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Preneed has been around for longer than your career. In my book “The Complete Preneed Perspective,” I chronicled the advent of preneed, showing its origin via the Greek burial societies of thousands of years ago to our sophisticated modern arrangement.

After being around cemeteries from a professional point of view for 30 years, I place them in one of three categories: New Design Historic Design Contemporary Design A New Design cemetery is exactly what the name says: It is a cemetery being created from scratch. We have raw land, we have an idea and we have the risk involved in a new enterprise.

In this article, I am going to write about ways to enhance sales of caskets, vaults, grave interment rights and mausoleums. I am going to approach this article this way since the ICCFA has both funeral home and cemetery members. I’m aware of the different mentality of funeral director and cemeterians. Frankly, the funeral directors reading this might be tempted to just speed read the material focused on selling caskets and urns. Don’t do this! Cemeterians, you also should not overlook any part of this essay. This article is about increasing merchandise sales, and you can learn from each other.

In my book, “What Every Funeral Director and Cemetery Must Know about Cremation,” I cover the history of cremation. For the past 5,000 years of humanity’s measurable civilized lifetime, we have used cremation to deal with dead human bodies. For the past 140 years we have had commercially functioning crematories. Since 1910, we have seen an increase in businesses buying and marketing their services as public crematories.