Imagine this: you won a bid to do an EV charger install, but the returns barely cover the $200 or more in marketing costs you paid to get to that winning bid. Sound familiar?
This is a common scenario for many electricians diving into the EV charger installation market. The core challenge? They don’t have the systems in place to profitably convert leads and grow their business.
It’s no secret that acquiring leads for EV charger installations can be pricey. You’re going to pay a lead provider anywhere from $150 to $500 for each completed job, whether you get revenue share leads from places like Kopperfield and QMerit, buy leads outright from Thumbtack or Angi, or advertise on Yelp and Google. Yet the profit margins on these installations don't always justify the investment if you aren’t ready.
Because it’s a smaller purchase size, EV charger installs can be a great business if you can create a steady pipeline of business, you can reliably win bids, and you use them to fill in gaps in your schedule or, ideally, dedicate a truck to doing 3 to 4 installs a day.
The key lies in establishing a consistent flow of jobs and building or buying a system that maximizes your chance of winning bids by automating tasks that take time and add cost except the bid and install. A critical way to lower costs is by eliminating most site visits.
Before you buy leads, assess if you’re truly ready. Figure out how much time you’re spending to bid, sell, follow-up, collect on each job, and request reviews. The most successful shops automate many of their processes so that they can:
Your best competition is doing this already. Here’s how you can beat them.
Once you have a lead, immediate follow-up is crucial. Here's how to make that follow-up pop:
If you are buying leads, you need to have systems in place to make quick responses happen even when you are at your busiest.
Make it easy for the customer to give you all the information you need to provide a proposal and price quickly — without a site visit. Doing virtual site visits right will win some bids before the competition even shows up.
Tools like those created by Kopperfield can help you conduct these efficiently by guiding customers through the process and providing you with a job summary. With Kopperfield you can:
EV charger installers who use Kopperfield remotely bid on over 91% of projects.
Doing a few bids a month in person is doable, but if you’re going to grow your business, you will run out of time. Virtual site visits make you faster, saves you a huge amount of otherwise billable time, and wins more bids.
Today’s customers expect a seamless online experience. This includes:
Reviews of businesses happen online whether the business asks for them or not. A good system can get more customers to leave good reviews while also catching bad reviews before they go online.
If customers are happy with their electric car charger installation, most still won't leave a review unless asked. A good system will first ask happy customers to review the business. If they give 5 stars, it can then ask them to post that review online on Google or Yelp.
No business makes every customer happy. So if an unhappy customer gives a bad review directly to the business first, the business has a chance to fix the problem before the customer posts a bad review online. A good review system allows the business to see bad reviews first and try to make the customer happier.
The EV charger installation market presents a major opportunity to grow your business, but only if you have the systems to capitalize on it profitably.
By automating and streamlining your processes around lead response, site visits, bidding, payment collection, and reviews, you can reduce costs, speed up your operations, provide a better customer experience, and win more bids.
To be successful, invest in creating seamless customer journeys with tools that guide customers, generate clear quotes, enable online scheduling and payment, and prompt for reviews.
Follow the lead of top shops who are growing rapidly in this space by innovating operationally. With the right systems in place, you too can build a highly profitable EV charger installation business.
Kopperfield is the complete platform for contractors who want to grow their EV charger installation business.
Kopperfield’s powerful system includes lead generation forms for Tesla and non-Tesla installs and guided remote site visits so you have everything you need to bid with confidence on every job. Centralized messaging keeps your team and your customers on the same page and online credit card processing with next day payment takes the headaches out of running your business.
Learn more about how Kopperfield can grow your business by booking a demo today.
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