One of the advantages of getting older, grayer, and more experienced in business is that you get a lot of time to reflect on the many things that have happened in the past and then can try to understand how you can put that knowledge into today’s society.  One of the terms I thought about the other day was “Wallet Share” which in the 1990’s was a big part of my vocabulary when I sat on a bank board.  As I continue on today, I will try to explain how “Wallet Share” is important to your funeral business going forward.

In the 1990’s I sat on a bank board of Norwest, which was the corporate name of Minneapolis based Northwestern National Bank – which had national aspirations.  Many people don’t realize, but it was Norwest that bought Wells Fargo Bank and because of brand identity (which is a another story that could be told sometime) Norwest Corporation moved forward, but took the Wells Fargo moniker as our brand because it was much better known nationwide.

The CEO of Norwest at the time, who became CEO of Wells Fargo was a gentleman by the name of Richard Kovacevich.  While Mr. Kovacevich wanted Wells Fargo to get a certain market share of the deposits in each community it served, he went further by telling branches (which he called stores) that they also had to get a large share of each client’s wallet or a “Wallet Share”.  What he meant by this is that the bank needed to implement a “cross-selling” strategy and market all of our products -checking, savings, insurance, mortgage, financial management, etc –  to all customers.  The theory was that this would greatly increase profits because we already had expended the “customer acquisition” cost on these customers and they were Wells Fargo clients where cross-selling would now be inexpensive.

So, with that intro, how is your funeral home business doing on cross-selling?  Once you serve a family do you make a follow-up call that can eventually lead to monument sales, pre-need sales, and more?  You’ve already acquired this family as a client family — adding ancillary sales post service is the easiest way to bring a higher profit to the bottom line.

Brainstorm and see what other items may increase your wallet share of this client family.  Can you:

• Get a percentage of flower sales by sending the family to a “preferred” florist?
• Get a percentage of reception food sales by sending the family to a “preferred” caterer?
• Make an ancillary sale by using your reception hall?
• Sell CD’s, on-line services, large photos, and the like?

The list is endless.  Put some thought into it and see what you can do.  Not only will you be able to add additional revenue to your funeral home business, you may be doing your client families a favor by making many things more convenient to them.  And many times, it can be done with a “soft-sell” by just having something in the arrangement room during the arrangement conference — you don’t need to appear that you are “making a sale”.

When I served on that Norwest board, I served with a CEO of a public cell phone company and he is the one that taught me about the high cost of customer acquisition.  Think about it — the funeral business has very high cost customer acquisition.  You need a nice facility, you need advertising, you need public relations, and you have a very expensive silo in the “cost of time” — whereas unlike the banking or cell phone business you may have to wait 10 years or longer to serve a client family because they have no need for your service until a death or pre-arrangement is needed.

It just makes sense, by the time you acquire that client family, you should have multiple products to offer them, and not be afraid to do so, to build the bottom line.

[wpforms id=”436″ title=”true” description=”true”]