Oregon Solar + Storage Conference 2025

Sales people, marketing people, and business owners - if you want to generate more sales and get proven strategies that preserve your profitability, this is the seminar for you.

SELLING YOU PRICE is an intense sales program designed to increase your sales effectiveness while maintaining the price you want and need to charge for the project. This seminar combines interpersonal and functional selling skills into a strategically-focused experience designed to reflect your business’s day-to-day challenges, opportunities, and competitive reality. Participants will learn:
• Learn how to develop the trust, credibility, and rapport necessary to turn prospects into committed customers who want to use you for their project.
• The importance of following a sales process and what needs to happen in the mind of the customer for them to want and agree to buy from you.
• Learn process models for making high-impact proposal presentations that get results and position you as the contractor of choice for their project.

Asking for the sale is an essential part of every sales call, yet only a small percentage of salespeople are comfortable with the need to do this. THE CLOSING CLINIC focuses exclusively on the steps that must be taken for salespeople to earn the right to ask for the sale – and feel comfortable doing it.

Contractor salespeople will redefine their beliefs about closing and gain the “closer’s mindset” necessary to boost their closing percentages.

Specific Skills That Will Be Developed:
• The reasons why some salespeople struggle with this very natural part of the sales call -and how to know when you’ve earned the right to ask a closing question.
• The top five prerequisites that must be met before you ask a closing question.
• A very organic and professional way to ask a closing question and put the prospect in a position where they need to make a decision.
• Effective ways to neutralize the price objection and communicate your confidence in your selling price.
• Strategies that better enable them to respond to their most common objections, such as: “Your price is too high.”, “I want to think about it” and “I need to get additional estimates”.
• The importance of being prepared to answer the objection they will hear and being accountable for their outcomes.

Sales is nothing more than a series of definable and repeatable steps that anybody can learn but business owners and managers need to make sure their salespeople are executing and acting on those steps. If you want to build a world-class selling organization, you need to do less sales training and more sales coaching - no excuses. This informative session serves as a crash course to help business owners, managers, and salespeople learn the best practices for building a dynamic sales culture and the pitfalls to avoid when doing it.

This session will discuss recent utility proposals for non-firm energy, the historical practice of utility curtailments, customer responses, and possible solutions. It will also address the legal issues, benefits, and challenges of providing and utilizing this interruptible energy service.   

Electric utility load projections have skyrocketed over the last few years. Traditional “duty to serve” utilities are desperate to find creative ways to meet this new demand while still complying with their renewable resource mandates and greenhouse gas limits. Fueled by mounting requests to power new data centers and clean tech manufacturing and restrained by transmission limits, climate initiatives, the intermittency of solar and wind generation, and a load curve that peaks just as the sun goes down, utilities are looking to revive and repackaging the practice of offering non-firm, interruptible, service for new large loads. Something that was more compatible with aluminum factories and paper mills that could shut down production lines or ramp up cogeneration, non-firm service allows a utility to curtail large customers during peak demand to balance the grid. Unlike these industries of old, however, this new large demand cannot just shut down, and running traditional diesel backup generation would violate climate-driven requirements.  A possible solution is battery storage, charged during off-peak hours, and used to bridge the gap during utility curtailments. 

Oregon's Request for Proposals (RFP) Process is at a crossroads: recent litigation, ongoing PUC rulemakings, and state clean energy targets are forcing change in the RFP process. Past RFP processes and mistakes have convinced regulators that Oregon is indeed facing a problem when it comes to competition in the RFP process, and current rulemakings are opening the doors for RFP reform. How can the RFP process be improved?