will do is click send for signature and both parties of the document will be notified via email. So that's pretty much it for the sales mode workflow experience. You can see how automations are included all throughout the workflow within here, and we hope that you get the most out of your Aurora Solar experience. Thanks. Hey, Jason. You're on you're on mute, my friend, so I just hopped in to let you know. We're gonna start back at the beginning. Hey, folks. I apologize. I had some technical difficulties on my end there. Just to go back here, I wanna talk about preparing for what's next. I realized that, this slide was up and you were probably wondering, what are we looking at here? So, thank you for dealing with that, you know, one of the joys of technology. Let's talk about preparing for what's next. We're gonna, first and foremost, adapt quickly. So it's important to diversify your offerings and adjust sales approaches to match changing priorities and homeowners needs. Think specifically TPO at being flexible around offering financing products. Number two, stay informed. Track new state incentives, policy shifts, and financing options. Things are changing on almost a daily basis right now, so it's important to keep your finger on the pulse there and understand, the environment that you're gonna be operating in, especially going forward. Number three, boost efficiency. Streamline workflows to reduce soft costs and speed up project delivery. And number four, automate smartly. So cut the manual work. The whole point here is to reduce those soft costs. So cut the manual work, improve accuracy, and standardized processes across your teams. So whether or not you have one team internally or you're dealing with different partners or sales dealers, make sure that you can customize the Aurora Solar experience and your sales experience, to have effective and, efficient, solutions in how you're gonna present those to your homeowners. So, again, apologies for the technical, difficulty there, but, hopefully, we're able to get through that. So now we're gonna get to the q and a portion. Curtis and I have been answering a bunch of these questions in the chat, but I did want to address some of them, right now as well. So the first one I saw, Michael did ask about, commercial projects in Aurora Solar. So, yes, you do have the ability to create commercial projects in Aurora Solar. The one thing to call out there though is that the AI, site modeling is not available, so you will have to manually model those projects in design mode. Now you can still leverage lidar data. Like, whenever I design a commercial project in Aurora Solar, I'm still using the lidar data to let me know, like, the height of, of the building, you know, parapet walls, obstructions, things of that nature. So, you know, I think there there are extra tools to help you build commercial projects. That being said, for anything that's, like, above two megawatts or so, the the processing speed can slow down a little bit. So that's where we do we do recommend helioscope as, like, the premier commercial modeling option. But like I said, for more, like, commercial size, you know, not not giving up to, you know, more than two, three, four megawatts, Aurora Solar can handle those, but it it does require more of a manual approach and manual touch. We had another question about setting up, different adders for different sales dealers. So I did try to answer that, in the chat. But essentially, what you can do as long as you you so this is gonna require, the partner management feature. So if you do have that as a part of your Aurora Solar account, you would wanna create different partners for different dealers. And then within an adder, what you can do is you can assign different adders to different partners, or within a singular adder, you can have different pricing variance. So the example that I posted was, let's say, you have a premium panel adder and, you know, for for your internal account, it's gonna be an extra 10¢ a watt. I can assign different pricing variance for different partners, And maybe, you know, for one partner, it's 12¢ a watt. For another one, it's 15¢ a watt. For another one, it's 20¢ a watt. So within one adder, you can have multiple different price points assigned to these different sub organizations. Yes. We are recording the sessions, and let's see here. Do I have to turn on AI auto zone because I don't see that option? Yeah. So that's probably related to the type of plan that you have. And so if you're looking to upgrade, we've got folks that you can reach out to about that as well. Let's see. Yes. Technical difficulties. I apologize that. I apologize for being muted. Thank you guys for keeping me honest here. Thank you, Curtis, for calling me out. Let's see here. What about financing for commercial jobs? So for that, we do have the ability to build custom financing products in Aurora Solar. So if it's not an integrated financing product, you can build out custom financing products, whether it's a loan, whether it's a lease, whether it's a PPA. We didn't really go into that. But if you do have, commercial financing through one of our integrated financing partners, you should be able to pull that in as well too. But if it's anything outside of those integrated ones, you'd have to just build it as a as a custom financing product, and then you would still just select it within sales mode at the same, at the same place. What if the installer I work for does not do commercial solar? I have a couple of commercial possible clients. I would need to get a little bit more clarity on that question about, installer not doing commercial jobs, but you've got a couple of commercial clients. The other thing that you can always do as well is, you know, it really depends on the level of detail that you wanna go in for these commercial projects. If you're really just looking to get a three d model and, you know, just kind of get a look at, like, okay. How big of a system can we build? How much energy is it gonna generate? Just to kind of get a a proxy of moving forward. You can do that in in Aurora, where if you wanna take it to the next level in terms of pulling in certain types of utility rates, certain types of incentives, o and m schedules, depreciation schedules, things like that, That's where you would wanna create it as a commercial job in Aurora because those types of things aren't available. If you were to create it as a as a residential job in Aurora, you can still model it and everything, but you're not gonna have access to a bunch of, like, the pricing and cost in, like, a finance financial forecasting inputs. So it depends on what level of of detail that you wanna go in, whether or not you're gonna build out a full fleshed proposal that includes financing and and, you know, pricing forecasts, or whether or not you just wanna kind of get more of a physical manifestation of that design. Let me see. I'm gonna scroll back down and see if we got see if we have any other questions here. As Curtis mentioned, this is recorded. We will be sending this out as well. Oh, okay. Here's one that I wanted to answer as well. So this is from Dimitri. How can Aurora help with design if site conditions have changed, e g a rebuilt house and in the Aurora Solar software old house. So to Curtis' point, we actually do have a number of different imagery providers. And especially with EagleView and Nearmap, they have pretty current imagery. Like, I know both of those in a lot of parts of the country are pulling images from, you know, at some point in 2025. So that's one way that you can kind of parse through those different imagery options to see if one of them does capture the home. If in situations, there is no available imagery of the home, one of the things that you can do, and this is actually gonna require using design mode. You can't really do this in Sales Mode. You can still use Sales Mode to build out the rest of the proposal, but in terms of creating the design, you're gonna have to use design mode. And what we recommend is if you have, like, a drone image or even better is, like, roof plans, if you have, like, a top down set, like, blueprint or, like, roof plans, you can actually upload that as its own custom image. What you'll have to do is then scale it. And the reason why I say roof plans is because they oftentimes have measurements. And so maybe you have the measurement of a ridge from end to end, and it says it's 60 feet. I can upload that image. I can use my ruler tool, scale it so it's the right size, and then you would manually model the roof by plotting points and kind of adjusting roof lines and things like that. You can set the pitch. You can add in dormers. You can add in folds and things like that. It's that's probably, like, the most complex thing that you can do in Aurora Solar. If anyone does run into that, I would say, you know, reach out to our support team, reach out to your account manager. We actually have created, a bit of a couple of videos that covers this stuff too, and I I share them all the time. But yeah. You you can handle those, but again, it's it's very complex because you're gonna need to get a specific set of blueprints. It's gonna require scaling, and it's gonna require manual modeling, which can be a little bit more technical. That's why we really try to push AI, especially when you have available imagery and lidar data, because manual modeling, can get tricky if you haven't been trained up on it. But, yes, you you can do projects where there is no imagery. You just need to have that set of blueprints. Let's see. Okay. I'll go ahead and hang out here if there's any additional questions. Again, apologies for those technical difficulties. I put the cart in front of the horse, so to speak. But glad that we were able to get back on track here. And, yeah, just to clarify, we do, pull in we are able to pull in Canadian utilities. So for our Canadian brethren up north, don't worry. You guys are covered. And, let's see here. Okay. We have just got a new one. How often are satellite images updated to account for home changes such as additions? Yeah. So, to to Curtis' point, it depends on the provider. Like I said, Nearmap and and EagleView do have pretty current imagery. But if, you know, let's say the image that we're pulling in is from March, but the addition was installed in July, we're not gonna be able to capture that. So that's a situation where, again, if you happen to have roof plans, we could upload those and then we're you know, have some manual modeling around that as well too. But, yes, to Curtis' point, the, especially those major imagery providers do update imagery at least a couple times per year. Okay. What is the best web browser to use for this site? Great question. The best browser to use is Google Chrome. So we always recommend, use Google Chrome when, when when utilizing Aurora Solar. It was really built and optimized to be to be run on Google Chrome. So Google Chrome every all time, every time. Good question, though. Okay. If there are no other questions, I think we're oh, we're gonna go ahead and wrap it up here. Thank you guys all for participating and joining today. I hope that you were able to to learn something from this and, both from, like, the industry trends, as well as how to build an automation leveraging Aurora Solar. Oh, I see one more question that's popped in. Have you ever had production issues? Not quite sure what that means. If you want, you can, reach out to us, and we can try to provide an answer there, offline. But we're gonna go ahead and wrap up here. So again, thank you guys so much for your time. Apologies for the technical difficulties on my end, and I appreciate you guys sticking with me. Hopefully, we were able to answer most of or if not all of your questions, and, we'll see you guys at the next webinar. So thanks, everyone.