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How to Manage, Buy & Sell Solar Leads with Phonexa

With electricity bills growing by over 25% (2021 – 2025), environmental concerns increasing, and the government introducing a 30% solar tax credit, it’s no surprise that progressively more Americans are adopting solar energy: only at the beginning of 2025, solar accounted for 56% of all new electricity-generating capacity in the United S.

In this highly competitive environment where lead prices rise and conversion rates decline, having an end-to-end lead ecosystem – like the one provided by Phonexa – is the safest bet for solar companies.

With Phonexa, you can manage solar lead generation, buying, and selling workflows at scale while maintaining control over scoring, compliance, fraud prevention, and distribution.

Keep reading to learn why solar businesses need to buy and sell leads to stay ahead of the market – and how Phonexa helps them.

Take a product tour to see how Phonexa’s software works in action.

How Solar Lead Buying Helps You Scale Faster

To scale effectively, you need a steady stream of leads you can close and build revenue loops with. Yet, generating leads, especially in competitive markets like solar, can be difficult:

  • Organic traffic: Even after your website gains authority and is properly crawled, high keyword competition makes reaching, at least, the first search engine results page (SERP) a challenge.
  • Paid traffic: Requires massive investments to win bidding wars, and even when you get clicks, you often waste bids on users with the wrong attributes – like roof type or condition – or just information seekers.

Don’t get me wrong: organic and paid traffic are essential, consistent lead sources, but for most solar businesses, it’s best to reinforce them with solar lead buying, which delivers quick, more controlled results.

These are just some attributes you can choose when buying solar leads:

  • Location
  • Average utility bill
  • Ownership status
  • Roof characteristics

After analyzing your purchase results, you can calibrate your solar lead requirements, which enables you not only to convert more but also to forecast your sales and, as a result, allocate your budget more efficiently.

Common Problems When You Buy Solar Leads

Stale Solar Leads

Although stale leads expressed interest in solar installations at some point, they went quiet for an unknown reason, and it’s difficult to transition them from marketing-qualified to sales-qualified, let alone to opportunities.

To re-engage aged solar leads, you must first identify them by tracking their interactions. Commonly, they open your emails without clicking through or hesitate when asked about solar installations, especially during live calls.

When stale leads are on file, you want to rekindle their interest with:

  • Latest innovations
  • Discounts
  • Federal incentives

Here’s how your email to stale leads may look: Hey Steve! Since our last communication, the government has extended the tax credit for solar installations, and many of our prices went down. Check our refreshed catalogue and tax updates here.

Inaccurate Information

Another, though less common, problem with buying leads is inaccurate information. The consequences range from jeopardized personalization (lead names are off) to the inability to nurture leads (contacts are off).

One way to safeguard yourself against these problems is to run pilot tests – purchasing a small batch of leads to validate new vendors.

You may also use lead generation/supply/purchase agreements, where you can, for example, define inaccurate information, claim a lead warranty period, and outline refund conditions.

Solar Lead Fraud

Alarmingly, over 30% of leads purchased from third-party vendors are fraudulent, meaning that poor monitoring can cost you nearly a third of your budget to buy leads.

Here are the most common types of lead fraud:

Fraud type Description
Duplicate leads Unscrupulous vendors sell you leads that they’ve already sold to you or other buyers.
Deceptive advertising Publishers promote your solar products or services with false or exaggerated claims, causing solar leads to drop off after you pay.
Stolen data Fraudsters create lead profiles out of stolen data, which not only provides you with dead-end leads but also puts you at risk of violating TCPA provisions.
Bot traffic Publishers program bots to fill your forms with fabricated data, inundating your system with a stream of fake traffic.

Although reCAPTCHA v2 can help block certain types of bot traffic, the breadth of modern fraud requires a more comprehensive, real-time screening solution. iClear by Phonexa is designed to monitor multiple fraud signals and risk factors simultaneously.

iClear screens leads in real time, generating risk and fraud signals based on multiple analysis data points, and passes those scores directly into LMS Sync, Phonexa’s proprietary lead management and distribution system, and one of its core solutions.

 

Besides being able to verify phone number risk scores, iClear ensures that your outbound calls are fully compliant by:

  • Looking up phone numbers among existing TCPA, FDCPA, and FCRA lawsuits
  • Checking compliance with the federal FTC and state guidelines by scrubbing against daily updates of the DNC

iClear & LMS Sync: Your Key to Comprehensive Decision Logic

In addition to fraud prevention, iClear works alongside LMS Sync to inform decision logic. iClear evaluates leads in real time and passes risk indicators into LMS Sync, where rules determine whether leads are accepted, routed, or declined based on your criteria, such as:

  • Address and location consistency signals
  • Public risk and compliance indicators
  • Legal and financial risk markers
  • Identity and eligibility signals
  • Behavioral and data integrity attributes

Proper filtering directly impacts your conversion rates and helps your business grow. For example, insights from Phonexa’s reporting may reveal patterns in customer eligibility or financing requirements. Using these insights, you can adjust acceptance criteria to deprioritise leads that are less likely to convert, helping you focus on higher-intent opportunities.

Source: Databox

Here’s how our clients use Phonexa software to distinguish bad from good leads and elevate their game:

 

With LMS Sync, informed by iClear’s real-time signals, you can also configure capping rules to automatically pause lead intake when your team reaches capacity and resume it once processing availability is restored.

Book a demo to learn how Phonexa can help you scale your business.

When Should You Sell Leads

Here are the most common reasons why your company may want to sell solar leads:

  • Redundancy: Leads that you can’t convert, often due to insufficient installation capacity.
  • Irrelevant region: Leads that you generate or acquire but can’t close due to geographic limitations.
  • Out-of-scope requests: Leads whose requests you can’t satisfy, for example, due to inappropriate roof conditions.

Timing matters when selling leads as delays increase the risk of declining intent or lost opportunities.

How To Sell Leads Online Safely & Conveniently

Direct Post

With direct post, you simply send lead details to buyers via email or, more commonly, via APIs, delivering the information directly into CRMs.

Since there’s no intermediary platform involved, direct post arrangements typically rely on predefined agreements between buyers and sellers. When drafting one, it’s critical to ensure TCPA and DNC compliance. iClaim by Phonexa helps document user consent and interaction records to support compliance requirements.

Integrated into Phonexa, iClaim records user interactions and consent data, helping reduce compliance risks for you and your partners. Recordings can be found in your Phonexa dashboards, from where you can share them via a secure, unique URL.

Ping Post

Ping post is a more advanced lead-selling method that uses a technology called a ping tree, allowing sellers to ping leads and reveal some of their attributes so the system can find the best-matching buyers.

Although a ping tree is primarily used by affiliate networks – lead marketplaces that connect thousands of sellers (publishers) and buyers (advertisers) – it can also be adopted by major solar companies with high-volume lead turnover.

“The ping post model typically can yield more revenue because it’s essentially offering the lead to the highest bidder. In the ping tree, it kind of cascades down and places it eventually, so no leads or calls will go unsold.” – Evan Weber, an expert in B2C and B2B digital marketing and online advertising, during the Pioneering Pay-Per-Call Excellence webinar

Here’s a more illustrative ping tree explanation:

 

Phonexa supports ping tree logic for both web leads and inbound calls, enabling flexible routing, distribution, and buyer matching.

  • Google Ads: Fine-tune your Google Ads Network campaigns, for example, when you sell a specific lead count.
  • Slack: Alert your team to important events, such as the introduction of a new buyer, with automated Slack messages.
  • Google Spreadsheets: Add data records to your Google Spreadsheet documents to track and share your results.

With these third-party solutions, Phonexa enables a streamlined workflow where data transfers are automatic, and routine tasks no longer distract you from what matters.

How Phonexa’s Platform Supports an End-to-End Solar Lead Ecosystem

To level up your game in the solar industry, you should generate, buy, and sell leads together, and you can do it with Phonexa. To scale effectively in the solar industry, businesses need a single infrastructure to manage lead generation workflows, buy leads, and sell leads — and that’s exactly what Phonexa provides.

It all starts with lead acquisition, which Phonexa supports through tools like HitMetrix for conversion analysis, E-Delivery for email and SMS automation, and Lynx for click tracking and traffic attribution.

If lead volume is insufficient, Phonexa allows you to manage lead-buying workflows using decision logic to filter out irrelevant, fraudulent, or low-quality traffic. If, along the way, you acquire hard-to-convert leads, you can monetize them through a ping tree configured within LMS Sync and Call Logic, enabling controlled lead distribution to external buyers.

Beyond handling high lead volumes at speed, Phonexa provides real-time, configurable reporting across your lead and call operations. These reports help you understand performance trends, identify inefficiencies, and make data-driven decisions across your funnel.

By the way, one thing that a lot of people forget to do is real-time tracking. They say, “Okay, I’m going to look at this once a month and then, wow, this is not good.” But that’s because maybe their system doesn’t track things in real time, or it’s difficult to actually pull the stats quickly enough. So, first things first, try and put everything in one place so you can actually follow everything in one easy process. Give your decision makers and your media buying team the right data.” David Pickard, CEO, Phonexa, during the Pioneering Pay-Per-Call Excellence webinar

Here are two core solutions you get at a single price:

LMS Sync Lead management & distribution software
Call Logic Inbound call tracking & routing software

These additional features further enhance Phonexa’s core functionality:

E-Delivery Email & SMS marketing software
Cloud PBX Cloud phone system
Lynx Click tracking software
Opt Intel Suppression list management software
HitMetrix User behavior recording & analytics software
Books360 Automated accounting software

Get started with Phonexa to manage, distribute, and monetize your solar leads and calls — all in one place.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where to buy leads

The most common sources of leads are brokers, marketing agencies, publishers, lead generators, and affiliate networks. You can also purchase solar leads directly from other businesses.

How much do solar leads cost?

Though solar leads can cost up to $1,000, their prices are fluid and depend on lead attributes, including type (commercial or residential solar leads), timeframe, role in the buying process, and location (Arizona and California residents are in the highest demand).

How to sell leads to businesses

You can sell leads to businesses either directly, by manually sending your leads to buyers, or via a ping post, when you use a ping tree to match your leads with buyers and trade them automatically.

Got Questions?
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Phonexa

Phonexa is the leading all-in-one platform for call tracking, lead distribution, email, marketing, and digital marketing. The Phonexa staff is responsible for authorship of Phonexa blog posts.

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