Being a Slow Adopter Can Undermine Funeral Home Success

In a blog post from February of this year, 3 Enemies You Must Conquer to Increase Cash Flow, Brian Tracy shared his views on the three most common, most damaging beliefs and behaviors affecting small business owners today. According to him, the biggest issues compromising our success are within ourselves, not within the community in which we live or do business. These are:

1. The overriding desire to stay in our comfort zone.
2. The willingness to remain a hapless, hopeless victim, caught up in our own helplessness.
3. The habit of always choosing the path of least resistance.

Let’s Talk Online Funeral Pre-Planning Forms

A bit of a “back story” is in order. For a long, long time I’ve wondered how effective online pre-planning forms really are. It’s because once upon a time a funeral director said to me, “I don’t get any leads from my funeral home website at all.” Honestly, I was dumbstruck. So, here was what I thought to be a valuable lead generation tool — was it really going to waste? I sat with that concern for a while, and then set about to learn exactly what was happening. I thought there were two possible issues:

• The funeral director in question was just plain wrong. This would allow me to forget the whole thing, and blame his ignorance of the facts. (Way too easy, and probably wrong.)
• He didn’t actively promote the form’s existence. If the public doesn’t know it’s there for them, how can you ever expect lead generation success? (A distinct possibility.)

Unfortunately, I’ve heard much the same from many other funeral directors who also made the comment that their online pre-need planning form is not the fantastic lead generation tool it was intended to be. In my pursuit of the truth, I turned to my professional community on Facebook. Asked way too many questions, and can only surmise how annoying I was — but I’ve got to admit, the Facebook community of funeral professionals is so courteous and willing to share.

Why Funeral Directors Should Care about the Information Gap

It seems to me, and a whole lot of other people including academics, financial advisors, health care professionals, and marketers; today’s world is one of “information haves” and “information have-nots”. Let’s consider funeral service. Funeral home owners and managers, funeral directors, embalmers, pre-need advisors, celebrants—we’ve got the information families need to make important end-of-life decisions. Most families don’t.

And this gap between the two—between families and the professionals who intend to serve them—needs to be recognized, and effectively bridged. The “information haves” need to creatively provide (using as many channels as possible, online and offline) critical information to the “information have-nots”. We need to effectively “fill the gap”.

How to Use Communication Technology to Stay in Touch with Families

Remember when the best communication tools we had available to us–both as “common folk” and as funeral service professionals–were a pen or pencil, paper, envelope, and a stamp? I sure do. Back then, letter-writing was an art form, as was penmanship. Today, everything is different.

Thanks to technology, we’ve got more ways to communicate with one another than we often have time for—ways like email, and social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and YouTube.