Alrighty! Hello everybody this is Albert and I am the head of sales at Parting Pro and in this presentation I'm going to talk about how to systematically increase your cremation revenue without having to sell. I'll start off by giving you a few examples of funeral homes we've worked with and how they've been able to adopt this mindset and see stellar results.
This is Randy from Balboa Cremation. We've been working with him for about six months and within those six months we've doubled his business from averaging about 30 cases per month to now averaging 60 cases per month.
This is Milos from Caring Cremations. We've also been working with him for about six months as well, and outside of growing case volume, we've increased his monthly merchandise sales by 75%.
Here’s Andy from Woodlawn Funeral Home. In the first three weeks we started working with him, we were able to increase his price chopper conversion by over 50% and continue to help improve this as time went on. So these were people who were inquiring about his services and not coming back. Right? After implementing this change, he was able to hold on to 50 more of them. And in doing so we also increased his average contract totals by about 10%, really by just helping him sell more merchandise.
Here's another one. Will from Omega Society, ever since we started working with them, they've consistently added about five thousand dollars just in additional merchandise sales every month. And I'll go into detail how we achieve this near the end of the video, but it's really important to understand what's going on with consumer habits which I'll cover first.
Okay, here's another email from John Perks who mentions how with Parting Pro he's able to tack merchandise about 75% of the time, whereas when he's doing his old way he's able to add our merchandise about 25% of the time. So that's three x more sales just by understanding his customers.
Here's another email from Jack Hagin of Brooks Cremation and Funeral Services who acknowledges in an email here that Parting Pro is increasing merchandise sales and he also says here that working with us has been one of the best decisions he's made in the funeral business.
Okay, so how are all these people able to ramp up their sales without having to sell? That is a question I asked earlier. I know that increasing sales without having to sell is appealing to a lot of you because, and just speaking very generally, I know a lot of funeral directors don't like to sell. They don't want to sell. They don't want to associate themselves with sales. Sales is typically not the reason you got into the funeral profession right?
And that's okay. That makes actually perfect sense. However I'm not catering this presentation about not selling because you don't want to sell. I'm actually catering it to not selling because your customers don't want to be sold to. They want to buy. And that's an important difference to understand.
Let me dive a little bit deeper in this and talk a bit about the dynamics between buyers and sellers and how that's changed over the decades. Okay, historically speaking, the power dynamic between a buyer and a seller generally lies with the seller having more power, Right?
Think about 50 years ago, when salespeople, like this guy right here, would walk around from house to house and they brought their catalogs and sample products. The seller would have all the information and all the knowledge whereas the buyer would really only have the information that the seller gives him, right?
So because of this asymmetry in information, the seller would hold more power than the buyer. However, this has slowly changed over time. And if you think about it, in the last decade it's actually really accelerated exponentially. Because with the availability of internet and technology, information is now readily available at everyone's fingertips and we’ve moved to a point where we're at information parity, rather than asymmetry, right, between the buyer and seller. Meaning the buying sellers essentially have access to the same information.
So generally speaking, buyers are now more informed than they used to be. They pretty much know all their options and they're actually involving the seller later in the process because they don't need them as early. And then the seller's role has really transformed where they're not really selling so much anymore as they are more of a consultant to the buyer as an expert in the field.
And generally because of this information that the buyers have and access to the competitors and all that, they have more power than the sellers. And keep in mind this has been happening across industries for a number of years now. It's kind of now just slowly starting to affect the funeral profession in recent years since, I think by default the funeral industry is always behind on trends right?
So you can see this happening in the funeral home since the internet and technology has made it easier for families to do research prior to reaching out. You see a lot more people calling to price shop, more people wanting to do things online and not coming in, people expecting convenience, people buying urns on amazon right?
So the internet and technology has fundamentally changed the way consumers buy things there's really no question about that anymore. The question now is...Which will result you in more revenue? Do you want to continue to force the family through your existing selling process or do you want to adapt and fit into their buying process?
Obviously this is a rhetorical question. You're going to need to change and adapt to their process in order to stay competitive. So, how do you do this? If you've seen my other videos, I spend a lot of time emphasizing the importance of this core concept, which is really basic. Your job is to make everything as easy as possible for the families and the easier you make it for someone to do something the more likely you're going to do what you want them to do.
This concept also applies to selling. So think about what your customers want. They want information. They want convenience. They want to be able to make the best decision in the shortest amount of time.
Okay, just keep those things in mind so let's go through some of the case studies of the examples i went through earlier. So here's one, this is Andy from woodlawn I mentioned. So similar to you, he has competitors in his market in his case his competitors are pretty similar in pricing so a lot of times families would call him and the first thing they would ask is “Hey, what's the price?
And then he would have this pitch that he gives to them and then after that, he would ask them if they want to come in or set an appointment to come in to make arrangements. Typically at this point the family would say “Hey you know what, I'm not the right person to talk to”...or “You're you're the first person I talked to so I'm gonna have to call around and call you back.” And typically they never call back and then Andy loses that sale. Does that sound familiar?
Okay, so after understanding the process, we talked with Andy and I think one can make the argument that asking someone to come in before they even know what they're going to do might be a bit of a big ask. Right? Especially in this day and age. So think about it. Would you drive somewhere to hear a sales pitch? Probably not. You probably want all your information up front before you make a decision right?
So instead we ask Andy, hey whenever someone calls you and asks for pricing...tell them the price like you normally do. Give them the pitch, let me just let them know what's included and give them all information that they want. But then ask them or tell them that you'll send them the information that they ask for in writing. And then ask them where to send that information to.
Usually by email, right? “So what's the email address to send this information to?” Right so then when he sends that email... what we're doing here is we're increasing an extra touch point, right? So now they have an email from you. We're including what they asked for, but we’re also adding like for example, his contact information.
So on a side note, you never want to, and this is for really your process and just sales in general, you never want to expect the family to remember anything. So you don't want to expect that right? So you really need to do everything in your power to make this easier for the family. So in the email Andy would include his name, his phone number, his funeral home name even.
Because people aren't gonna remember, right? They're gonna remember how you made them feel probably, but outside of that, it's all going to be the same. So in this email that we sent to the families, the real reason outside of the extra touch point is we're actually including a call-to-action. And the ccall-to-action actually allows the family to see all the pricing they're asking about.
And then, essentially, go through the process, look at merchandise, calculate all the fees and pay for it right. So now the next step in this process Andy has isn't going to come in and make an appointment, which is a big step. We're asking a much smaller step, which is hey can you just open your email? And then we'll bring them down this funnel where we get the customer or the family to trust us enough to become a paying customer.
So by doing so we increase the shopper conversion by about 50% in a very short amount of time. Does that make sense? Okay I don't know why I'm asking. This is a video.
All right, so another example I mentioned earlier is Omega Society, so a very similar story. I've talked to a lot of funeral homes that have this process where it's like the family comes in to make arrangements, right? And they have the arrangement room... and they have set up all the urns in the arrangement room and the funeral home doesn't want to hard sell the family because they don't want to make you feel uncomfortable.
And they would typically just want the family to ask about the urns and if they ask about them, they will sell the urns to them right? And that's totally fine. I understand why they do like that they don't want to come off as a hard selling anything. So after working with will at Omega Society and understanding their process we said “Hey you can continue this policy, but instead, what if we included the urns not just in the arranging room but on your website?”
So instead of having them sit with you in the arranging room and seeing them, they can actually see it directly on the website. And because we control this flow, as they start to make arrangements online they can see the urns and they can make the decision whether or not they want it.
But we're not forcing anyone to ask to see if they want to buy an urn. We're also not forcing anyone to select one. If they don't want one they can move on and then in doing so we had very big effects on the bottom line. Really just making sure people are given these options like you're not you're not selling them you're giving them the option to buy, right? Every single person now has the option to buy.
There's a very small change in mindset and a small change in process, but it has really big effects down the line. So in this case they added about five thousand dollars per month and merchandise sales they weren't getting every month they've been with us.
Okay so I hope these examples help. In summary, you really want to think about what your customers want. You want to think about how you can make it easier for them. Right. And you really want to adjust your style of conversation and adjust your process to make it as easy as for them to understand the value you provide and to be able to do what you want them to do.
So in this case it's either coming back to make an appointment to become a customer, or go online to become a customer, selling merchandise more easily. So you can really apply this concept to almost every aspect of your business.
I hope this if you find this helpful. Just think about your business in terms of this, I guess, framework and if you have more questions you can feel free to reach out. Cool see you guys in the next video thanks!
