Volt
Volt™ by Freedom Forever is a lead management and canvassing tool customized for sales teams to streamline and increase solar sales. Features include lead management, door knocking, territory assignments, competitions, leaderboards and more.
“Amazing. Arguably one of the better [door] knocking apps, with more thought than most, out there.”
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Volt set out to solve key problems and provide value to
both Freedom Forever (the installers) and it’s Dealers
(the sellers):Dealers were paying up to $30k a month for
third-party canvassing, lead management, and
gamification software products.The third-party products also had their limitations
and issues and were not integrated into the
Freedom Forever’s software platform where sales
are submitted.Through an “in-family” solution built by Freedom
Forever, the dealers would get free access to a fully
customized app developed and enhanced with their
direct input.Volt could set Freedom Forever and the Dealers
apart in the industry with an important recruiting
tool that could also improve sales volume and quality.
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One of the most unique aspects of the residential solar industry is the nature of sale — a deal isn’t truly closed until the system is installed and working. This makes the relationship between the sellers (or dealers) and installers important — neither party makes money if the job is not completed or properly installed.
As the largest residential installer in the U.S., Freedom Forever has exclusive partnerships with the Super Dealers of the industry — together they act as the sales arm for Freedom Forever.
This mutually beneficial relationship incentivizes Freedom Forever to support the Super Dealers with development resources, including bonus software products — like the Volt App.
Volt’s Evolution
The Process
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The “Sales App'“ as we called it back then was kicked off in September 2022.
In just 4 months we were launching the MVP of Volt Freedom Forever’s first sales app.
MVP
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The MVP was launched early January 2023
Current Version
The Process
The concept for a sales app was not new at Freedom Forever. The Chief Revenue Officer understood the potential and knew it could be a key industry differentiator. Once the company had a product team up and running and the priority winds shifted toward the sales side of the business, the sales app concept found it’s moment.
Working with our VP of Product and collaborating with another Senior Product Designer, we came up with a few key screen mock-ups in order to pitch our concept and get final buy-in from the necessary stakeholders.
Fun Fact: Solar dealers primarily follow a setter-closer sales model, where more junior level sales reps canvass neighborhoods, with the goal of setting appointments and assigning them to closers – the experienced sales reps most likely to close the deal.
Next with feedback from stakeholders, we honed in on the core features for the MVP, with an eye toward future iterations.
The MVP:
Door knocking/canvassing:
A map view that allowed for pin dropping to quickly create and disposition or tag leads based on the conversation (or lack there of) at each door they knocked.
Lead Management:
A list view of the leads created
A view for each lead with the ability to set appointments and leave notes and add attachments
Scheduling:
Ability to easily set appointments assigned to a specific sales rep
A calendar view for reps and managers to keep track of reps’ appointments and schedules.
The MVP
We officially kicked the project off in early September 2022 with the challenge and ambitious goal of launching Volt to start the following new year. The lead-up to launch involved me taking on the primary designer role and working closely with our VP of product. The process was admittedly unconventional. Because of our tight deadline we took advantage of our VP of Product’s alter-ego as a software developer/coding wizard. As he was setting up the mobile web environment, I continued on with design, pulling in another senior designer as needed for collaboration and feedback.
I took the lead on defining the early design system, getting the opportunity with a fairly blank slate when it came to mobile since we weren’t constrained by the company’s broader design system.
We set up the beginning of the new mobile development team with a couple other developers and a QA engineer and started our daily stand-ups and planned for sprints. Moving through those months toward the launch our VP of Product wore both his developer and product hats and we were able to move fluidly and quickly in designing and building the app’s core sections, screens, flows and interactions.
The MVP launched right on schedule with encouraging usage and adoption metrics. Downloads doubled within the first four months and leads created (the core feature of the app) increased from 59k in the first month to 583k by the end of May 2023. Additionally, events per user for leads created tripled increasing from 116 per user in January to 330 per user by the end of May.
Current Version
The Rebrand
The Branding & Marketing are primarily responsible for the logo designs and color directions. I worked with the team for both iterations to finalize the color schemes to ensure text readability for both the light and dark themes with a bright yellow lime primary color.
Volt Logo & Color Styles
Enhancements
Since Volt’s launch the app has consistently been improved with new features and regular enhancements across the board. In order to determine where we focus our design and development time we meet regularly with leaders from each major sales dealer, in addition to leaders we collect qualitative data from sales representatives who use Volt daily, and analyze quantitative metrics.
Additional features launched:
Leaderboard
Lead Filtering
Sales Competitions
Calendar Blockers
Google Calendar Integration
Sale Rep Recruiting and Onboarding
