Thought Leadership

Imagine a business exists where the owners and managers universally keep doing things the same way the previous generations did. That is funeral service. In the last 20 years, society has changed to a degree greater than in the last hundred years. Do you remember your first cellphone?  Do you remember how much you paid for it as well as how much you paid per minute? We didn’t give out the number, as we didn’t want people calling us. A wrong number could cost $3! Today, many people don’t have a landline. We use our cellphone to surf the internet as much as we use it to chat. Yet, so many of us in funeral service still don’t realize we have to change the way we market our businesses. There are five new things we have to employ. These new […]

Figuring out how to price merchandise and interment, entombment and inurnment rights in your cemetery involves doing the math, knowing your market and getting feedback from you salespeople. Dear Cemetery Impossible, My cemetery is not priced right and I can’t figure out a method to create a solid pricing schematic. Can you help me? Puzzled About Pricing Dear Pricing, Nothing is tougher in cemetery management than determining the price of interment rights. Merchandise is very simple. Let me walk you through both. However, before I do, I must reiterate the basic mantra of pricing. For every item being sold, there should be a model showing: Good Better Best We use this good-better-best (GBB) analysis for merchandise and for interment rights. For merchandise, we know that we have different markers, vases, benches and flowers. For interment or inurnment, we can do […]

Not necessarily! Before building another facility to attract new business, first consider cost, revenue and cannibalization. Dear Dan, I own and actively run a one-location, 150-call funeral business. My firm has a 40 percent non-casketed rate that is increasing. I am the largest operator in my town; my competitor does about 100 calls. He advertises that his services are cheaper than mine, although our market share has not changed for 20 years. A town 10 miles away, surprisingly, does not have a funeral home. The prison is the largest employer in that town of about 6,000 non-incarcerated residents. I am thinking about building a funeral home in that town. I estimate there are about 50 calls. My competitor and I get about 25 of them and the rest go to a funeral business 10 miles on the west side of […]

’Twas the week before Christmas and all through the funeral home, not a preneed was written not even on a gnome. With all due respect to all writers famous and not, allow this article on preneed production be a forget-me-not to next year. I have been told for years that you can’t sell preneed or cemetery interment rights from Thanksgiving until after mid-January. I will explain in simple words, without rhyme, how to boost your preneed program during the Christmas season. I have written many articles about preneed marketing, including a 300-page book, “The Complete Preneed Perspective.” I continually tell people that selling preneed is easy. The chore is finding the people that are willing to talk to you about the economic reality of making their own prearrangements. If we can keep a good stream of leads coming through the […]