The Steel CodCast

Anthony Fors and Jon Beresford take the induction conversation somewhere it doesn't usually go — the pans.
Most of the induction pan conversation on the floor starts and ends with compatibility: does the pan have enough ferrous material to respond to the magnetic field? If yes, it works. Move on. The problem is that compatible and capable are not the same thing, and the difference between them is the difference between a customer who loves their induction cooktop and one who's frustrated by it every time they cook.
Jon builds out the full spectrum — from pans that technically respond to the induction field all the way to pans that are genuinely optimized for it. The factors that determine where any pan sits on that spectrum are in the construction: what's happening inside the pan materials when the induction field hits them, how the base is built, and whether the base is thick enough to distribute heat the way the customer expects. Base thickness is the piece of this conversation that almost never gets discussed on the floor, and Jon makes the case that it's one of the more important variables in the actual cooking experience.
The cast iron conversation is one of the more interesting ones. Cast iron should be the instant winner — ferrous material, heavy base, induction-compatible by default. Jon explains why the result is more nuanced than that. Multi-clad construction is another variable that performs differently on induction than it does on gas or electric, and understanding why changes how the floor handles pan pairing alongside cooktop sales.
The back half of the conversation turns practical: what a salesperson can actually do with this information, whether appliance dealers should be selling pan sets alongside induction cooktops, and whether inviting customers to bring their existing pans in for a look is worth doing — and what it tends to reveal when they do.
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Anthony Fors and Jon Beresford are back with another episode in their series on the conversations the sales floor keeps treating as preference decisions when they're really commitment decisions. Panel-ready vs. stainless was the first one. Built-in vs. freestanding outdoor gas grill is next.
The floor version of this conversation tends to go one of two ways: either it's "built-in looks more permanent, freestanding gives you more flexibility — which direction are you leaning?" or it's just "are you thinking built-in or freestanding?" and the customer picks one and they move on. Anthony calls both versions of that conversation irresponsible — not because built-in is wrong, but because the customer was never told what they were actually deciding. This isn't a preference. It's a commitment. And you're going to live with it for decades.
The structural reality of built-in: the grill head drops into a cutout built specifically for that grill's exact dimensions. The day you choose that grill head, you chose every future grill head. The cutout is fixed. The gas line is fixed. The surrounding structure was built around one specific product. When that product gets discontinued — which happens outdoors far more often than anyone wants to talk about — or when the manufacturer changes dimensions between generations (which happens constantly, and for legitimate engineering reasons), the replacement search doesn't go the way the customer expected. Sometimes there's an exact match. Sometimes there's a close fit with modifications. And sometimes nothing fits without tearing open the structure, and a grill replacement becomes a partial outdoor kitchen renovation. The freestanding customer in the same situation wheels out the old one, wheels in the new one, and is grilling again by the afternoon.
Jon shares the story from his earlier career that made this real for him — a Cape job where a grill went through a manufacturer transition, the old one couldn't be serviced, the new one didn't fit, and everything had been built so tight around the old specs that there was no clean path forward. The customer put the bill on them. They paid it. And Jon closes with his personal position: freestanding, 100 out of 100 times, pushed into a finished outdoor space and pulled out to grill when needed.
None of this is an argument against built-in. The right customer — permanent outdoor kitchen, long-term commitment, brand with a real longevity story like Kalamazoo, structure designed with service access built in — is absolutely a built-in candidate and will love the decision. The problem is the conversation required to arrive there correctly, and that conversation almost never happens.
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🔗 Referenced this episode:→ Panel-Ready vs. Stainless Built-In: https://www.podbean.com/eas/pb-3bsp5-1b06d2d

Anthony Fors and Jon Beresford run the broiler conversation all the way through — infrared vs. gas vs. electric — and the point isn't just which one wins. It's that most salespeople aren't having the conversation at all.
Anthony's household is a broiler household. Fish, meat, vegetables, browning, finishing — the bake element barely gets touched. And his frustration is that in most luxury range sales conversations, the broiler gets a passing mention at best. Customers spend 45 minutes on burner configuration and the broiler gets "it has X passes" and the conversation moves on. That's a real missed opportunity, especially in the luxury cooking space where the broiler type can meaningfully change the cooking experience.
The episode starts with the anti-broiling problem: most customers are either indifferent to the broiler or have been burned by it — usually literally, usually by an electric broiler that underdelivered. Jon compares it to picking up a sport for the first time with the worst possible equipment. You don't hate the sport. You hate that equipment. Electric broilers have created a layer of low expectations that gas and infrared now have to sell against before the real conversation can even start.
Gas is a significant jump from electric — even the old tube-in-the-drawer versions were meaningfully better. Infrared is a different category entirely. Not a step up from gas — a genuine break from what broiling feels like. The qualifying question is whether infrared is like the high-BTU burner conversation (specific to how someone cooks) or whether it's an across-the-board upgrade that changes the experience regardless of cooking style. Jon and Anthony work through where that line sits — and then declare a winner.
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Anthony Fors and Jon Beresford sit down with Speed Queen's Randy Radtke for a conversation that's been months in the making — and it doesn't disappoint.
They start where they always start with Speed Queen: TC5 vs. TR7. Anthony says what he always says — he goes to his grave saying the TR7 is the better-constructed machine. But with Randy in the room he adds something he says he'll probably only say once: the people who love the TC5 are not wrong. They're buying a value system, not a spec. You're not going to engineer your way out of that conversation with a better argument. The skill is reading the customer in the first 60 seconds. The one who makes a statement when they walk in has already decided. Sell them the TC5 and do it with conviction.
From there, Jon makes the case that the 7-year in-home labor warranty is a weapon — and most independent dealers aren't using it. His approach: don't explain it. Ask the customer what they have now, ask what happened when they used it, and let them sit with the distance between that and what Speed Queen is offering. A customer who's been burned isn't looking to be convinced. They're looking for a reason to believe in something different.
Anthony then gets into Speed Queen's front load problem — the brand has built such a dominant top load identity that their own front load machines have to fight the brand's reputation every time a salesperson tries to surface the conversation. He calls it 50% Speed Queen's brand identity problem and 50% floor perception. The opportunity is sitting there for the dealer willing to slow down and qualify the customer past the brand name.
The back half of the conversation covers Pet Plus and what its origin story reveals about how Speed Queen makes decisions, why the independent channel is genuinely the only environment where the Speed Queen story can be told correctly, the Power Index data showing Speed Queen owning top load with two simultaneously running stories in the top five, and why Ripon isn't an American-made talking point — it's a manufacturing control argument that makes the warranty and the cycle test actually possible.
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Last week's Saturday deep dive covered the salesperson who stops learning. This week Jon Beresford and Anthony Force tackle the companion problem — and in some ways the trickier one to address: the lone wolf.
The lone wolf isn't someone who's checked out or slowed down. They're often your top performer by the numbers. They've been on the floor long enough to build real relationships, real credibility, and what everyone assumes is a very real book of business. And somewhere along the way they've made a calculation — consciously or not — that they work better alone. Jon walks through how this starts, what it actually looks like day to day, and why the costs to the business are almost always invisible until they compound into something that can't be ignored.
The knowledge hoarding piece is specific: it's not just product knowledge being held back. It's everything — approaches, relationships, strategies, the way certain customer types get handled, the shortcuts that took years to develop. None of it gets shared. None of it transfers to the floor. It just lives with one person, and it walks out the door if that person ever does.
Anthony brings an analogy from his first career as a high school band director that maps almost perfectly: two jazz bands, both with a generationally great lead trumpet player. Both times, when the star wasn't there, the trumpet section sounded better. The other players had been unconsciously pulling back — playing softer, deferring — in a way that the section didn't even realize until the lead was gone. The concert where the lead was absent was the best the section had ever sounded.
The episode closes on two questions that matter for any dealer sitting on this problem. How often is the lone wolf actually changeable — and when is it time to stop having the conversation and just act? And how overstated is the "book of business" threat? Anthony's take: in appliances, significantly overstated. Trade professional loyalty doesn't survive the end of a project, and every future project is up for grabs no matter who holds the relationship. The best time to make the change was fifteen years ago. The second best is today.
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Referenced this episode:→ The Salesperson Who Stops Learning — https://www.podbean.com/eas/pb-mb4gr-1b02ac9

Shannon O'Hara and Jon Beresford are back with the latest from the Steel Cod Retail Council — anonymous responses from the owners, managers, and top salespeople on the retail side who you'd actually want to hear from if you could. Three questions this week, and all three have something worth sitting with.
The TC5 vs. TR7 conversation came back pro-TC5 from the council, and Anthony is clear on why that happens — there's a very specific kind of conviction behind the classic agitation story and he genuinely respects it. But his camp is the TR7, and the reason he keeps landing there isn't about preference or aesthetics. The TR7 service call frequency is running significantly lower than the TC5 series. Once you have that data in your hands, the debate stops being emotional and becomes an engineering argument. He walks through who the TC5 is genuinely right for — it's a real answer for a real customer — and how to use the service data to have the honest conversation with a customer who has already sold themselves on the TC5 but maybe shouldn't be there.
The word "stagnant" came up more than any other word when the council described DCS, and Anthony wants to spend a minute on it because it's probably the most important word in the whole episode. Stagnant doesn't mean bad product. It means the floor ran out of a reason to talk about you. The energy shifts, the enthusiasm shifts, and eventually the recommendation follows — toward the brands that keep giving something new to say. Alfresco winning the question isn't the headline. The reason is the headline. And there's a lesson in there for every outdoor brand with floor presence right now, including some that probably feel comfortable enough that they shouldn't have to worry.
And then the pizza oven result — most of the council isn't displaying, selling, or seriously thinking about outdoor pizza ovens. Anthony uses that answer to say something he's clearly been wanting to say for a while. A floor's job is not to display what sells. It's to inspire. The products doing the most important work in a showroom are often the ones that never move the most volume. They're the products that open a door in a customer's mind — that make them start imagining a version of their outdoor space or their kitchen or their home that they'd never allowed themselves to fully picture before. And when that happens, the ceiling on what they're willing to invest becomes a completely different number. The dealer who builds that floor isn't just selling appliances. They're building something their competitors cannot replicate, no matter how similar their product selection looks.
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🔗 Referenced this episode:→ Julie Burns / Monogram episode: https://www.podbean.com/eas/pb-nsimf-1af9d49

The pellet grill vs. gas grill debate has been framed as a war. Jon Beresford says it never was one — and the industry's insistence on treating it like one has been creating customer confusion and ownership mismatch for over a decade.
His position is simple: for the vast majority of households, gas is the primary outdoor cooking platform and pellet is secondary. Not because pellet grills are bad — some of them are genuinely phenomenal — but because the two things serve fundamentally different cooking behaviors that shouldn't be competing for the same job.
Jon explains why pellet grills took off in the first place: they solved an emotional problem. Offset smoking had always required fire management, wood management, temperature babysitting, and a steep learning curve. Pellet grills lowered the intimidation barrier so far that anyone could smoke a brisket without becoming a pit master first. The internet celebrated that, long-form smoking content performed incredibly well, and the hype snowballed. But the internet's version of outdoor cooking and the reality of how most people actually use a grill aren't the same thing.
The aspirational trap is real and common. People see the advertising, convince themselves they'll smoke everything, and buy in. Then Tuesday night comes and dinner needs to be on the table in ten minutes — and nobody is starting a pellet grill. That's the moment gas separates itself. Anthony speaks to this from product training days: he had to bribe salespeople not to smirk during pellet hamburger demonstrations while everyone waited 27 minutes and counting for the grill to come to temperature.
The actual comparison that makes sense, Jon says, is a cast iron pan vs. a gas burner. Nobody argues that one replaces the other — they solve different cooking experiences entirely. Gas and pellet should be thought about the same way. Gas for speed, flexibility, high heat, and quick recovery. Pellet for low and slow, smoke, and long-form cooking. The salesperson who separates those lanes clearly — and helps the right customer see that they could have both — is doing better work than the one still pretending these two platforms belong in the same conversation.
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Built-in refrigeration versus freestanding is not a fair product fight. Jon Beresford says that from the jump — and Shannon agrees. But the point of this episode isn't to declare a winner. It's to lay out the conversation that needs to happen before any customer makes a decision on refrigeration they'll have to live with for the next decade or more.
Jon covers what built-in actually delivers beyond the look — the longevity, the construction, the food preservation story, the ownership experience — and clears up what he identifies as one of the most persistent and costly customer confusions in the category: counter depth and built-in are not the same thing. Treating them as though they are is a setup for disappointment on both sides of the transaction.
The price conversation is unavoidable here. Built-in refrigeration can run anywhere from two to ten times the cost of freestanding, depending on what you're looking at. Jon walks through how to have that conversation honestly without either overselling or underselling the value.
The fence-sitter conversation is where things get interesting. Shannon assumed the line between built-in buyers and freestanding buyers was firm — you're on one side or the other, and crossing is nearly impossible. Jon pushes back. More customers ride the fence than salespeople realize. And the salesperson who steers a fence-sitter toward freestanding to save them money isn't doing them a favor — they're defaulting on the conversation in a way that tends to produce a customer who's quietly unhappy about it later.
Refrigerator drawers also enter the conversation, and the case is made that built-in refrigeration without a drawer discussion is a missed opportunity almost every time. The capacity trade-off in built-in is real, and drawers solve for exactly that while opening a broader conversation about how the whole kitchen functions. Shannon's closer from her time in builder sales: open the bottom drawer, step back, and watch what happens. That was always the sale.
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Third rack dishwashers have become the default — brands lead with it, salespeople sell it, and customers expect it. But Jon Beresford says the real conversation isn't whether the third rack exists on a dishwasher. It's whether the third rack is actually the right fit for the specific household standing in front of you.
This episode covers what the third rack was actually designed to do, what the genuine trade-offs are, why some customers are better served without one, and why brand quality matters enormously here — because not all third racks perform the same way, and the difference between a well-engineered third rack and a mediocre one shows up in daily use pretty quickly.
The trade-off that rarely gets named on the floor: third racks reduce clearance in the second rack, which matters for some households more than others. They also require a specific loading approach — a system-minded user who thinks about what goes where. Shannon's mom has a third rack dishwasher and treats every load like a magazine shoot, perfectly placing every item. Not everyone wants that kind of relationship with their dishwasher. Jon's wife doesn't use theirs at all, though the option to remove it is its own kind of solution.
The qualifying question makes it simple: does this household run a lot of awkward-shaped items? Tall utensils, spatulas, serving pieces, oversized items that would normally hijack real estate in the main basket? Then the third rack changes the whole equation. Shannon puts it directly — the Forces are third rack people. They have Fisher & Paykel now, miss the third rack from their previous dishwasher, and the difference it made for oddly shaped items was real enough to feel the absence.
The honest answer isn't one size fits all. And that's the conversation worth having before anyone makes a decision.
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Six audience questions, one mailbag, and some of the most direct answers Jon Beresford has given on the show.
The opening question came from a sales manager watching the craft lose its appeal among younger people. Jon's response doesn't let the industry off the hook. The next generation isn't avoiding appliance sales because they lack ambition. They're avoiding it because nobody has given them a compelling reason to choose it. The pitch — boring product category, slow-building compensation, spec-sheet training, no clear career path — isn't a compelling one for someone with real options. The fix isn't finding better candidates. It's building a better case.
On practical sales strategies, Jon directs listeners to the Saturday deep dives for depth and then gives the short version of where most salespeople actually break down: the first two minutes. The customer says refrigerator and the salesperson starts walking. They skip the part that makes everything else easier — understanding what the specific person in front of them is actually trying to solve for. Real qualification asks about the life the appliance is going to live in, and when that foundation is right, the price conversation stops being a defense and becomes a connection between a number and an outcome the customer already asked for.
On Steel Cod, Jon makes the case that the podcast itself is a fluency builder — and fluency is worth more than any feature training because features inform while fluency convinces. Steel Cod University takes the same philosophy into 3-5 minute classes built specifically around positioning moments and real objections. He also teases an upcoming tool the entire team is more excited about than anything they've ever built — one that will change the selling conversation permanently.
The episode closes with Jon's case for the independent dealer — structured, direct, and one of the most compelling arguments for the channel you'll hear anywhere. The independent dealer is the only person in the entire appliance buying landscape with no structural reason to mislead. Big box has inventory targets. Manufacturers have one product to sell. Online retail has affiliate revenue and no context. The independent dealer has one job: the right answer for the right customer. That advantage compounds. It builds through referrals and repeat business in ways competitors can never replicate — and it gets more valuable every single year.
Oh, and the audience asked Jon what luxury brand he doesn't like. He almost answered.
New episodes every day. Rate and subscribe wherever you listen.