Reliability vs. Serviceability: The Appliance Question Nobody Is Asking

How to Sell a French Top to Someone Who Has No Idea What It Is

French tops are one of the most skipped products on the appliance floor. Salespeople find them intimidating. Customers don't know what they're looking at. And the result is a product that almost never gets the conversation it deserves. In this episode, Shannon and Jon break down what a French top actually is, where it came from, and how to make the sale to a customer who walked in with zero frame of reference for it. Jon makes the case that most home cooks are already doing French top behavior without realizing it — moving pots around, adjusting heat zones mid-cook, trying to keep things warm without overcooking. The French top doesn't ask them to cook differently. It just does what they're already doing, better. He also covers where salespeople consistently lose the customer in this conversation, what the correct entry point looks like, and why the assumption that French tops are only for serious chefs is exactly the kind of thinking that keeps a great sale from happening. Which brand is easiest to sell a French top with? Drop a comment or email Anthony — Jon will get back to you. 🎙️ Hosted by Shannon O'Hara and Jon Beresford | The Steel Codcast 🔔 New episode every day of the week. Rate and subscribe wherever you listen.

How to Sell Refrigerator Food Preservation Without Sounding Like a Brochure

FreshFlow. HydroFresh. FreshSeal. ProduceSaver. If you've ever tried to explain produce preservation to a customer and ended up just reciting a branded name — this episode is for you. Jon Beresford breaks down the actual hierarchy of refrigerator food preservation: what matters, in what order, and how to tell the difference between a refrigerator that's genuinely engineered to protect produce and one with a shiny sticker on a leaky plastic drawer. The conversation starts where it should — the drawer itself. Does it seal? Does it have gasket material? Does it create a controlled environment or leak air like a storage bin? If you can't check that box, nothing else in the preservation story holds up. From there, Jon works through humidity balance (not just trapping moisture — managing the exchange), temperature stability (why inverter and variable speed compressors produce fundamentally different environments), produce separation from disruptive airflow (what dual evaporators actually do), and finally — only after all of that — the enhancement layers: ethylene absorption, air purification, and the branded filtration systems that brands love to lead with. Those enhancement layers are real when they're built on strong fundamentals. Sub-Zero didn't build their food preservation reputation on a cartridge. But when the fundamentals are weak, those features are just expensive distractions. Jon also calls out why this category has become a mess — manufacturers realized "keeps food fresher longer" sounds premium, created a thousand different names for it, and let salespeople use the chaos as cover for not actually understanding what they're selling. 👉 Our full air purification episode: https://www.podbean.com/eas/pb-hpiay-1aced2c 🎙️ Hosted by Shannon O'Hara and Jon Beresford | The Steel Codcast 🔔 New episode every day of the week. Rate and subscribe wherever you listen.

Julie Burns, Executive Director of Monogram, on What's Actually Driving the Brand's Rise

The Power Index has been tracking a shift — Monogram is showing up in showroom conversations in places it historically hasn't. In this episode, we sit down with Julie Burns, Executive Director of Monogram, to hear what's driving it straight from the source. Julie came into the appliance industry from a luxury background outside of appliances, which gave her a perspective that long-time industry insiders often don't have. She walks through what she's built over the past six-plus years at Monogram, what's resonating with the design and trade community that's increasingly specifying the brand, and what the path forward looks like as new lines come to market. For the salespeople listening: this episode gets directly into how to position Monogram in a showroom full of luxury brands, how to separate it from the GE/Café/Profile family in the customer's mind, and how to anchor it in a single, clear statement when a luxury buyer is standing in front of you. Jon also gets into the support structure — Monogram has its own dedicated sales team and service operation separate from other GE brands, which matters enormously on high-end projects where post-sale friction can cost you a relationship. Learn more at monogram.com 🎙️ Hosted by Anthony Fors and Jon Beresford | The Steel Codcast 🔔 New episode every day of the week. Rate and subscribe wherever you listen.

Bigger Kitchen Doesn't Mean Better Kitchen — And Nobody In the Room Will Tell You That

The bigger the kitchen, the better. That's the assumption. Jon Beresford disagrees — and he has a very specific reason why. In this episode, Jon and Shannon break down why massive luxury kitchens are often the most poorly designed spaces in any home, and why almost nobody involved in building them has any financial reason to tell the homeowner to pump the brakes. The case starts with constraint. Smaller kitchens force trade-offs. Trade-offs force clarity. Clarity is what separates a kitchen that functions brilliantly from one that just looks expensive in the photograph. Big kitchens remove all of that pressure — and what fills the void is accumulation. More appliances, more zones, more everything, designed around an imagined version of how the family plans to live rather than how they actually do. Jon walks through what that looks like in practice: oversize ranges, refrigeration walls for couples who barely stock milk, secondary dishwashers that run a few times a year, steam ovens nobody learned to use, warming drawers storing cookie sheets. None of those products are the problem. The problem is that nobody in the design chain — not the designer, not the builder, not the salesperson — is rewarded for saying "do you actually need this?" The only person who pays that long-term cost is the homeowner. And they're almost always the least informed person in the room during the design phase. Jon also gets into the trap salespeople fall into on large projects — the moment they accept the customer's pre-built vision and become a coordinator instead of an advisor — and what the best salespeople do instead. 🎙️ Hosted by Shannon O'Hara and Jon Beresford | The Steel Codcast 🔔 New episode every day of the week. Rate and subscribe wherever you listen.

Retail Council Ep. 2: Steam Ovens, Performance vs. Ownership & The Brand Winning Right Now

The Steel Cod Retail Council is back for its second weekly episode. Four questions, answered anonymously by a handpicked group of experienced independent appliance retail voices — owners, managers, floor salespeople who deal with these conversations every day. This week's questions: Q1: Miele, Wolf or Gaggenau — you can only carry one steam oven line. Which do you take? Jon walks through what the council landed on and what the results reveal about how steam ovens are currently being positioned in the channel. Q2: Performance or ownership experience — what do customers gravitate toward more today? The council split three ways, but Jon argues all three camps are actually describing the same thing from different vantage points. Performance opens the conversation. Ownership experience closes the relationship. The salespeople winning right now are carrying both. Q3: What category are salespeople still massively underselling because they don't understand the value story? Steam ovens dominated the responses — described as being presented as a reheating tool rather than a kitchen hub, with salesperson knowledge cited as the core problem. Not customer resistance. Not price. Salesperson knowledge. Ventilation came up strong as a second answer. Front load laundry, speed ovens, warming drawers, and under-counter beverage centers all surfaced as categories being left behind by a cautious sales mindset. Q4: Which brand has the strongest combination of product positioning and timing right now? The most diverse set of answers the council has given yet — GE, Miele, Sub-Zero/Wolf/Cove, LG, Fisher & Paykel all receiving mentions with very different reasoning behind each one. No consensus. Jon explains why that actually tells you something important about how competitive the market is right now. 📚 Steel Cod University — free for Steel Cod users: https://university.steelcod.com/ 👉 Performance vs. Ownership Experience episode: https://www.podbean.com/eas/pb-6adhj-1af035d 🎙️ Hosted by Shannon O'Hara and Jon Beresford | The Steel Codcast 🔔 New episode every day of the week. Rate and subscribe wherever you listen.