Residential solar is crowded: door-knockers, call centers, lead aggregators and big installers all chase the same homeowners. Commercial roofs are a different market. A warehouse, a farm, a church or a small manufacturer has a big flat roof, a monthly electric bill that someone pays attention to, and a decision-maker you can write to directly. To get customers for a solar company in that market, you send a short email that carries a number, not a slogan.
This article covers who to target, how to find them by name, what the one-page estimate should say, and how to follow up. The example installer is Ridgeback Solar, a made-up crew of eight.
Why the cold email can carry a number
A homeowner's electric bill is a private thing, and a mailer can only guess. A commercial building is different in two ways. The roof is visible from satellite imagery, so you can estimate usable area before you write. And the owner of a business that spends several thousand dollars a month on power thinks in terms of operating costs. An email that says "your 38,000 square foot roof could host roughly a 150 kW system, and for a building like yours that could cover about a third of your electric use" gets read, because it is about their building.
The sizes are estimates. Say so in the email, and say that you'd confirm them with a utility bill. A claim that is honest and specific is better than a precise one that turns out wrong.
The warehouses, farms, churches and small manufacturers worth going after first
Look for buildings with large, mostly flat or low-slope roofs, a decent age (so a re-roof may be coming), and daytime electric loads. Warehouses and light industrial buildings are the obvious fit. Small manufacturers run machines during the day, which matches solar production. Farms have large barn and shed roofs and high usage for cooling or irrigation. Churches have big roofs but low weekday use, so the math is different, and some have decision processes that take months. Self-storage facilities and cold storage buildings are also worth a look.
Skip tenants. If a company leases its building, the decision belongs to the landlord, and the landlord is the person to email.
Build a list of commercial building owners with large roofs
Use county property records to find commercial parcels with a large building footprint, and a satellite map to confirm the roof is open and unshaded. For each, find the owner or the operator. For businesses that own their building, the owner is often listed on the company website or in state filings. For farms, the farm's name and the operator's name are usually public.
You are looking for 50 buildings to start. Rocketship can search for these buyers by description (owners and operations managers of warehouses and light manufacturing within 40 miles) and show the count and the first 25 by name before it uses a credit. It finds business buyers and not homeowners, which is exactly the market in this article. Before you pay for any list, check a sample, as lead data you can check before paying describes.
What to offer: a one-page savings estimate from their utility bill
The offer is a one-page estimate, and it is free. You ask for one thing: a recent utility bill. With it you can model the building's use and show how much a system could offset. A free public tool such as NREL's PVWatts gives you production estimates for a location and system size, and you apply the rate from their bill.
Here is a simple example. A warehouse pays $4,800 a month for electricity, or $57,600 a year. A rooftop system you size to offset about 35 percent of use would offset roughly $20,000 of that a year at current rates. The estimate shows system size, expected annual production, the first-year savings, and the installed cost and payback on the second line. Incentives and tax treatment change from year to year and depend on the owner, so confirm the current federal, state and utility programs before you quote, and state which ones you assumed. The owner's accountant will ask.
Three short emails to a building owner
Subject: Solar on the roof at 1200 Mill Road
Hi Dale, I'm Priya with Ridgeback Solar. I looked at 1200 Mill Road from above, and the roof is about 38,000 square feet, mostly open. A system of roughly 150 kW could fit, which for a building like yours might offset about a third of your electric use. That's an estimate until I see a bill. If you send me one recent utility bill, I'll send back a one-page savings estimate this week. No cost. Ridgeback Solar, 100 Example Street, Your City, ST 00000. Reply "stop" to opt out.
The second email, five days later, offers to include the building's roof age: "If the roof is near the end of its life, it may make sense to plan the re-roof and the solar together." That is often the real timing question. The third is a phone call or a short note asking who handles energy decisions. Send from your own Gmail, include your address and an opt-out as CAN-SPAM requires, and keep volume modest, 20 to 50 a day per inbox. Personalisation at low volume explains why one real detail per email is worth more than a bigger list.
Selling to homeowners at the same time as everyone else
Homeowner solar is a legitimate business, but it is a volume game, with high advertising costs, a lot of competition and long sales cycles for each small sale. If you try to do both, the commercial pipeline usually loses, because the residential phone keeps ringing and the commercial follow-up gets postponed. Pick commercial for the next 90 days and see what the numbers say. A single 150 kW project is roughly as much capacity as a couple dozen typical home systems, with one decision-maker instead of twenty-some.
Answer the owner calling with one question about your estimate
The reply that matters often comes as a phone call from an owner who has your estimate in front of him and one question. Your sales rep is on a roof or in a meeting. Rocketship answers your existing number through call forwarding, takes the building, the question and a callback time, and sends it to you, so a warm owner doesn't reach voicemail. The Rocketship connector also works inside Claude if you prefer to run searches and drafts from there: see Rocketship in Claude.
A weekly routine for commercial roof owners
Each Monday, add 15 buildings and send first emails. On Wednesday, send second emails and reply to anyone who responded. On Friday, call owners who engaged and complete any estimates you promised. Do not let a promised estimate sit more than a week, because it is the thing that proves you are real. After ten weeks you will have written to about 150 owners, and you will know your response rate, how many estimates turned into site visits, and which building types respond best. Use those facts to narrow the next list.
For other trades selling to the same roofs, see how to get commercial roofing clients and how to get commercial clients for an electrical business, since a solar install often needs both.
A commercial solar pipeline is a list of named owners and a number you can put in front of them. Rocketship finds the buyers, emails them from your own Gmail, follows up, and books the meeting on its own. Plans that get you customers start at $24.99 a month (Launch), and both Launch and Frontier start with a 7-day free trial, card required. Answering your existing number is included; a dedicated line is $5 a month. See the AI workers page for what each worker does.