Arzel Zoning
How do you sell zoning? It starts with understanding your customers. They probably don't know about zoning, but if they had it they would never want to live without it. Here's how to find out what your customers need, how you'll know if zoning is a good solution for them, and how to close the sale. Equip yourself with sales strategies from our experienced technician so you can increase your customers' comfort and your company's profit.
So, if your customer has never had zoning in their house and they’ve never experienced it, do they know to ask you for it? It’s estimated 60% of all homeowners are dissatisfied with HVAC performance in their home. One person was quoted saying, “When it comes to comfort, not much beats zoning. It’s one of those things that once they’ve experienced it and they’ve had it, they’ll never live without it again.”
You know, I think back when I was growing up, I was out in the country. My dad did not have central AC. So those hot, humid, steamy nights, you turned on the fan and you laid there and you died, right? But you thought that was kind of normal, right? You didn’t know any different. And I remember getting my first place and it had AC and it was like, I’ll never live without this again in my life, right? In some respects, AC is more important to our customers than heating. So, it’s kind of the same once they’ve had zoning and they understand the control that it gives them. You know, they don’t want to live without it. But even more so, contractors that offer it can increase their profits by up to 40%. You know, wouldn’t it be nice to have that additional income coming, you know, into your company?
And then lastly, Blake Edwards, he’s senior uh marketing for uh Lennox International. You know, this is probably what I want to stress the most, which is that, you know, while zoning becomes more uh popular, uh that a lot of contractors simply don’t bring it up to their customers unless the customer brings it up to them first. The one thing that I’ve noticed through all my travels is I could be sitting next to somebody in an airport, strike up a conversation. I work for a zoning company. They think I’m the guy that measures properties and streets and you know you can’t put your thing there and you’re too close and you’re encroaching and you know no one has ever said, “Oh, that thing where I can put more than one thermostat in my house.” So your customers don’t know to call your phone and ask you about it. So you guys have to be the ones to plant the seed to talk, to start the conversation, and say, where are your comfort issues? Are you happy everywhere in the house?
So what are we selling with zoning? We all basically know what zoning is, right? We’re taking a single home or structure, we’re dividing it up into multiple areas, giving a thermostat, you know, but at the end of the day, you know, you guys are really selling comfort. The thing I liked the most about zoning out of almost any other product that I sold was just the immediate payback, the immediate effects of what I just did. I could put in the highest efficiency gas furnace and highest efficiency heat pump and tell that customer how great it is and how much money they’re going to save and then I guarantee you for the next 12 months they’re going to have every utility bill on their counter going I thought this thing like basically paid for itself when it operated like you know my bills as low as they should be you know and then you get in the whole conversation well it was colder and your kilowatts went up and this and that. Um, same with humidifiers. You know, you put in a humidifier and the moment you roll out of the driveway doesn’t mean that the humidity is 40% or wherever you left it at, it takes sometimes days. You could put in zoning on a 90° day and roll out of the driveway at 5:00 p.m. and probably by 6:00 p.m. everything in the house is going to be right exactly where those thermostats are set to, maybe sooner. That’s like immediate payback.
Know your customers, what’s important to them, you know, and and when’s a good time to ask them. You know, you can ask during just a yearly maintenance, you know, empower your techs to to bring it up in conversation. We have a marketing piece uh that we can offer you. Some companies have made their own, but it’s kind of like a questionnaire. For a while, company I worked at, we had a questionnaire, and it just simply asks them, you know, how happy are you in all areas of your home? Identify for us areas that are not comfortable for you. Have you ever considered um you know if you could put more than one thermostat in your home, where would you put those thermostats? You started that conversation. A lot of the homeowners would ask, “You had me fill this thing out. Now what?” It’s like, “Well, I can take it back to the office, but we have solutions for all of this.” Oh, really? Like, yeah, would you like an adviser to call? Maybe your techs sell in the field. I don’t know.
Identifying opportunities. Uh load diversity, load shift, you know, good example of load diversity would be this room. 360 days out of the year there’s nobody in here and then 5 days out of the year, you know, we put 15, 20, sometimes, you know, up to 40 people in here. You know, that’s that’s a lot of load diversity. Load shift. Just think of that the sun moving around throughout the day. It’s on the east side, it’s on the second floor, it’s on the west side of the home. uh remote zones, usage patterns, uh conditioning requirement, maybe an in-law moved in, and we had a uh contractor came in some years ago and he said he was going home and putting it in like that weekend. He had his mother-in-law move in the house and he said all winter long he was coming home and the house is at like, you know, 76 77 degrees because she keeps coming out and cranking the main thermostat up to try and make her area of the home comfortable. Um, you know, what about a workout room? Things like that.
Some questions to ask as soon as you walk in the door: Hey, I’m here to service your equipment, or here for your quote for your new equipment. Can you identify for me and kind of point out where your comfort issues are at? Additionally, how are the spaces used? Oh, I see. You know, your kids are older. They’re off to college. Do they come back? Yes, they come back. So, you’re kind of like an empty nester, but they come back periodically. Maybe they’re just empty nesters, no kids. We really just don’t have a need for good chunk of the second floor, probably. Is energy savings a priority? Zoning in itself, depending on how they use it, there are some caveats to it, but zoning on its own typically saves the customer a considerable amount of money. You’re targeting where that delivery is going. You’re putting the air where you want it when you need it. And you know, I think of what I’ve done for years. Before bed, I would turn my downstairs thermostat to some ridiculously – I don’t want to tell you what temperature I would set my thermostat to – but I would set it much lower than what you’re probably advising your customers to do, all in an effort to hopefully make the master bedroom on the second floor kind of comfortable for sleeping. And you know what happened in the morning when I went downstairs. It was like an ice box, right? That cost me a lot of money. Right? Because I’m taking 2,000 square feet, 2,300 square feet and I’m cooling it down to some subarctic temperature to make the upstairs kind of comfortable, when they can just simply have a thermostat and just put the air into that area.
Any comfort requirements like that in-law suite or workout room? What’s been done previously? A lot of times you’ll find out that, you know, well, one guy raised my blower speed and another guy turned some balancing dampers and it helped a little bit, but it never really solved my issues. Uh, one guy said my filter or my uh coil was plugged and I had to have that cleaned. But none of these things typically can defy physics, right? What does warm air do? Wants to stay upstairs. What does your cold air do? Wants to stay downstairs. You’re typically going to have that divide between first and second floor. Or what about a great room with three outside walls and vated ceilings and tons of glass? It’s just different than the rest of the house. Are the spaces too hot, too cold? Obvious question. And then where’s your thermostat? Is that the only one?
You know, a good analogy or good description for your customers is, could you imagine one light switch when you walk into your house? You just walk in, you flip that sucker on, everything in the house comes on regardless if you need it or not. Why do you have one thermostat? These are just kind of to get the the brain churning a little bit.
We just ask that when you pull up to your call, whether it be service call, sales call, maintenance call, just look at the house for, you know, 5 seconds at the end of the driveway, and look at the characteristics of the house. What could be a conversation starter with your customer?
What do you guys see here with this house that might be some red flags that there could be some comfort issues? Big vaulted ceilings on the second floor. Yep. What else? Windows. Lots of windows, right? So, we got a little bit of all those things going on. Vaulted ceilings, windows, sun exposure. I don’t know what’s in there. It could be a boiler, right? But just to think about it in that aspect when you’re pulling up: how could this be an opportunity for our company?
Conversation starter. We’ve all seen and worked on these houses, right? They’re perfect from top to bottom, right? Never. We kind of have what, three separate climates in there? You got one that’s, and this is probably a bad example. I mean some of them literally that lower area is almost it’s not quite a basement but it’s below grade and then you have a kind of a center floor and then you have that intermediate concrete on slab area. You probably put the thermostat, what? Right there? And hope that you get kind of an average. It would be a great opportunity to talk to the customer. You got split level, thermostat, you know, load diversity, just because you have below grade slab and then second floor.
This one’s a little harder to see, but there’s a window unit that’s in the window of the second floor. The gentleman came here to Comfort College. We kind of went through these slides. He left the next week. He went and did a repair. I think it was a contactor in the unit in the backyard. He goes there, does the whole repair. When he pulls up, he sees one of these. He goes in the back, he sees a couple more. He gets everything done, and he starts talking to the customer like, “Now that the AC’s working, do you need a hand getting those out?” No, those stay in all year long. Why would that be? Well, you know, the second floor is just uncomfortable. So, we run window units plus our central air. Really starts the conversation. And this ended up being his first Arzel sale. Again, you know, just analogies to to try and get you to think a little bit. There are people, you know, in my previous life before working here, I did it in one of my houses: I like to sleep in, colder the better, just more comfortable I am. And I had homes with central air and a window unit. Went right in the window.
What about this house? Now, we’re going to make a lot of assumptions on this house because we don’t know what’s inside and what they have for HVAC equipment, and how many systems and all those kinds of things. What are some red flags on this? There’s a finished room above the garage potentially. Right. So, this could be a false attic with false dormers or it could actually be the wife’s crafting room or, you know, whatever the case may be. What else? Shitload of windows. Shitload of windows, right. If you double these windows and put the same number of windows on the back, I mean, that’s a lot of glass, right? This could be a potential area, right? Could be attic space or it could actually be where the kids go to play during the summer and stay out of the way of the parents. You just got a lot of different things going on, right? Great opportunity. Walk through that front door and just say, “Wow, I love this house. This is really great. Um, but comfort’s kind of my thing. That’s, you know, what my job is. Can I just ask you, you know, how is this house to condition? Are you happy all over? Do you have any areas of the house that are uncomfortable?”
Like, oh yeah, I mean, this one right here, like I try to go in there, it’s supposed to be my craft room, but every time I go in there, it’s just too hot. I just give it up and, you know, off I go ’cause it’s right above an unconditioned area, you know, and it’s got vaulted ceilings most likely and dormer windows and things of that nature. Might just be a great, you know, conversation starter. Just talk to them about that.
Somebody here used a ductless mini split. Now, again, I don’t know anything about this. Zoning may not even have been an option, but I can tell you that if I had my choice in this application of either a using a mini split or I could have done zoning, I’d probably go the zoning route. A nice white room with this terminal right above a television. Which, that’s a kind of dated television there. But, you know, I wouldn’t want to be the guy that either had to service this or come in and put a bib on it and a pressure washer. I would be the guy that would hit something and the water would spray across the room and I would destroy something. Just for those aspects, you know, zoning, the nice thing about especially our product is, you’re working pretty much in one central area, most commonly the basement. You’re not putting a unit in the backyard, hanging units on the walls up in the bedrooms on the second floor, going in the attic, running line sets. There’s just a lot less impact to the customer’s home. And once it’s in, there’s zero maintenance. There’s nothing you have to do: clean, lubricate, you know, adjust anything. So, it’s it’s kind of a one and done.
What about this room? I think it’s fair to put a slide in here to also kind of point out when it’s not an opportunity. We had a customer actually put in zoning. He put a run into this room, no return, one single run inside wall, put a thermostat in there, and thought miraculously the zoning was going to take care of everything for him. I actually went to go visit the job not knowing what I was getting into, because I knew the the guy that did this and a customer was standing there. He’s standing there and he’s like, “Look, this is what I did. I put a run in here. It’s got a thermostat. It won’t keep up.” Like, yeah, probably not going to. You need about six runs in there and you need to put a return air, and blah blah blah. So I’m just pointing out, also understand the limitations of zoning. It’s not a fix all. This would probably be better solution for a mini split. Give it its own dedicated unit that doesn’t require duct work and supplies and returns and all those things.
We work commercially. Typically up to 15 tons is kind of your cut off. So 7 1/2, 10 ton, 12, 15, they’re all fine. Once you start getting above 15: we’ve done those, we’ve done easily 20 ton and above, but we just like to be involved in the design process. If they need giant mammoth dampers that are just not in our wheelhouse to make, or depending on how they’re controlling static pressure. If they’re using a VFD and they’re controlling, you know, with a pressure transducer and we can control all that and they’re using 12 or 14 inch round dampers, yeah, we can zone that all day. But if they’re not using a VFD and they want a 4 x 5 foot damper, that’s just not in our wheelhouse. So, we’d recommend something else.
But obviously all your typical retail plaza, your office spaces, restaurants, things of that nature. And then really anything residential, as long as it has duct work. Split system, multilevel additions, things where they put on a great room, right? So they bumped out the back of the house and they put this really elaborate great room off the back. Great time. They’re like, “Hey, we’re we’re upgrading all this, upsizing your equipment. you know, this is going to be a comfort issue for you for years to come. Has three outside walls made of glass. Let’s put zoning on it. We’ll give you greater control.
And then, you know, recommending the Arzel product. It comes down to, hey, they’re they’re locally manufactured. They’re American-made. Their tech support is based here in Ohio, backed with a lifetime warranty, 100% comfort guarantee. They’ve got tech support 7 days a week. There’s a lot of reasons, you know, things you can tell your customer to give them that peace of mind that like, listen, this is something you can depend on and count on. It’s supported well. I know some major brands with bigger presence in the market than than us that you get really, really poor service from, and I’m sure you guys do, too. So, just things you can recommend to the customer during that process.
Also the benefits: less mess. I kind of loosely compared it to the experience of putting in a ductless mini split. You know, you have to drill holes in drywall, run line sets, there’s electrical to be run. Drains, somehow you got to get rid of that condensate coming from the unit. Once it’s installed, eventually you’ll have to have tuneups and cleaning and things like that.
Our system is very quick, easy to install. It’s less intrusive, very little noise. The dampers are almost completely silent. Our dampers are still air driven. So there’s no motors, no gears. Fewer moving parts and and then, again, no maintenance.
We have lifetime warranty. You do have to register the serial number and then we have what we call a 100% comfort guarantee. We can get it to you in printed form. We can give it to you in a digital form. But it basically is also a confidence booster with your customer. You can say, “Arzel backs this up that as long as I followed their design rules, as long as I installed it correctly, the equipment was sized right, you know, there wasn’t inherent problems with the HVAC system, it’s going to do exactly what we say it’s going to do. It’s going to work. And if during that first year it doesn’t work, Arzel will buy it back.”
So, you buy it from, you know, you buy the Arzel system from, you can’t get it from Sears Roebuck, but I’m just using as a neutral distributor. You buy it from Sears, you install it, your invoice for all your Arzel stuff was 1,000 bucks. We’re going to buy it back from you for 1,000 bucks. You still have skin in the game because you have to figure out what am I going to do with the system. Now, that’s on you, but we’re going to buy it back for that amount. Now, that doesn’t mean that you could go install zoning on a system and you know that that two season room, that glass room with the three outside walls, you decide to make that a zone and only put one 6-inch run in there. Uh that’s not a buyback situation, right? That’s not a fault of the Arzel system. That’s a fault of improper duct and blah blah blah. So, a confidence booster for for your customer. This is the certificate that we can provide you with if that’s beneficial for you for a sales call.
And then hopefully closing the sale, just conveying the message of, what are they going to get? What problems is going to solve for them? And attention to detail to create that relationship. My wife got a new SUV and it occurred to me that there are five comfort zones in her SUV and then I looked it up and the interior space of her car is like less than 200 cubic feet or something like that. So you got 200 cubic feet with essentially the equivalent of five thermostats. Front side driver, front side passenger, second row driver, second row passenger, and then third row. and they all have their own control. And then I’m thinking about the average house, 1,500 square ft, 2,000 square ft, not even getting into cubic feet, but just square footage. And then one thermostat, right? So just something to think about in those terms.
We remain committed to our lifetime warranty, strong industry partners, our responsiveness to you guys as customers, and that tech support. That tech support we also offer to you guys 7 days a week until 9:00 p.m. So, if you’re on a sales call: Man, I just don’t know which panel I should use here. You’re on a tech call: I don’t know why this thing’s not working. We can help you with that. And like 99% of our products are all made not only in the United States, but mostly within a 30 mile radius of this office. So, you know, that’s pretty strong. Doesn’t have to be a hard sell, but you should be recommending it each and every time that you put something in front of your customer.