Earlier this year, PM headed down to Ashland City, Tennessee, for a visit to A. O. Smith’s residential water-heater facility where we chatted with Vice President of Marketing David Chisolm and Senior Manager of Commercial New Product Development Matt Schulz. Chisolm and Schulz talked about A. O. Smith’s push into smart technology, its emphasis on training, and what it’s planning next.

PM:What’s new on the residential water-heater front?

DC: One of our interests is centered on heat-pump water-heating technologies. This continues to gain momentum to the point we are seeing rebates upward of $750 for installation of a heat-pump water heater from utilities to end users. Our efforts have been about educating our channel partners to the existence of these rebate programs so they can utilize that information in their selling efforts. We’re training contractors on what that sales message looks like. If you walk into a home and see an electric water heater in a garage or basement, that’s a perfect application for a heat-pump water heater. You are saving the end user on energy costs by putting in a more energyefficient water heater and the contractor also can make more margin — so it’s a win-win. It’s just a matter of getting broader adoption and broader awareness for these alternate technologies.

PM: What is one key trend A. O. Smith is seeing on the commercial side?

MS: All products in our Cyclone line leave the factory with onboard Wi-Fi and connectivity capability. Now the end user can get data on how the unit is performing, how it is applied and if there is troubleshooting needed. There is much more visibility into the historical performance, as well as very clear alerts into what is going on with the product today.

DC: Connectivity also is helping us with product-design elements. We can take that intelligence on how products are performing in the field and use that in our product-development cycle. It allows us to be much more intelligent in the way we design products because we are getting much better visibility into end-use applications.

PM: What are your customers asking for?

MS: They are looking to us for direction and help in choosing the right technology and the right product. With more options out there, we’re getting more questions asking which water heater is right for a particular application.

DC: The game is getting more complex with condensing technologies, tankless, heat pump, solar and the list goes on. A consumer walks into a situation where they took a cold shower and now they have to make a selection quickly under duress. We are the experts. We are the technology innovation leaders in the space. We know all the complex attributes, and we are able to take all that knowledge and simplify it for our customers who are in the market maybe a day every decade.

PM: A. O. Smith has an impressive training studio here in Ashland City. How much of a game-changer has it been?

DC: The more training we can offer as a service to the channel, the more effective we are at doing our jobs and the better our products are applied. Everybody wins in this scenario. We’ve put a lot of money and effort into the training studio. It is near and dear to our heart. Now we can generate content in our training studio where we can record it, stream it and conduct Q&As at the end. We have the ability to push a lot of content to our channel, and as a result we have seen exponential growth in the number of people we can effectively reach in a given year.

PM: What’s next for A. O. Smith?

MS: Connectivity is the obvious path. We have a lot more products that we can put that technology on. We are unique and ahead of others in that our iCOMM technology is standard on our premium Cyclone product.

DC: Connectivity gives us a lot of future options with product design and establishing those tighter connections to our customers. We’re on a journey to get closer to our end-user customers based on very intelligent data.