We’re doing this all wrong – the customer is key (not the contractor)

There’s a longstanding belief that true market transformation for efficient equipment begins with the contractor. No matter the technology, the playbook has always read if you get as many qualified contractors trained to install and upsell it, you will meet market demand and achieve your energy savings goals. While we have managed to impact a subset of progressive contractors to focus on efficient equipment, such as heat pump water heaters, they are the minority. Most contractors mitigate their liability by selling and installing proven baseline technologies that they can service quickly, which also offers a low probability of callbacks. When you look at the reality of the current situation with HVAC (a large chunk of contractors will retire in the next five years or sooner), is a focus on the contractor to drive efficient equipment adoption the only viable option anymore?

The American Home Comfort Study (2019) cited that the contractor is no longer the gateway to decision-making for HVAC purchases: it is customer driven.¹ More customers are completing their research online and know what they want and, more importantly, what will work in their homes. Customers aged 30 to 45 do their independent research instead of asking a contractor for their recommendation. Millennials are also growing in their comfort in “buy now/pay later” (BNPL) through e-commerce from 19% to 41% in three years.² The lower cohort of GenX relies on independent research, too, and had a similar gain in adopting BNPL from 9% to 30%.

So, we can confidently say that customers are actively doing their research for efficient equipment online and are becoming increasingly confident in buying large ticket items online with financing. We know these aren’t just merely trends because we witnessed them firsthand. Through dedicated limited-time offers we implemented in support of Snohomish PUD, customers bought heat pump water heaters through us in partnership with a local distributor. They shopped on price, purchased the unit, and made separate arrangements for installation.

Need more proof we need to start from the bottom up and not top-down? We debriefed our distributor partner for last summer’s promotion to ask her how it went from their perspective (we sold 80 units in a few weeks). She was ecstatic and said to us that she told her installer partners, “I told you so.” We looked at each other virtually via Teams and said, “What do you mean?” She went on to say that her installers don’t try to upsell heat pump water heaters because they cite a lack of customer demand for it. She’s using this promotion to prove to her installers that there is indeed customer demand for heat pump water heaters; they aren’t always presented with the opportunity to buy them and don’t know an awful lot about them.

Let’s try something different as an industry and focus on the customer for heat pump water heaters and other efficient equipment we’re trying to move these days. Changing our thinking coupled with TechniArt’s Product Advisor Plus platform will generate the customer demand essential for enticing contractors, distributors, and other critical supply chain members to buy in and support efficient equipment. Who says “no” to incoming sales? Maybe instead of “push,” we do “pull” for a while, eh?

1. “The HVAC Purchasing Landscape” video presentation snippet form the 2019 American Home Comfort Survey accessed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2XbqCtW4zo
2. “The Rise of Buy Now, Pay Later, Explained” https://mailchi.mp/thedailyupside/what-goes-around-comes-around?e=2231374a67