Simpleray creates a customized, data-driven sales process with Zendesk Sell

Once a niche market in energy production, solar has gone mainstream—and for many homeowners and businesses, it’s an alternative to the conventional grid that makes more and more sense, both financially and environmentally. In the United States’ Midwest, the solar energy market is booming, and turnkey solar installer Simpleray is leading the way.

For more than a decade, the Iowa-based company has offered planning, financing, and installations for solar energy solutions in both the commercial and private sectors. And as the solar energy market has grown—and spurred intense competition—the company realized that its sales team was unsure where to focus its efforts to drive the best results. That led Vice President David Birchmier to begin the search for a solution, one that he knew would require custom integrations and data science in order to optimize Simpleray’s sales processes.

In its early days, Simpleray used ad hoc sales tracking tools, which hindered productivity and siloed data across multiple solutions. As he began his search for a sales platform, he knew that it would need to yield actionable insights and be readily accepted by his team. “I needed a solution that didn’t restrict our sales team and instead would let us build out a measurable process that worked for us,” says Birchmier. After briefly evaluating Salesforce and Nutshell, he found exactly what he needed with Zendesk Sell: an intuitive and extensible platform.

Simpleray easily integrated Sell with its marketing system to better capture, qualify, and manage leads. “Once someone fills out a contact form, all lead capture data is pushed to Sell, triggering an automated email and auto-assigning the lead to a sales rep,” Birchmier said. Various custom lead statuses in Sell have been set up to automatically fire customized emails, and location data is captured to improve the qualification process. “Our industry is very geolocation focused, so we need to know where our prospects are located to assess whether or not they’re viable leads,” Birchmier said. “By having a Google Maps snapshot of their locations automatically pull into Sell, we can do that.”

For Birchmier, having an extensible platform behind his sales team has made all the difference. “You simply can’t achieve your maximum potential as a company if you’re restricted by your platform’s APIs and big data capabilities,” he says. Using the Sell API has allowed Simpleray to build custom integrations that fully meet its use case, and the results have been remarkable. “Before Sell, we acquired 8 leads a week,” Birchmier said. “Now, we acquire roughly 400 leads a month.”