I did an article last Tuesday about the Krause Funeral Home and their low-key approach to Pre-Arrangement presentations with their “Pizza and Pre-Need” get-togethers.  It made me think about how I’ve presented Pre-Need in a seminar format and how my approach has been refined over the years as both the consumers and the product (death care) have changed in some subtle and some not so subtle ways.

Over the years I started with trust based certificates of deposits and then moved on to getting my insurance license, owning my own pre-need insurance agency, and  writing pre-need with commissionable insurance products.  While I was the overall manager of our funeral home my brother did most of the actual pre-need sales, but I would guess that I wrote over $5 million of premium over the years and did monthly seminars to tee up appointments for my brother and others who sold pre-need.

I’ve refined my “art of the seminar” to five fundamental foundations that I touch on.  They are:

1. What I believe is necessary in funeral /memorial care to move the survivors to a position where they have the ability to continue on with life following the loss of a loved one.
2. What I believe are the three simple things that all couples and their children should know and decide upon in the unlikely event that a sudden death occurs.
3. Next I like to have a power point of what different types of services will cost in our area.  This includes a discussion of full casketed services all the way down to what I would refer to as a minimal service direct cremation option.  It’s at this point that I like to make the point that – while we believe that we are very reasonable with our costs – none of the service options, including the lowest minimal service cremation, is an insignificant amount of money to most people.  This is where I also tie the idea of having a savings account or  insurance for this financial outlay is a smart decision.
4. This is where  I open the seminar up for questions and can  make some very good points on the value of pre-arrangements.
5. Finally, we pass out a short questionnaire where consumers are really honest with us as to the type of service (burial, cremation, memorial) that they think they would like.  We ask consumers if they would like us to contact them – and the vast majority say yes.  We have found , however, even if they don’t check the contact box, we will contact them and it leads to just as many sales as the consumers that asked us to contact them.

I’ve refined this approach so that in the invitation letter to consumers we state they we will only take 45 minutes to one hour of their time on that day.  We think that the request to take so little of their time to educate them on something so important is one reason why our attendance response rate is about five times the industry average on cold call letters.

Tomorrow I’ll point out some of the more detailed parts of my presentation.

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