The Steel Codcast is a daily podcast delivering expert commentary, industry insight, and real world perspective for professionals across the appliance industry. Hosted by Jon, VP of Sales, and Anthony, President of Steel Cod, the show blends evergreen education with breaking appliance industry news to help listeners sell smarter, position products more effectively, and stay current in a fast moving market.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Designed for appliance sales professionals, manufacturers, distributors, brand leaders, and independent dealers, The Steel Codcast covers appliance industry trends, sales strategy, and product positioning across every category. Episodes explore everything from small countertop appliances and mass market products to high end luxury appliance brands, built in appliances, and emerging technologies.Released Monday through Friday, the podcast delivers consistent commentary on appliance sal
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80/100
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The Steel CodCast is a business podcast hosted by Anthony Fors and Jon Beresford, with 100 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.
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Anthony Fors and Jon Beresford hosts The Steel CodCast, a business show with 100 episodes published.
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Episode #218
The Council's Verdict: Most and Least Trusted Brands on the Independent Floor
Aug 21, 202648 min
Questions for the mailbag? Send them to: https://forms.office.com/r/XQLFmqn03F Apply to Join the Retail Council Here: https://tally.so/r/vGGdq0 The Steel Cod Retail Council had its biggest submission week ever — and the data delivered. Shannon and Jon go through four questions: the most trusted brands on the floor (Sub-Zero unanimous at #1, Miele near unanimous at #2, Café surprisingly strong at #3, True at #4, Fisher & Paykel at #5 with an important caveat — Wolf came in sixth), the least trusted (Samsung took multiple spots, some responses had all five as Samsung — Jon says the relationship between Samsung and independent retail is broken and probably unrepeatable), which price increases are creating the most frustration (Thermador and Bosch raising while the floor waits for the overhaul they've been asking for; the Gaggenau data point that illustrates exactly where the line between true ultra-luxury and everything below it sits; and Cove being pushed into a package before trust had time to develop), and what to do when your brand's product shows up at Big Box for less than you paid to acquire it — Jon's answer is unambiguous and today-not-eventually. One of the most data-dense SCRC episodes yet.
The Science Behind Why Feature Presentations Don't Close Sales
Aug 20, 202630 min
FAB — Feature, Advantage, Benefit — has been the standard sales framework for decades. It's not wrong. It just stops too early. Jon Beresford opens with the neuroscience: neuroscientist Antonio Damasio studied patients with damage to the brain's emotional processing center. Logical reasoning intact. Could analyze, compare, understand consequences. Couldn't make decisions — any decision, at any level. His conclusion: emotion isn't the enemy of rational decision-making. It's a prerequisite for it. The purchase decision sequence is emotional response first, purchase intention second, rational justification third. The spec sheet is what customers use after they've already decided — to justify to themselves what the gut already chose. The framework Jon introduces is FABEI. The first three steps are FAB. The last two — Emotion and Identity — are where luxury selling actually lives. He walks through the translation formula (Engineering → Result → Specific Moment → Identity), explains why specific moments are exponentially more powerful than abstract emotion, and builds out three complete brand examples: Kalamazoo, True refrigeration, and Miele. Then he closes with the most important question in luxury appliance selling, and the research on what has to happen in the silence after you ask it. Average salesperson waits 1.5 seconds. Top performers wait 3-5 or longer. What fills that silence is the map of the entire conversation. Rate and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, and send your mailbag questions to: https://forms.office.com/r/XQLFmqn03F
Inside Miele: What Held the Brand Back — And What's Changing Now | Miele Interview
Aug 19, 202645 min
Miele makes a compelling case for being one of the best appliance brands in the world. So why has it taken so long for the sales floor to fully believe it? Jon and Anthony sit down with a senior member of Miele's training team for one of the most candid brand conversations we've had on this show. He doesn't sugarcoat it: for years, Miele explained engineering complexity instead of benefits. Salespeople walked away from training able to recite technical specs and unable to close a room. The assortment was too broad, the story was too complicated, and — critically — there was no range in the US lineup until 2014. That last point is worth sitting with. Without a range, Miele was collecting scraps at the end of a Sub-Zero/Wolf kitchen sale. Now they're asking salespeople to go backwards — to pitch the range to customers who've already committed to another brand's cooking platform. What's changing: a training philosophy built around 5 compelling talking points per category, a sales-language-first approach, and a range story that should have been told years ago. One person builds every Miele range from start to finish. The serial number traces back to that builder. That's not a spec sheet point — that's a closing story. Also in this episode: the steam oven's evolution from rice cooker perception to genuine Monday-through-Friday appliance, what "immer besser" actually means inside the company, and the Doctor Miele philosophy of never chasing margin at the expense of the family name. Rate and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, and send your mailbag questions to: https://forms.office.com/r/XQLFmqn03F
What's Actually Cleaning Your Clothes — And Why the Drum Either Helps or Hurts
Aug 18, 202624 min
The spec sheet will give you the capacity number. It won't tell you whether the drum is going to clean your clothes. Anthony and Jon dig into the engineering of the front load washer drum — the part of the machine that's doing more work than any single spec communicates. What's actually responsible for cleaning (and why the drum either helps or gets in the way), what tumble arc is and why it matters, how drum surface material affects the wash in ways most brands haven't bothered to address, why capacity is the BTU of the laundry world — easy to market, misleading in practice — and why wash rotation speed almost never makes the spec sheet even though it probably should. Plus how salespeople should actually apply all of this without turning a washer conversation into a physics lecture. Rate and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, and send your mailbag questions to: https://forms.office.com/r/XQLFmqn03F
Why Doesn't Steel Cod Cover GE, LG, and Samsung? We Answer That and More | Mailbag
Aug 17, 202630 min
Five mailbag questions this week — and some of them will feel very familiar. What do you do when a coworker tells a customer that a $12,000 range and a $2,000 range are "basically the same thing because they both cook food"? Why does Steel Cod spend so much time on luxury and independent brands when GE, LG, and Samsung are what's actually on most floors? After eight years in luxury appliances, what does it take to finally crack the built-in coffee conversation? Is manufacturer training — the kind where someone from corporate explains how their product should be sold — actually making salespeople worse? And if you're seven months into your career, outselling people who've been on the floor for a decade, and your manager tells you to slow down, why would you? Jon has answers for all of them. Rate and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, and send your mailbag questions to: https://forms.office.com/r/XQLFmqn03F
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