Selling Solar


Book Description

The solar industry is expanding at rapid pace - almost fifty percent annually since the year 2000, and with this growth has come tremendous opportunity for those who are prepared to take advantage of it. While basic selling skills like prospecting, making good presentations, and closing techniques are foundational in any selling environment, the solar industry demands a unique set of competencies and abilities if you want to become a top performer. Having spent thousands of hours working for solar companies of various sizes, this book shares the lessons and best practices author, Daniel Howson, has gained as a door-to-door lead generator, a sales consultant, a supervisor, a leader, a manager, and a pioneer for solar power in a number of markets around the country. Discover: - Why selecting the right company to work for is critical to your success - What consumers are really looking for when they choose solar - How to build trust and credibility quickly and reliably - The secrets for delivering compelling solar presentations - How to deliver the benefits of solar to clients This book is not simply a "how to" book, although you will learn the tools and methods you need to sell solar effectively. Just as importantly it is a complete guide to developing the skills, knowledge, and mindset that are critically important to leading a successful career in solar. The solar industry is changing the world and by reading this book you can become a big part of it, building the sales skills to be a top performer, deepening your knowledge, and preparing for a future powered by the sun.




Selling Solar


Book Description

To solve the climate crisis, the world must make a wholesale shift to renewable energy technologies. With surging growth in emerging markets, this transformation takes on even greater urgency. The challenges - and opportunities - are immense. Selling Solar considers how such a shift might happen. Focusing on the case of solar photovoltaics, it shows how, at the start of the 21st century, this promising technology began to diffuse rapidly in select emerging markets, after years of struggling to take off. What were the initial barriers to diffusion? How were they overcome? Who did it? And how can this success be replicated? Drawing on literature on innovation diffusion and entrepreneurship, the author answers these questions, showing how entrepreneurs affected profound technological change not just through the solar systems they sold, but through the example they set to both new market entrants and policymakers. In analysing how this happened, this book offers important lessons for the diffusion of a range of renewable energy technologies in emerging markets, and for the advancement of the sector as a whole. Selling Solar is essential reading for anyone who believes in a renewable energy future and wants it sooner rather than later.




Solarnomics


Book Description

Solar power has come of age. Not only has it become one of the key alternatives to fossil fuels, it can now be deployed in a way that makes a viable business with a financial profit. This book shows industry professionals and students how to do just that. Solarnomics describes the economics of building and operating a solar power plant today and provides a window into a future in which several technologies collaborate, and in which all participants in the electricity grid become smarter at scheduling both the supply and demand for electric power to give humanity a future that is sustainable, both environmentally and economically. The book shows how to estimate costs and revenues, how to tweak the design of a project to improve profitability, how to calculate return on investment, how to assess and deal with risk, how to raise capital, how to combine solar with batteries to make a hybrid microgrid, and how to be prepared for future developments in the evolving smart electricity grid. Solarnomics will enable professionals in the solar industry to assess the potential profitability of a proposed solar project, and it will enable students to add an extra dimension to their understanding of sustainability.




Advertising & Selling


Book Description







202 Things You Can Make and Sell For Big Profits


Book Description

Reap Your Share of Resale Riches! This is it—the bona fide insider’s guide to cashing in on the huge boom in reselling new and used products for big bucks. At last, a soup-to-nuts primer on how to tap into the exploding market for new and “previously owned” merchandise flying off of websites such as eBay and elsewhere. This book has it all—the latest information on what to buy, where to buy, what to pay, and how to sell it for big profits, online and off. Get the complete lowdown from a true expert on how to launch into this exciting area, plus discover 202 products almost guaranteed to start your business off with a bang. Learn which products are proven sellers, how and where to buy them cheaply, and how to resell them for top dollar: • Tap into page after page of buying sources, including distributors and wholesalers, manufacturers, online and offline auctions, government surplus sources, estate sales and more! • Find out how and where to sell the goods for the most profit, including: eBay, internet malls, websites, e-storefronts, consignment outlets, and mail order, not to mention your own showroom and in-home parties, or at trade shows and seminars. • Learn how to negotiate like a pro for overstock and out-of-season and slightly damaged goods—buying on terms for no money down. • Learn how to “work the room” at auctions, estate sales, liquidations, and flea markets—bidding and buying for less. • Learn how to tap the vast and profitable world of imported goods, with full details on over seas sources and how to deal with them.




PV Technical Sales


Book Description

NABCEP sets the standard for solar certifications in the United States and Canada. The NABCEP PV Technical Sales Certification shows customers, friends and employers that you are knowledgeable and qualified to sell solar systems. If someone is selling solar, they need to know what they are selling and how it is configured. Where will they connect the circuit breaker? Will the house need expensive modifications in order for a PV system to be installed? These are the questions that you as a NABCEP Technical Sales Certified solar salesperson will confidently answer. This book is full of practical information that anyone selling solar should know in order to properly serve their customers and to ethically represent the industry that is solving the world’s problems on the ground and rooftop level. This book will be of use to those taking the NABCEP PV Technical Sales Exam, as well as anyone selling or planning to sell solar.




Solar Energy Update


Book Description




Transforming Nature


Book Description

This book is but the draft of a draft, as Melville said of Moby Dick. There is no prose here to match Melville's, but the scope is worthy of the great white whale. No one could possibly write a comprehensive, authoritative book on ethics, invention and discovery. I have not tried to, though I hope my bibliography will be a useful starting point for other explorers, and the cases and ideas presented here will keep people arguing for years. Although this book is nothing like a textbook, it is written for my students. I was trained as a teacher of psychology in graduate school and ended-up, by one of those happy chances of the job market, teaching psychology to engineering students rather than psyche majors. My dissertation and early research were in the psychology of scientific hypothesis-testing (see Chapter 2). When I team-taught a course with W. Bernard Carlson, a historian of technology, I saw how cognitive psychology might be applied to the study of invention. Bernie and I received funding from the National Science Foundation for three years of research on the invention of the telephone; a portion of that work is described in Chapter 3.




Law and Policy for a New Economy


Book Description

This book makes the case for a New Environmentalism, and using a systems change approach, takes the reader through ideas for reorienting the economy. It addresses the laws and policies needed to support the emergence of a new economy across a variety of major areas – from energy to food, across common pool resources, and shifting investments to capitalize locally-connected and mission-driven businesses. The authors take the approach that the challenges are much broader than setting parameters around pollution, and go to the heart of the dominant global political economy. It explores the values needed to transform our current economic system into a new economy supportive of ecological integrity, social justice, and vibrant democracy.