My advice - go for quality, look at where you can cut costs without impacting on quality - eg delivery costs, negotiating bulk discounts with suppliers, consider second hand easidec systems to reduce scaf costs on simple scaf jobs etc and price at a level that is sustainable for you, then just focus on coming across as professionally as possible.
We never price match now, best we'll do is to meet them in the middle, but explain the advantages of the systems we're offering, and the experience level of the install team, warranty back up etc, while hinting at some of the problems we've seen from those offering silly prices.
A few will still go for the cheapest no matter what, but don't worry about them, there are enough customers out there who want a quality job doing by a reputable firm they feel they can trust to sustain you - as a comparison we used to offer value and high spec ranges, and I reckon only about 10-20% ever opted for the value system, most people have an instinctive reaction to go for a mid range option rather than the absolute cheapest or the most expensive, particularly if they don't really know what they're doing - it's effectively how people who aren't either wine buffs, or alcoholics choose wine, go for a mid priced option with a label / description that inspires confidence.
We stopped competing at the bottom about a year ago, and our order books have been getting increasingly full since then mostly from recommendations / google searches, plus a couple of exhibitions. I think we're now winning more than 50% of jobs we quote for that actually go ahead with anyone, and most of the dirt cheap companies around here have gone out of business anyway.
We're in the process of putting our basic prices up to £6.5k for 4kWp solarworld mono black with stecagrid 3600Tl inverter, in the expectation that we might get knocked down a bit on that by some, but will get it for most, meaning we can at last start to claw back some of our losses from the last couple of years at least in the run up to the tariff cut. We've done this gradually, so went up to £6k, then £6,299, now will be at £6,499, which really is about the lowest the prices should actually be IMO to be sustainable in the long term for us - at least until we're able to ramp up other aspects of the business to cover part of our costs.
We;re also starting to do 1-2 a month viridian in roof systems at more like £10k, and looking at more roof integrated systems for the solarworld panels as well, as there's a significant portion of the market who like the idea of solar, but hate the looks of the standard above roof mounted stuff, even if it's black.
key thing is to be the company that is on the ball with quotes, and follows the quotes up 2-3 days later every time... we lost so much work in the summer through being too busy to properly follow the quotes up when staff were on holiday etc
