---
title: "How we closed $7,650,000 of solar and storage projects for a commercial EPC in nine months. | Stone Haven Capital Group"
description: "Nine projects, an average of $850,000 each. Nine months. A commercial solar and battery storage EPC. No new sales hires, no dealer network, no waiting for a facilities director to run a procurement."
canonical: "https://stonehaven.capital/showcase/commercial-solar-storage-epc"
last-updated: "2026-08-22"
---

> Nine projects, an average of $850,000 each. Nine months. A commercial solar and battery storage EPC. No new sales hires, no dealer network, no waiting for a facilities director to run a procurement.

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Case study · Commercial Solar & Storage EPC

# How we closed $7,650,000 of solar and storage projects for a commercial EPC in nine months.

Nine projects, an average of $850,000 each. Nine months. A commercial solar and battery storage EPC. No new sales hires, no dealer network, no waiting for a facilities director to run a procurement.

- $7,650,000 generated in 9 months, from 9 solar and storage projects at an average of $850,000.

- 354,891 emails to 59,149 companies, producing 652 replies at 1.1%.

- 137 interested conversations became 41 held meetings and 9 signed projects.

- What did most of the work: we built the list around site portfolios and utility geography rather than company size.

- What went wrong: the follow-ups repeated the opener almost verbatim.

01

## Did they get a good result?

Yes. Here it is plainly. Before we started, the year's closed work stood at $2,732,000 and arrived through referrals from two electrical contractors. Nine months later the company had signed nine projects worth $7,650,000, an average of $850,000 each, and 41 qualified opportunities worth $26,240,000 sitting behind them. That is 2.8 times the baseline, off nine signatures.

What happenedThe number

Project value signed in nine months$7,650,000

Projects closed9

Average project value$850,000

Baseline before the programme$2,732,000

Growth against that baseline2.8x

Qualified opportunities41, worth $26,240,000

Interested-stage conversations137, worth $58,910,000

Emails sent354,891 to 59,149 contacts

Replies652, a 1.1% reply rate

Positive replies and bounce rate137 positive, 21.0% of replies; 0.9% bounce

Nine months of sending against a few thousand qualifying sites.

02

## Did you get them in front of the right people?

This is the only question the send count cannot answer. At nine closed projects across nine months, a single wrong month of targeting is a tenth of the programme. Nothing about this shape is forgiving.

41 opportunities cleared qualification carrying $26,240,000 between them. Nine of those signed, for $7,650,000, at an average project of $850,000. Behind that sat 137 interested-stage conversations worth $58,910,000.

Targeting shows up in what converts. 652 replies produced 137 positive ones, 41 of those reached qualification and 9 signed. On a programme where one deal is worth $850,000, a list that is slightly wrong does not produce slightly worse numbers. It produces none.

The project pipeline as the client worked it: 41 site assessments held, 9 signed.

03

## What worked, and why

### We built the list around site portfolios and utility geography rather than company size.

A solar and storage offer is only real in places where the utility rate structure makes it real. The list started from the operators, industrial, cold storage and distribution, then narrowed to the service territories where demand charges and time-of-use pricing already do most of the arguing. Inside those territories it narrowed again to operators running several owned sites rather than one.

That produced 59,149 contacts across the programme and 354,891 sends at a 0.9% bounce rate, 3,194 bounces in total. Placement held at 94.0%. Neither number is the interesting part. The interesting part is that a director of facilities in the right rate zone reads the first line and recognises their own electricity bill in it.

A reply thread from an operator in one of the target territories, from first answer through to the site walk.

The reason it holds: multi-site operators in a high demand-charge territory are already paying for the problem every month. The utility has done the persuasion. The list only has to find the people standing in front of the bill.

### We excluded everyone whose lease made the answer no before the conversation started.

The buyer for this offer is a director of facilities, a VP of real estate or a head of sustainability at an operator that owns its buildings or holds a lease long enough to outlast the term. Everything else came out. Short leases, single-site operators, tenants with no control over the roof, and any building where the structure or the roof age would not carry an array.

Those exclusions removed most of the starting pool. They also removed most of the conversations that feel productive for two weeks and then end at a landlord who was never going to sign anything.

The first pull, before rate territory and ownership filters went on.

The same market after service territory, site count and ownership filters.

What that buys: on a $850,000 project the qualification problem is not finding interest. It is finding interest attached to a building where the work is physically and legally possible. Doing that filtering on the list costs nothing. Doing it after a site visit costs a week.

### The first email made an observation and asked for nothing at all.

The opener said one specific thing about the prospect's own sites and stopped there. No offer, no capability paragraph, no meeting request, signed with a first name and nothing under it. It reads like a note from a person who happened to notice something, because that is what it is.

Everything left the estate as plain text, varied line by line, so two operators in the same territory never received identical wording.

Six touches on alternating seven and three day gaps, and the observation that opened them.

The reason it works: a facilities director who has been pitched solar four times this quarter is scanning for the ask so they can delete around it. An email with no ask in it has nothing to scan for. What comes back is a reply about their building instead of a no about your offer.

We ran six touches on alternating seven and three day gaps across five months, with three variations on the opener.

Six steps on a long gap then a short one, all A/B tested, running long enough that a contact entered in the first week is still in sequence five months later. None of it ran on the client's own domain; the estate carried every send.

Why that holds: a capital project has a budget cycle attached to it and the cycle does not care when your sequence started. The long gap keeps the programme alive across months without becoming noise, and the short one that follows it lands as a reminder rather than as a new approach.

### We reviewed reply quality weekly and cut what was not producing site visits.

Angles were judged on whether a reply led to a site walk, never on how many replies came back. With 652 replies across nine months, the weekly review is reading tens of conversations rather than thousands, which means the judgement is qualitative and has to be. An angle producing polite interest that never reached a building came off inside a fortnight.

04

## What did not work, and what we did about it

Three of them, and you should hear them from us rather than infer them later.

### The follow-ups repeated the opener almost verbatim.

Touches two and three restated the observation from touch one with the words rearranged. Nothing new was added, no second reason to answer was offered, and the effect was immediate: the sequence stopped reading as a person who had noticed something and started reading as a system that had been configured. A facilities director who ignored the first email and then received it twice more has learned exactly one thing about the sender.

Step one, the observation that opened the sequence.

Step two, which repeated it almost word for word before it was rewritten.

What we changed: every touch after the first was rewritten to carry its own reason for existing, and the list was rebuilt underneath them at the same time. The opening pool of 197,577 contacts came down to 68,130 once service territory, site count and ownership filters went on. Fewer contacts, each seeing six genuinely different messages.

### One persona was written for the whole list.

Facilities and sustainability were receiving the same email, and they buy for genuinely different reasons. A director of facilities is buying an operating cost reduction and wants to know what happens to the demand charge. A head of sustainability is buying a reporting outcome and wants to know what lands in the disclosure. A single message served neither of them well, and it read as generic to both.

What we changed: the list was split by function and the opener was written twice. The underlying offer never changed. What changed was which consequence of it appeared in the first line.

### Three angles was too few for a market we did not know yet.

Three angles across nine months produced 652 replies and 137 positive ones. Spread across three variations that is a base too thin to separate them with any confidence. Two performed within a few conversations of each other for most of the programme, which is indistinguishable from chance at that size. The more expensive part is what we could not see: whether this market wanted a fourth thing nobody wrote.

What we changed: we stopped rotating the three and let each accumulate replies until the gap between them was wide enough to act on, which on a programme this size means months rather than weeks. A fourth angle was written and deliberately held back for the next engagement instead of being squeezed into this one, where it would only have thinned the base further.

A programme this small in deal count leaves nowhere to hide a mistake, and a document showing none of them has had the section removed. These are the corrections that recur on your engagement, which is the only reason they are worth reading.

05

## The three angles we test, in every market

Everything above is what this programme settled into. It did not start there. At the outset nobody knew which of three openers this market would answer, including us, and the honest position is that no amount of reasoning gets you to that answer in advance. So three variations run at once, one per angle, and the reply data decides. These three travel across sectors because each rests on a different reason a person answers a stranger.

06

## 1. Value first

Open with something the prospect can use whether or not they ever answer. A read on their rate structure, a benchmark, a number from their own territory. Usefulness first, interest second.

We pulled what the demand charge looks like across the three territories your sites sit in this year. Want me to send it over?

07

## 2. The timing hook

Attach the message to something that just changed for them. Only works when the change is public and recent enough that mentioning it proves you actually looked.

Saw the utility filed for a demand charge increase effective January. Does that hit the cold storage sites or just the offices?

08

## 3. The named problem

State the constraint they live inside, in the words they would use, then ask whether it holds for them. Lands hardest where the problem is an open secret nobody says out loud.

Most facilities teams your size are paying more in demand charges than in energy and cannot do much about either. Is that where you are?

09

## How we use them

All three go out at the same time against a divided list, and the failures above are part of why the split matters. On a programme with nine signatures in it, you cannot afford to spend three months learning something the reply data would have told you in three weeks.

10

## Why this works for commercial solar specifically

The EPCs that come to us describe the same situation. The work is technically sound, the financing structure removes the usual objection, and origination still runs through two or three electrical contractors who refer whatever happens to cross their desk. That produces a real business and a completely unforecastable one, and it never reaches an operator who has not already been introduced.

This market suits the channel for three specific reasons:

- The bill does the arguing. In the right service territory the prospect is already paying, monthly, for the problem this solves. The message does not have to create a need. It has to name one that is already on a statement someone signs off every month.

- One project pays for years of the channel. At an average project of $850,000, the arithmetic stops being a marketing question after the first signature. Very few channels have that ratio, and it is what makes a low-volume programme rational.

- The offer removes the capital objection before it is raised. A fixed monthly energy bill with no capital outlay means the first conversation is about the building rather than about a budget request that does not exist yet.

11

## Why would this work for your business?

### Possibly it will not, and establishing that now costs nothing. Read down the table.

This works ifThis does not work if

A signed project is worth six figures or moreThe average job is a few thousand dollars

Your buyer sits at an operator with several owned sitesYou sell to single-site tenants with no roof rights

Rate structure or policy in your territory already creates the caseYour economics depend on the prospect caring in the abstract

You can put an engineer on a roof within a week of a positive replyA site visit takes a month to schedule internally

You can carry a five-month sequence before judging itThe programme has to show signed work in month two

If the left column describes you, what transfers is the method rather than anything unusual about this client. An EPC with real technical capability, a financing structure that answers the obvious objection, and no route to an operator who has never heard of them. All of it came out of process, and the process does not change for you.

12

## One more thing worth understanding

In this market the first meeting is close to worthless, and treating it as the goal is the most common way these programmes stall.

A facilities director on a thirty-minute call can tell you their headcount, their sites and their frustration with the utility. They cannot tell you the roof age, the structural loading, the switchgear capacity, the shading, or where the interconnection actually lands. None of that is knowable from a chair. So the call produces warmth and no information, everyone agrees it went well, and the opportunity sits there.

The site walk is where the deal is made. It is the first point at which the project becomes specific: this roof, this array, this number. It is also where the prospect stops being a prospect, because someone who has spent an hour on their own roof with an engineer has begun the project in their own head.

So the whole sequence is pointed at the walk rather than at the meeting. Positive replies propose it directly. That is why the response time failure above mattered more than it looks like it should, and why the gap between a walked site and a signed project is far narrower than the gap between a held call and a walked site.

13

## Before and after

Before After nine months

Where projects came fromReferrals from two electrical contractors A list built on service territory and site ownership

Signed project value$2,732,000 $7,650,000

Projects closedWhatever the referrals happened to produce 9, at an average of $850,000

Qualified pipeline behind itNothing tracked 41 opportunities worth $26,240,000

Time from positive reply to site walkTwo days before anyone replied at all Same-day response, walk proposed in the reply

14

## If you want to know whether your market has this in it

A quarter of an hour usually settles it. Tell us which operators you want on the roof of, what a typical project is worth when it signs, and which territories you can build in. We come back with how many of those operators are genuinely reachable, what conversation volume is realistic against that number, and a direct answer on whether this channel suits you.

If the answer is no, we say so on that call. Neither of us gains from finding out in month four.

## Want to know whether your market has this in it?

The first conversation is short. You tell us who your buyers are and what one is worth to you. We tell you how many we can actually reach, what the meeting volume looks like, and whether outbound is the right lever for you at all.

If we think it is not, we will say so.

Book a consultation call

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