Solar dialer: how solar sales teams call and text leads

A solar dialer is the calling tool your setters use to reach homeowners fast, track every attempt, and pair calls with follow-up texts to leads who agreed to them. The ones that hold up combine quick manual calling, consented recording, a Missed call card in the Inbox thread for each call you miss, and compliance checks before anyone dials or texts.

This guide covers how solar teams work leads in practice: the first five minutes, a multi-day call cadence, local numbers, consent problems with aged and purchased leads, DNC scrubbing, and follow-up texts. We make Ready, so the worked examples use the Ready Dialer and Ready texting. We also say where the Ready Dialer is the wrong tool, because some solar operations need something it doesn't do.

Why solar lead calling is harder than most verticals

Solar leads have three traits that make calling them unusually unforgiving:

• They go cold fast. A homeowner who filled out a savings-estimate form usually filled out two or three. The first installer to reach them sets the frame for the appointment.
• The sale is long. Site survey, proposal, financing, utility interconnection. You can easily make a dozen touches before a contract, so your cadence has to survive weeks, not one afternoon.
• The lead sources are mixed. Your own website forms, shared leads from aggregators, aged lead files, door-knocking sheets, referral lists. Each source has different consent behind it, and that decides whether you can text the lead at all.

The third point is where solar teams get into legal trouble, so we cover it in its own section below.

What a solar dialer needs to do

Ignore the feature grids for a minute. For a setter team, the list is short:

1. Dial in one click from the lead record. No copying numbers into a phone.
2. Catch inbound calls. Homeowners call back hours later. If that call goes to a dead voicemail box, you paid for the lead twice.
3. Record and transcribe, with consent. Recordings settle disputes about what was promised on price or incentives. Transcripts let a manager review a call in two minutes instead of fifteen.
4. Sit next to texting. Most homeowners screen unknown calls. A text that says who you are and why you're calling is often what gets the next call answered.
5. Keep compliance upstream. Scrubbing, opt-outs and quiet hours should happen before the dial or send, not in a spreadsheet afterward.

What the Ready Dialer does and doesn't do

The Ready Dialer is click-to-call from the dial pad in the Ready dashboard or inside GoHighLevel. It records calls with consent, produces transcripts, and rings the open pad on inbound calls.

It does not auto-dial, run a predictive or parallel queue, drop voicemails, transfer, or let managers barge or whisper. If your floor model is ten setters each pushing through hundreds of aged leads an hour, you need a different category of tool, and our post on auto dialer pricing explains what those cost and why. Many solar teams don't work that way, though. They work fresh inbound leads by hand, and manual click-to-call fits that.

The first five minutes: text plus call

Speed matters more than anything else on a fresh solar lead. Here is the pattern we'd set up for a lead that came through your own form, with consent to calls and texts from your company:

1. Within a minute: an automated text confirms the request and names the setter. Example: "Hi Dana, it's Marcus with Brightline Solar. Got your savings request for 4410 Elm. Calling you in a few minutes from this number." That's about 130 GSM characters, so 1 segment.
2. Within five minutes: the setter clicks the number in the lead record and calls from the pad.
3. If no answer: a short follow-up text, then a second call attempt later the same day.

Ready automations can send the instant text. The call is a person clicking dial. There's no auto-dial step that fires the call for them, so speed depends on someone watching new leads come in. For a small team, a shared view of new leads usually does the job.

An example solar call cadence

This is an example cadence, not a measured best practice. Adjust it to your close cycle and your lead sources. It assumes a consented web lead.

That's six call attempts and four or five texts over two weeks. Leads who opt out by text are suppressed automatically. Leads who ask on a call not to be contacted again go on your internal do-not-call list, which your reps have to log, because a verbal request on a call doesn't flip a text opt-out by itself.

Keep calls inside local calling hours. Federal telemarketing rules limit calls to 8 AM to 9 PM in the recipient's time zone, and some states are stricter. For texts, Ready holds sends outside permitted local hours based on the recipient's area and sends them later. Campaigns, drip campaigns and automations wait up to 24 hours for the window; a one-to-one or API text is held only if the window opens within 6 hours, otherwise it is refused and must be resent; a one-to-one reply to someone who texted you in the last 24 hours goes out at any hour.

Local numbers and local presence

Solar is territorial. You install in specific counties, and a homeowner in Phoenix is more likely to pick up a 602 or 480 number than an out-of-state one.

For texting, Ready's local presence sends from the account's number closest to the contact's area code. In GoHighLevel, the #from:local# tag picks it, and #from:rotate# spreads new contacts across numbers inside the local area-code group. A contact keeps the number they already text with, so a homeowner never sees a conversation jump between numbers. Local presence has a listed price of $0.0015 for each segment of a delivered text.

Every number still sits on your registered 10DLC campaign. Local presence picks among registered numbers. It doesn't get around registration. Teams turn it on because a local area code tends to look more familiar to the homeowner. We don't publish a reply-rate lift as a Ready statistic.

For calling, buy numbers in the area codes you install in, and give setters numbers that match their territories.

Consent for aged and purchased leads

This is where solar teams get sued. The TCPA allows $500 to $1,500 per violating call or text, and solar has drawn a lot of TCPA litigation. We aren't your lawyer, and compliance is the sender's responsibility, but a few things are clear enough to say plainly.

Purchased and shared leads. The consent on a lead-gen form often names the aggregator, or lists dozens of "partners," rather than your company. Before you text a purchased lead, check the actual consent language and the page it was collected on, and keep a copy. If the consent doesn't clearly cover your company and texting, don't text the lead.

Aged leads. A lead from 18 months ago may have changed numbers, and the person now on that line never agreed to anything. Treat aged files as phone-and-mail leads, not text leads.

Our stance is simple: cold contact happens by phone and mail. SMS goes to leads who consented to texts from you, or who replied to you. Once an aged lead picks up and asks you to text them the proposal, you have a conversation, and texting it is reasonable. Before that, keep aged and purchased leads out of text campaigns. The insurance agent dialer guide works through the same aged-lead problem for another lead-heavy industry.

Ready records your consent attestation on every bulk send and every API send that sets consent_attested: who sent, to how many, and when. It does not store per-contact proof such as the homeowner's opt-in time, the form wording or the page URL. Your CRM or lead vendor has to keep that record.

DNC and litigator scrubbing before you dial

Before a setter touches a purchased or aged list, scrub it. Ready's standalone TCPA & DNC Litigator Scrub costs $0.005 per contact. It checks each number against known TCPA-litigator lists and DNC-complainer lists and flags matches before you contact them.

Worked example: a 5,000-lead aged file costs 5,000 × $0.005 = $25 to scrub. For comparison, one demand letter over a single text can carry $500 to $1,500 of statutory exposure. A scrub lowers risk. It doesn't make you lawsuit-proof, and it doesn't replace your own checks against the National Do Not Call Registry or your internal do-not-call list.

For ongoing texting, scrubbing and landline validation can also be switched on per account. Each adds $0.003 per segment, and both are off by default. Landline validation can be worth turning on for aged solar files: Ready already refuses numbers it has seen as landlines for free on every account, and validation adds a live line-type check for the numbers it hasn't seen, so old home-phone numbers are refused before they cost a send (the number check itself can still be billed).

What it costs: a worked month

Assumptions for this example: a team works 200 new consented web leads in a month on the cadence above. On average, each lead gets 4 unanswered call attempts, and 40% of leads connect once for an 8-minute conversation. Each lead gets 3 single-segment texts.

Calls (Ready Dialer, $0.025/min, each started minute billed as a full minute, no seat plans, and every minute billed at that one rate):

• No-answer attempts: 200 × 4 attempts, unanswered calls are not billed = $0.00
• Connected calls: 80 connects × 8 minutes × $0.025 = $38.40
• Total: $16.00, or about $0.20 per connected conversation

Texts (Standard, $0.0075/segment plus a $0.0045 carrier fee per segment):

• 200 leads × 3 texts × 1 segment = 600 segments
• 600 × $0.0075 = $4.50, plus 600 × $0.0045 in carrier fees
• That all-in figure excludes the compliance surcharge. With scrubbing and landline validation both on, add 600 × 2 × $0.003 = $3.60.
• Homeowner replies are billed like sent texts, at the same per-segment rate plus the carrier fee.

Watch segments. An emoji drops a segment to 70 characters, so a 175-character text with a sun emoji is 3 segments, which triples that text's cost. Ready swaps curly quotes and long dashes for plain ones before sending, so those don't change the count.

Registration: texting needs a registered 10DLC brand and campaign. You pay $25 at submit for the first month, then $25/mo for registration and $2 per number. Most approvals take 2 to 7 days. Picking the right use case matters for solar: see our guide on matching your campaign use case to what you send, and 10DLC cost for the full fee breakdown. Current texting rates are on the pricing page.

Sending follow-ups from your own app

If your lead flow runs through custom software, one API call sends a follow-up from the number closest to the homeowner. Include an Idempotency-Key header (any UUID) so a retry never sends twice:

POST https://api.tryready.com/v1/messages
X-API-Key: <key>

{"to": "+16025550142", "body": "Hi Dana, Marcus at Brightline Solar. Does Thu 4 PM work for the roof survey?", "consent_attested": true, "from_strategy": "local"}

Opted-out numbers and known landlines are refused and not charged. Full reference: docs.tryready.com/api/messages.

The practical takeaway

Solar lead calling comes down to three things. Get to fresh leads in minutes with a text plus a manual call. Run a cadence that lasts two weeks without annoying anyone. Keep text campaigns limited to leads who actually consented. Scrub aged and purchased files before anyone dials them, and keep per-lead consent records where they belong, in your CRM.

If you work inbound leads by hand, the Ready Dialer and Ready texting cover that workflow inside one inbox, including inside GoHighLevel. If you need predictive dialing across huge aged lists, buy a tool built for that. To try Ready, sign up and use your first 20 free one-to-one texts before you register. To send, you add a card and get a number, which is $2 a month with the first month charged when you get it.

FAQ

What is a solar dialer? It's calling software that solar setters and closers use to reach homeowner leads quickly, log attempts, and record calls. Better setups pair it with consented follow-up texts and pre-dial compliance checks.

Can the Ready Dialer call solar leads automatically? No. It's click-to-call from the dial pad, with consented recording, transcripts, inbound calls that ring the open pad, and a Missed call card in the Inbox thread for each call you miss. It costs $0.025/min, and each started minute is billed as a full minute.

Can I text purchased or aged solar leads? Only if their consent clearly covers texts from your company, and you can show it. Otherwise, contact them by phone and mail, and text only after they reply or ask you to.

How much does it cost to scrub a solar lead list? The standalone TCPA & DNC Litigator Scrub is $0.005 per contact, so a 5,000-lead file costs $25. It lowers risk but doesn't replace your National DNC Registry checks.

Do I need 10DLC registration to text solar leads? Yes, for regular SMS. You pay $25 at submit, then $25/mo for registration and $2 per number. Most approvals take 2 to 7 days.