Sunrun sells residential solar at national scale, and at that scale the constraint is never awareness — it is qualification. There was no shortage of people willing to fill out a form. What the business needed was a funnel that could tell, before a rep spent a tank of gas and half a day, whether a given roof could carry a system worth selling and whether the homeowner behind it could actually buy one.
We built that funnel end to end: the ad accounts feeding it, the landing pages, the roof-modeling layer, the financing qualifier, and the appointment handoff into the sales team. This is the same architecture PartPixel builds for high-ticket lead generation today — it was proven on solar first.
What the Funnel Actually Did
Every funnel we built for these companies ran the same core loop: paid traffic and organic search fed a landing page, the landing page qualified the homeowner in under ninety seconds, and a qualified appointment landed on a rep's calendar with the roof data already attached. No call-center guesswork. No cold lists. No windshield surveys.
The six steps between a click and a booked appointment:
- Address first — the homeowner types their address before anything else, so the page can qualify the roof before it ever asks for a phone number
- Google Sunroof roof modeling — usable roof square footage, annual sun hours, and a recommended array size pulled straight from Google's solar imagery
- Utility bill qualifier — the homeowner enters their average monthly bill, and the page sizes the system against real consumption instead of a generic average
- Instant savings estimate — projected production, offset percentage, and a first-year savings figure rendered on the page before the form is even complete
- Financing selector — solar loan versus full upfront cash, side by side, with the monthly payment and the net cash price both shown
- Calendar handoff — the qualified homeowner books their own appointment, and the rep receives the roof model, the bill, and the financing preference in the notes
Put the qualification in the funnel, not in the field. Every question a rep used to ask standing on a porch — how big is your roof, how much shade do you have, what's your power bill, how are you paying for this — gets answered online, by the homeowner, for free, before anyone burns a tank of gas.
Google Sunroof: Why the Roof Comes First
The single biggest lift in every one of these funnels came from putting Google Project Sunroof at the front of the form. Sunroof uses Google's aerial imagery and 3D roof modeling to calculate how much usable roof a home actually has, how many hours of usable sunlight it gets per year after shading from trees and neighboring structures, and how large an array that roof can physically carry.
That let the landing page answer the homeowner's real first question — will solar even work on my house? — before asking them for a phone number. Instead of a generic lead form, they saw their own roof outlined, a recommended kilowatt size, and an estimated production number in kilowatt-hours. The page did the sizing conversation the rep used to do on a porch with a clipboard.
It also did the disqualifying for us, which mattered just as much. Heavily shaded roofs, north-facing slopes with almost no usable plane, and homes with too little roof to justify a system got filtered out at the top of the funnel instead of consuming an appointment slot. Reps stopped driving to houses that were never going to pencil.
A solar lead form that asks for a name and phone number is guessing. A solar lead form built on Google Sunroof already knows whether the roof can carry a system worth selling — and tells the homeowner, which is exactly why they finish the form.
The Numbers We Were Selling Against
Residential systems in these markets averaged roughly $25,000 to $35,000 installed before incentives — somewhere around $3.50 per watt for a typical six-to-nine kilowatt system. The federal investment tax credit came off the back of that, and state and utility incentives moved the net number further depending on the market.
| SYSTEM SIZE | INSTALLED COST | COST PER WATT | TYPICAL HOME |
|---|---|---|---|
| 6 kW | ~$21,000 | $3.50/W | Small roof, low bill |
| 7.5 kW | ~$26,000 | $3.50/W | Most common size sold |
| 9 kW | ~$31,500 | $3.50/W | Large home, high usage |
| 10 kW+ | $35,000+ | $3.50/W | High consumption / pool / EV |
Because the ticket was that size, the funnel could not treat price as a footnote. We put the two ways to buy directly on the page, side by side, and let the homeowner self-select before the appointment was ever booked.
| HOW THEY BOUGHT | WHAT THE PAGE SHOWED | WHY THEY CHOSE IT |
|---|---|---|
| Solar loan — zero down | Fixed monthly payment set against their current utility bill | No cash out of pocket, owns the system, claims the tax credit |
| Full upfront cash | Net purchase price after the federal tax credit | No finance charge, fastest payback, no lender in the deal |
How we sold loans
Most homeowners bought on a solar loan. The pitch was a straight payment comparison: their current utility bill against a fixed monthly loan payment on a system they own, with zero down at signing. On a $30,000 system amortized over a long-term solar loan, that payment frequently landed at or below what they were already sending the utility every month — and the utility number climbs every year while the loan payment does not.
The funnel supported that pitch directly by pulling the homeowner's actual monthly bill into the estimate, then showing the projected loan payment beside it. Ownership was the other half of the argument: on a loan the homeowner owns the array, claims the tax credit themselves, and keeps the equipment and the production for the life of the system.
How we sold cash
A meaningful slice of buyers paid the full amount upfront in cash, and those were the cleanest deals in the pipeline — no lender approval, no credit stipulations, no funding delays, and the shortest path from signed contract to install. Cash buyers were sold on total cost of ownership rather than monthly payment: no finance charge at all, the full tax credit applied against the purchase, and the fastest payback period of any product we offered.
So the funnel qualified for it directly. The financing selector let the homeowner indicate a cash purchase before an appointment existed, which changed how the rep prepared and which numbers they walked in with. Sorting loan intent from cash intent at the form — rather than forty minutes into a kitchen-table appointment — is one of the highest-leverage things a solar funnel can do.
Solar is a five-figure purchase sold in a living room. The same principle applies to roofing, HVAC replacement, medical procedures, and every other high-ticket consumer sale we work on today: if your funnel does not qualify the money, your reps are doing it for free.
What Changed in the Field
The practical difference showed up in the quality of the conversation at the door. A rep walking into an appointment out of this funnel already knew the usable roof area, the modeled array size, the homeowner's current power bill, and whether they were leaning loan or cash. The first fifteen minutes of a traditional solar appointment — the part where you establish whether this house is even a candidate — had already happened online, for free, while the homeowner sat at their own computer.
That is the entire thesis behind the lead engines we build. Reps should be closing, not surveying. Every question your funnel answers is a question your salesperson doesn't have to drive across a county to ask.
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We build address-to-appointment funnels for solar companies, contractors, and high-ticket consumer sales — from our Tampa headquarters, nationwide. Call (813) 608-6008 or get a free quote and we'll map the funnel for your market.