This category contains articles about how to get and keep customers

Building A Competitive Fortress Through Your Pricing Strategy

Last week I addressed our broken pricing model referred to as Cost-Led-Pricing.  Apropos of everything this article came to my attention Tough times add hardship to heartache: More families ask for help paying for funerals underscoring the problem created by our outdated pricing strategy and causing me to wonder if maybe we won't need to eventually [...]

A Broken Business Model: Wringing More Money Out of Your Best Customers Is Not Sustainable

This image illustrates so well the folly of our more than century old pricing model.   All was good until the market changed about 30 years  ago.  Because we didn't know anything else (and neither did our advisors)  our response to the growth in cremation has been to beef up our burial prices and focus [...]

Are You Tired of Burying Your Local Treasure?

My friend, Ed Mazur of Kapinos-Mazur Funeral Home, ran a very successful PR / Public Service program in his local community.  The campaign featured this poster and newspaper ads.  Weekends were set aside to encourage parents to clean out unused medication from their medicine cabinets and bring them to the funeral home.  On the first [...]

Kudo’s to Batesville Casket

One of my favorite bloggers is Caleb Wilde who writes "Confessions of A Funeral Director."  He recently Posted this photo. Texting while Driving: A Great Way to Support Your Local Funeral Director For those of you that don’t know, Batesville, Indiana is the Mecca of the Funeral Industry as it houses the great Batesville Casket [...]

Why Families Seem Ruder Today and Some Tips on How To Respond

Funeral Directors are increasingly distressed about being treated rudely by families. This rudeness often causes practitioners to lose control of vital conversations at critical moments.  Industry vendors know that Funeral Directors can be very rude as well.   In my opinion the reasons both are rude is fundamentally the same. And Yes! Funeral Directors can [...]

Expert Opinion: Some Things Are Obvious

Here is an excerpt of an interrogation of a witness in a Massachusetts trial court: Lawyer:  Doctor, before you performed the autopsy, did you check for a pulse? Doctor: no. Lawyer: did you check for blood pressure? Doctor: no. Lawyer: so, it’s possible the patient was alive when you began the autopsy? Doctor: [...]

New Book on Reinventing Your Business Features Funeral Home

I read a lot and sometimes I preorder new books.  This Winter I preordered "THE REINVENTORS, How Extraordinary Companies Pursue Radical Continuous Change" By Jason Jennings.  I started reading it last week and when I turned to page 60 lo and behold what did I see?  My friend Bill McQueen as one of the case [...]

Liking What You Do Is Not The Issue

I was visiting with a friend last week and the conversation went, briefly, to some mutual acquaintances. We noted how angry they had become as their careers had progressed and concluded they were really frustrated with the career they had inherited from their parents. Disappointment is a normal part of life. Some respond with increasing [...]

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