Incentives Gateway: use nationwide incentives to drive sales

Right now, there are over 16,000 active incentives offered by electric utilities in the U.S. They span HVAC, smart appliances, EVs, batteries, and more, but all share a common goal: deploy equipment to create societal benefits, for ratepayers, the grid, the climate, and so on. Yet for all of the free money utilities and energy markets make available, these incentives drive only a tiny fraction of overall sales. They're rarely accessible during the purchase and sign-up decisions made by real customers.

This is the norm. Every sales leader and incentives manager we've spoken with, across more than 60 companies, acknowledges the potential, but highlights a common set of challenges that stand in the way of widespread use.

• First, there are just a lot of programs. They span 3,500 electric utilities, 50 states, each RTO/ISO, and more than 15 implementers, DERMS, and VPP platforms. The options are overwhelming.
• The rules are complicated, which makes qualifying customers and estimating the incentive amount ($) risky. Most companies are careful not to set the wrong expectation.
• Fitting an incentive into one channel takes a lot of effort, and companies often sell in multiple channels. Most choose to focus on depth or breadth, but not both.
• If implemented poorly, incentives create confusion, frustration, or extra steps for customers. This can translate to 1-star reviews and customer support tickets.

Sales and marketing teams have harnessed incentives using a handful of common approaches. Each adds value, but each trades away some of the potential and consumes internal resources:

1. Create a program tracker: someone creates a big list of incentives with program names and a link to the website. This is immediately useful, but quickly falls out of date and is tough to put in front of customers.
2. Buy a vendor database with more program details and embed it on the website. But these stop short of qualifying customers, estimating the incentive ($), or filing post-installation, so most companies never embed them close to the decision point.
3. Build a custom process for the few highly lucrative incentives worth full end-to-end support: eligibility checks, a point-of-sale discount in one channel, and operations filing the applications. This is extremely powerful, but resource-heavy, and programs spin up and down too often to build on that success.
4. Use installer rebate software: adopt a platform specializing in certain rebate types, such as HVAC, electrification, and storage. These qualify customers and handle filing, which is best for installers delivering upfront discounts. But they skip customer-filed programs and ongoing utility payments, and OEMs are too distant from the customer to benefit.
5. Integrate with a DERMS/VPP platform: platforms like Leap hook into utilities and energy markets to turn DER controls into an ongoing revenue stream and customer-facing incentive. But incentives accrue over time and each platform covers only a subset of nationwide programs, which makes them hard for sales teams to harness.

What all of these approaches lack is the ability to work uniformly across every incentive category, qualify a specific customer down to a dollar amount you can show them, deliver that number natively in the sales channel, and carry the customer through to a paid claim. No platform does all of these today. Combined into one platform, a sales team could put credible offers in front of every customer, across channels, and lift conversion without absorbing the operational load.

We started exploring this problem at Leap because we've seen amazing results when incentives are used to inform a buying decision. Our partners have found ways to package long-term grid revenues as upfront discounts, for example $800 for a home battery. And when a grid incentive is baked into the sale terms, our internal data indicates customers opt in at rates up to 95%, more than 9x higher than the post-installation base case.

Introducing the Incentives Gateway

We think there's a better way to deliver incentives at the point of sale. Based on our work with sales teams, and on helping dozens of partners integrate VPPs into their sales channels, we're releasing the Incentives Gateway, a single platform designed to surface, qualify, and claim all available incentives.

In addition to converting more sales by influencing decisions in the checkout process, companies use Incentives Gateway to give new customers a great experience by making it easy to claim the incentive they were shown. And by helping customers claim VPP incentives, you automatically build a portfolio of assets that generate recurring revenue, while benefiting from the high enrollment rates achievable at the point of sale.

229

programs live at launch

57%

of the U.S. covered, by population

~800 ms

to return a full eligibility result

3,500

utilities monitored for rule changes

Here are some of the key features that allow Incentives Gateway to deliver for your business:

01Comprehensive program tracking

229 programs are available today, covering 57% of the U.S. by population. This represents a first step towards nationwide expansion. We'll add new programs regularly.

Active programs include a mix of rebates, utility demand response, managed charging and Leap's VPP programs. Residential EV charging has the strongest population coverage at 55%, but all categories exceed 30% coverage, including residential and commercial customers for thermostat, battery, and smart building controls.

Our platform is currently tracking more than 16,000 programs across 3,500 utilities. Each utility is monitored for new programs and rule changes, ensuring the results shown to customers stay fresh.

02Detailed eligibility and incentive calculation

The engine can take any customer's address and device, find their utility, and perform a detailed eligibility and incentive calculation. The results are formatted for customers and delivered in ~800 ms.

Results are stacked across hardware and make-ready installation rebates, utility demand response, managed charging, and wholesale virtual power plants. The customer-facing results are blended into a single view, which is bucketed by upfront discounts, post-install incentives, and ongoing rewards.

You can show an estimated dollar amount to the customer, break down the payment types, and decide how much background to expose for the calculation.

03End-to-end lifecycle

Customers get direct assistance claiming their incentive. They provide required data in Leap Connect and receive status updates via email. As the seller or operator, you can provide data and documentation on the customer's behalf via API to ease their application burden. All questions from customers are managed on the Leap platform, not routed to your support desk.

You can promote the incentive with confidence under your own brand, without the overhead of managing the long application process or questions from customers.

04Fit for many sales channels

Use the API for e-commerce and CRM integrations, or give sales teams direct access to the portal to run reports for their prospects.

Configure your Incentives Gateway account, then roll out a unified system across each of your sales channels.

Now available in beta

Sign-ups for the Incentives Gateway are now open. The first 1,000 lookups are free during the beta release. Reach out if you're running A/B tests to measure conversion impact, or connecting sales channels to VPP enrollment flows. We're here to help.

Over the next few months, we'll be expanding coverage and bringing more upfront incentives online.

We're excited to see the creative ways incentives get used to drive sales of EV chargers, thermostats, batteries, and more.