The Steel CodCast

Every salesperson has had this customer: they walk in loaded with research, quotes specs, references YouTube videos, and pushes back on almost everything you say. And the instinct is to assume they think they know more than you.
Jon Beresford says that instinct is wrong — and it's costing salespeople sales they should be closing.
This episode tackles one of the most requested topics from the Steel CodCast audience: why customers seem to stop trusting expert advice. Jon's answer reframes the entire thing. It's not a trust problem. It's an ownership problem. The second a customer follows someone else's recommendation, the risk shifts. It stops being "I made a bad decision" and becomes "I let someone else make a bad decision for me." Not every customer is comfortable with that. And the ones who aren't are going to protect their ownership of the process — with research, with pushback, with questions — because it's the only tool they have.
Jon breaks down why treating all customers the same way is the real source of inconsistent results on the floor. Some customers want you to take the wheel and tell them exactly what makes sense. Others need to feel like they got there themselves, with you as a guide rather than a director. Give the wrong approach to the wrong person, and the sale breaks immediately.
He also explains the post-sale side of this that most salespeople never connect: the high-maintenance customer who calls constantly after the sale, questions every feature, and second-guesses everything? That's not a personality type. That's what happens when ownership never gets properly transferred during the conversation.
Jon closes with the reframe that ties it all together: trust in a sales conversation isn't "do they believe I'm right." It's "do they feel comfortable with how the decision is being made." You can be completely right and still lose the customer if the process doesn't feel like theirs.
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The Steel Cod Retail Council is back for July, and Jon Beresford is breaking down three questions that generated some genuinely surprising results.
First up: if you had to build your entire floor around one luxury cooking brand — Monogram, Blue Star, or SKS — what would the council choose? Monogram took it, and Jon explains why that result makes complete sense given what the independent channel has been doing quietly for the past couple of years. He also unpacks the Blue Star ceiling conversation and makes a thoughtful case for why retailers who commit to SKS now might look very smart down the road — the same way early Wolf and Sub-Zero believers did.
The second question asked which category has the biggest opportunity to explode over the next 12–18 months. Induction dominated, and Jon highlights the specific development he thinks the industry is seriously underestimating: battery technology that removes the last real infrastructure objection from the conversation. But the real talking point was laundry — a category almost nobody predicted, and one Jon admits he initially couldn't see until he started reading the council's reasoning around all-in-one machines and the way new builds are changing the game.
And then outdoor. The council was asked which premium outdoor brand is most at risk, and DCS absorbed most of the heat. Jon gives DCS real credit — this is a brand with genuine heritage and a story worth telling — but he's honest about what the council is seeing. Heston shows up in a different way: great product, real quality, but brand recognition that hasn't yet caught up to the price point. And Broil King's appearance was the one that genuinely caught Jon off guard — a mid-tier brand getting squeezed from both directions at once.
He closes with a reframe worth sitting with: in a category built entirely on desire, the question is never "why should they buy it" — it's "why would they."
New episodes every day. Rate and subscribe wherever you listen.
Referenced this episode:→ Julie Burns / Monogram Interview — https://www.podbean.com/eas/pb-nsimf-1af9d49→ Composer with Tim Ketchum — https://www.podbean.com/eas/pb-qmshm-1af16ec→ Qoldusion / Residential Walk-In Refrigeration — https://www.podbean.com/eas/pb-uhxzq-1aec6e4

Study the steam oven category deeply enough and a problem emerges: almost every brand leads with the same talking points. Steam cooking. Convection. Automatic programs. Reheating. Healthy cooking. And when salespeople can't find the real differences, they invent ones that aren't big enough. Customers feel it immediately — and retreat to the path of least resistance.
Jon noticed this compression while building Steam Cod University content with Ben, and it led to a different kind of episode. Not a 1v1 — a full category hierarchy.
At the top sits Gaggenau — and it isn't close. The 400 Series Combi Steam Oven offers selectable humidity levels (0, 30, 60, 80, 100%) combined with precision convection across a wide range. That's not a feature. That's a different cooking philosophy. A vegetable, bread, fish, and roast all need different environments. Gaggenau lets you shape that environment deliberately instead of treating steam as an on/off mode. Add the plumbed architecture and you have a product built around cooking control at a level the rest of the category doesn't match. Selling it from a feature checklist misses the point entirely.
Miele earns the second position through depth of steam ownership intelligence. Wolf's redesign earned it the third spot — before the redesign, it would have landed in the compression group. Jon explains what changed and why it matters.
After those three, the category largely compresses. That doesn't mean the other brands are bad products. But salespeople need to be careful not to overstate separations that aren't clearly there — because customers always feel when you're forcing a difference that isn't big enough.
🎙️ Hosted by Shannon O'Hara and Jon Beresford | The Steel Codcast🔔 New episode every day of the week. Rate and subscribe wherever you listen.

The Power Index measures showroom consideration activity — not sales data, but what customers are actively discussing on the floor right now. And in the luxury outdoor grill category, something is shifting.
In this episode, Jon Beresford walks through which brands are gaining ground, which ones are cooling off, and what the psychology underneath it all means for independent retailers.
The core theme: outdoor luxury doesn't carry the same emotional weight as indoor luxury. Customers will stretch their budget for a luxury range without blinking — the kitchen is tied to their identity, their dream home, who they are. But outdoors, that emotional gravity weakens. And when it does, customers start asking hard practical questions they'd never ask on the indoor floor. "What am I actually getting for the extra money?" That question is starting to reshape the entire category.
Exo is rising — presenting well, landing where customers expect aesthetically, and easier to justify financially as outdoor project totals climb. Artisan is benefiting from an Al Fresco halo effect, picking up customers who want the experience without the price. Wolf outdoor is taking heat — not because the product is bad, but because the badge that does all the work indoors isn't translating the same way outdoors. A new lineup is reportedly coming and sounds strong, but the current story isn't closing the gap. And Lynx is showing the most concerning signal: broad lineup cooling across the whole category, which points to positioning pressure, not a product problem.
Jon's takeaway: luxury outdoor brands survive difficult markets when customers clearly understand why they're different. Right now, the badge alone may no longer be enough.
👉 Al Fresco vs. Artisan episode: https://www.podbean.com/eas/pb-h58w7-1abb7a8
🎙️ Hosted by Anthony Force and Jon Beresford | The Steel Codcast🔔 New episode every day of the week. Rate and subscribe wherever you listen.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is probably the most emotionally charged debate in the appliance industry. More emotional than gas vs. induction. More emotional than front load vs. top load. And in 2026, it's still very much alive.
Deep fill vs. load sensing — and what it actually tells us about how human beings process trust, visual evidence, and decades of marketing conditioning.
Jon Beresford breaks down where the belief that "more water equals better cleaning" actually comes from, why the appliance industry created it, and why they never bothered to update the story as the engineering evolved. He explains what load sensing is actually doing — not minimizing water, but calibrating it to the specific load — and why that distinction matters more than most people realize.
He walks through the detergent concentration argument, the optimal threshold problem, and why the existence of a deep fill button doesn't prove load sensing has failed (hint: no one adds a special button for the objectively best option in every situation).
Speed Queen comes up — because of course it does. Jon addresses it directly: the brand earns every bit of its reputation, but he asks the harder question of how much of what customers love is actually attributable to the water, versus everything else Speed Queen builds into the machine.
The final take: deep fill solves a human problem. Load sensing solves an engineering problem. They're not competing. The debate has survived this long because everyone's been using the wrong scoreboard.
🎙️ Hosted by Shannon O'Hara and Jon Beresford | The Steel Codcast🔔 New episode every day of the week. Rate and subscribe wherever you listen.