How about a bowling night for elementary school volunteers?

There is not a business around that doesn’t want a bigger piece of the pie when it comes to market share.  Funeral businesses and funeral home owners are no different.  So, what is the secret in building your market share?

First, there is no silver bullet on how it is done.  However, just like Major League Baseball being more analytic over subjective in analyzing data, funeral homes that analyze data can get a good indication of how to build that market share.  I’ve recently came across a funeral home services trend article that surveyed over 25,000 funeral home clients on why they did what they did.

After analyzing the data, I’ve came to the conclusion that you can change and/or get better at some of the things that are mentioned and some, quite frankly, you have little influence over.  So, in my opinion, those things that you can get better at or change what you are doing is where you should be putting your effort in gaining market share.

Let’s look at why families chose the funeral home that they did.  The top four reasons mentioned were the funeral home had previously served them, the funeral home was in a convenient location, they had pre-arranged their funeral with the funeral home, and the funeral homes reputation.  Okay, you cannot change if a family had used your funeral home previously – either they have or they have not.  Also, unless you are planning a re-build or an expansion, you can’t really change your location.

Your reputation is your reputation and you should be constantly working on upgrading that, but that is also something that you cannot change overnight.  Where does that leave us. . . .of the top four reasons families choose a funeral home, you can do something about pre-arrangements.

My philosophy about pre-arrangements is more than signing people up. . . .it is about becoming the funeral home of choice to that family even if they do not formally commit to the pre-arrangement process.

Our funeral home went from about 65% to 80% of market share in our community in about ten years by using pre-arrangements as a lead tactic in what I call “interdicting” in your potential client family’s lives at an earlier age.  It was in the 1980’s and Nancy Reagan was the First Lady and her major program was a program for children called, “So No to Drugs”.  Mrs. Reagan opined that the earlier we talked to children about the dangers of using drugs the more success we would have in stopping that usage.  In essence, the earlier we “interdicted” in the children’s lives, the better off they would be.

I used the same philosophy by ramping up pre-need seminars for people in our community.  I also dropped the age that we would invite people to the seminars from 60 to 50.  Now, a lot of those 50 year olds were not yet interested in pre-arrangements but we learned that if we had an incentive for getting them to the seminar, we could at least “interdict” them in our philosophy, make friends with them, and become their favored funeral home simply by default as many did not know any funeral home personnel, from any funeral home,  at that age.  A sale of a pre-arrangement account to them was a bonus.

We have taken that a step farther now.  We do things in the community such as hold a firefighter, law enforcement, and EMT night outside the funeral home with a free picnic meal and games for the kids to say thank you to these people in our community.  With this type of event, we are “interdicting” with 30 year old parents and giving them a reason to consider us their funeral home of choice before they have a chance to consider a different funeral home.

As we move forward I predict that price will gain more than the 7% reason why a family chooses a funeral home and you have to watch that.  However, if you want to increase your market share over time, consider trying to do things where your funeral home “interdicts” with people at a younger and younger age.

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