How We Find Qualified Small Business and Commercial Leads for Energy Programs
Even though your energy programs and incentives provide great benefits to commercial customers, getting the opportunity to talk to them about it is often much harder than it should be.
You’re offering access to programs that, in most cases, result in financial savings for business customers. Yet, frustratingly, most people perceive the outreach as just another sales pitch.
The biggest barrier to successful communication about your energy programs is access to the right decision makers. The way to close that distance is to meet small business and mid-sized commercial and industrial prospects in person, face to face.
Before we get to how you can start using in-person lead generation and qualification for C&I decision-makers at small to mid-sized organizations, let’s be clear on why it’s so hard to do it using the usual approach.
Challenges to getting small business, commercial, and industrial leads
Telling business customers about your utility programs and incentives faces many of the same barriers that sales reps face. Here are some of the main ones.
Gatekeepers
Even at small and mid-sized companies, it’s difficult to get your marketing materials to the right person. There’s a decision-maker at every company for energy program incentives, but finding and reaching that person by email, mail, phone, or other typical sales approaches can be quite difficult.
And even if you do know who the right person is, you often have to get past their secretaries, executive assistants, or other gatekeepers they’ve installed to shield themselves from all the pitches.
What do most gatekeepers do when they receive traditional marketing media? That recycling bin isn’t going to fill itself!
No reply and no call back
Even when you do manage to connect with the decision-maker at a targeted company, you still have to keep their attention and motivate them to respond. Emails get ignored. Direct mail gets tossed. Phone calls don’t get returned.
It takes extensive effort just to land the time for an actual conversation.
Too much noise
The gatekeeper’s job is to keep the noise down for the person you’re trying to reach. That person might be an owner, operator, or a team lead within the business.
Whoever it is, you can bet they still get regularly pressed for responses from a variety of marketing pitches. And, they are bombarded by marketing in their private lives too. With all the noise coming from technology and devices, it’s very difficult for anyone to break through — including utilities that aren’t even selling anything.
Mistrust
Another reason small business or commercial and industrial leads don’t respond is because they don’t trust you. It’s not personal. They just don’t trust most of what comes their way, and it takes a lot of effort to get past that — especially when most of your marketing efforts don’t even reach the right person.
Poor targeting
Some companies aren’t actually in your target audience. They may not qualify for the energy programs and incentives you’re offering. They may be ineligible for a variety of reasons, or just not be the right fit. But you don’t always know that before having a conversation.
That means you can risk wasting lots of time chasing leads that turn out to be unqualified. So much time gets lost on fruitless marketing outreach efforts like emails, direct mail, and cold calls, and much of that effort amounts to nothing.
The good news is, there’s a better way. Let’s start with a quick reminder of why your situation is different.
Energy programs offer unique benefits, often including substantial financial savings, for commercial customers. You just need to get in the room with them and have that conversation.
This is where Power Direct Energy helps, in the form of Energy Ambassadors.
What are Energy Ambassadors?
What if you could get in the room with the right decision-makers at your C&I leads and have that initial meeting without draining your budget on the same wasteful media campaigns?
With Energy Ambassadors, this is exactly what you can do.
Trained brand representatives
Energy Ambassadors are trained by Power Direct Energy’s team, based on the information you give us and the goals you want to achieve. We handle all the hiring, training, paperwork, and management of Energy Ambassadors, so you don’t have to use up your valuable time and resources.
We have employee-led, trained teams we can activate all over the country, and they quickly adapt to the specifics of each utility’s campaign. They are friendly, outgoing, professional, and effective communicators.
In-person engagement
Energy Ambassadors go out and engage targeted companies in-person. They find the decision-maker, qualify the leads, and report back with response data. They achieve in one conversation what months, maybe years, of marketing efforts have failed to do.
Detailed response records
To assess the quality of a lead, you need data, and Energy Ambassadors record valuable data so you’ll know which steps to take next, and with which companies. You’ll get data such as:
- Positive responses
- Non-responses
- Leads considering but wanting more time
- Leads that want a follow-up conversation
- Companies who asked for campaign literature
- And more
You’ll know which companies to follow up with first and which ones were receptive enough to justify continued efforts to engage them regarding your energy programs.
Initial lead qualification
That initial lead qualification is the hardest but most important step. If a lead isn’t a good fit for your utility’s energy incentive programs, it’s best to know that right away so you don’t waste time, resources, or personnel.
Let’s say you have 250 commercial and industrial customers on your target list. After the Energy Ambassadors have reached out to all of them in-person, you might discover that just 175 of them are potentially qualified. You’ve now saved yourself the trouble of hassling with the other 75, and you did this without having to use any of your own employees.
That’s a big win!
Identify warm leads for follow-up
The remaining leads will be further broken down into degrees of warmth for follow-up so you can prioritize outreach to the companies that expressed the strongest interest in your energy programs.
The Energy Ambassadors can help bridge the gap between their interaction with companies and your specialists who can continue the conversation and offer more expertise.
It’s like a relay race. The Energy Ambassador runs the first leg, then passes the baton to your specialists who can take it the rest of the way.
Leave behinds
Energy Ambassadors will also leave printed materials behind for decision-makers who aren’t quite ready to move to the next step, but who are interested enough to think about it. These are your less qualified leads, but ones you still certainly want to get into your system.
So after you’ve completed your work with all the warmest leads, you can follow up with the other companies that had positive interactions but no commitment from the initial meeting with the Energy Ambassador.
The printed materials the EA leaves behind help spark your follow-up efforts, because your team can refer to those when you reach out, and remind them about the ambassador they met in person.
Focused on small and mid-sized businesses
Energy ambassadors are designed to support utility programs targeting small and mid-sized commercial customers — the segment that’s often the hardest to reach through traditional channels.
These businesses are typically underserved by digital and outbound outreach, yet represent a significant opportunity for program participation. Energy Ambassadors connect directly with these decision-makers in person, ensuring your programs reach the right audience at the right time.
Detailed tracking and auditing
Energy Ambassadors don’t work in isolation. Power Direct Energy’s auditing method is the same one we use for our door hanger distribution services. We use cutting edge tracking and auditing technology so you can get real-time updates on what the Energy Ambassadors have done, where they’ve gone, who they’ve met with, and so much more.
Response data gets entered on the spot, and GPS tracking and other auditing efforts help ensure that your team of EAs is performing the job you need from them.
Find out more about Energy Ambassadors
No HR hassles. No interviews. No new hiring. And no need to train anyone.
Power Direct Energy manages all of that. All you have to do is communicate to us the specifics of your energy program, share your customer data to help us target the right prospects, and give us whatever information we need to maximize response and equip the Energy Ambassadors to do everything you need them to do.
We do everything else.
Want to find out more?
