The 4 Boxes of Selling and how they apply to your funeral home's pre-need program...
The Four Boxes of Selling
I am sitting across from a funeral home owner on an idle Tuesday afternoon. He has invited me in for what he thinks is a short conversation. Business is fine, he says, mostly. He has a marketing partner. That partner placed an agent with him a few years ago and he shows up a few times a week to write business. The agent produces. Numbers move, technically, in the right direction. But the owner has that feeling he cannot quite name, the one that shows up before the rational one does. His agent is here, physically, and somewhere else the rest of the time.
I try to tell him what I think is happening. I can see him not listening, not because he disagrees but because he has heard this before, from the last person, and the person before that. He has been burned by guys like me too many times. He’s likely being burned now. I am just the next guy holding a torch, walking toward a wound he has already decided is not worth reopening.
We finish the conversation. Nothing is decided. Two months later I hear that nothing has changed. The agent is still a few days a week. The owner is still unhappy in that specific, low grade way that never quite reaches the threshold of action. He is not stupid and he is not stuck out of laziness. He has simply run the math the way all of us run it without meaning to. The pain of staying the same is still less than the pain of change. So he stays.
This is not a story about one owner. It is the story of most pre-need programs in this country, sputtering well below what they could be, propped up by a rotation of agents who never really belonged to the funeral home in the first place.
Here is the part almost nobody says out loud. When a marketing firm places an agent in your building, that agent was trained by a carrier, incentivized by a carrier, and will be loyal to that carrier’s commission structure long before they are loyal to you or your community. You are renting a body. For a while the rental looks like a solution. The numbers move. Then they stop moving, or they move less, and you are left wondering, again, why a program with this much potential keeps sputtering, why this agent never seemed attached to your families the way you are, why replacing one underperformer with the next just produces the same result on a delay.
The instinct at that point is almost always the same. Find another agent. Call another firm. Go back to the bandage cabinet, because the wound is right there and it looks urgent and a bandage is fast. But a bandage over an open wound does not heal anything. It just hides the infection from view while it keeps oozing underneath. You have to actually clean the wound out and build a sterile zone before anything put on top of it will hold.
There are four places this wound tends to live. Most funeral homes have only ever looked at one of them, and usually not even that one closely.
The first is who you are actually talking to. Most businesses never examine this box because it feels presumed. Families come to you at their time of need, your reputation is intact, so the thinking stops there. But not all prospects are created equal, and the gap is not subtle. A healthy fifty five year old who says maybe someday is a different problem than a seventy two year old widow who already knows she does not want her kids dealing with any of this. The second one is ready. She is, in fact, where most of your walk in business already comes from, and if your marketing has never separated her from the fifty five year old, you have been spending the same effort on two completely different people and calling it one strategy.
The second box is the attitude of the salesperson, and this is the one people underestimate the most because it looks soft next to numbers and scripts. Sales is a transfer of belief. If the person sitting across the table does not believe, in the product, in the necessity, in the value of what they are offering, the family will feel that absence before a single objection gets raised. An agent who is convinced the product is too expensive, or who needs to cram every family into a multi pay plan to hit a commission number, is not failing at technique. They are transferring their own doubt, and no script fixes that, because the problem was never the script.
The third box is the selling environment, and this is the one owners hand off without realizing they are handing off control. The environment is not just where the meeting happens, though that matters too, whether it is a living room, an arrangement office, a phone call, or increasingly a Zoom meeting that more families are choosing than most funeral homes have prepared for. The environment is also the sequence. Whether the appointment was set with intention or stumbled into. Whether the family arrived educated, having already received material that prepared them for the conversation, or arrived cold and had to be talked into caring in real time. If you let the prospect, or the agent, dictate the conditions of that environment instead of controlling it yourself, you lose the thing that was never visible on a spreadsheet but decided the outcome anyway.
The fourth box is the skill of the salesperson, and it is the box that gets all the attention because it is the only one most owners think to look at. If I could just find a great agent, the thinking goes, everything would be fine. But great agents are rare, expensive in ways beyond salary, and often unwilling to work inside anyone’s system but their own. The more talented they are, the more true this becomes, and the more your entire program depends on one person’s mood, health, and willingness to stay. That is not a program. That is a bet, dressed up as a strategy.
The reason so many pre-need programs sputter despite real potential is that owners keep treating box four as if it were the only box, and keep renting the solution instead of owning it. A marketing firm that places you a good agent has, at best, patched one corner of a four sided problem. The other three corners keep leaking, and eventually the fourth one does too, because a talented agent operating inside an unaddressed environment, in front of the wrong prospects, without the belief to carry them through, will burn out or wander off no matter how gifted they are.
Fix all four boxes and something different happens. Not just better numbers, though those come. You create what I think of as a vacuum, a pull that starts drawing families, referrals, and momentum toward you instead of you chasing all of it uphill. Who you talk to, how your salespeople think and carry themselves, the environment you control instead of surrender, and the skills you build into a system instead of praying for in a person. That is the whole program, not one quarter of it.
I think about that owner from the idle Tuesday afternoon sometimes. He was not wrong to be skeptical of me. He had earned that skepticism honestly, one burned relationship at a time. But skepticism of the next agent is not the same thing as skepticism of the next system, and until an owner sees the difference, he will keep doing the math that says staying the same hurts less than changing. It does, right up until the moment it doesn’t, and by then the wound has usually been open a lot longer than anyone wanted to admit.
-johnny renaissance
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