Anyone Work Pre-Need for a Funeral Home?

[FortHoodTX]

I came over from life insurance and am new to Pre-Need. I recently went full-time doing sales for 3 local funeral homes, huge market here in this area. When I was in Houston last week for training and a couple seminars, it was mentioned that a lot of agents are making big money "working files". It was elabourated on, but not at length.

Anyone have experience with it? I'm just confused as to what they mean. A lot of those agents do funeral AND cemetery property. If someone owns cemetery property, they work the file and call and see if they want to do funeral pre-arrangements. The kicker is... we are NOT a cemetery location, just funeral.

Trying to discover some value for me personally to work files. Pre-Need looking for referrals? At-Need following up with families to see if they've done theirs? We have filing cabinets full of unworked files; if I could find something productive to do with them, it could be a goldmine.

Newby? Anyone else with ideas? Thanks!

 

[HoosierLife]

Talk to Newby. He might be busy at the Monkey Dust conference until next week though.

 

[rebhchad]

im in pn, and its a hard business if your doing it ONLY.. in my opinion pre-need is a very hard sale, and you must have very thick skin to do it.. I wish you luck, and dont depend on walk-ins like most do..

stay on the phone
mail letters
follow up with families
ask for referrals
etc...

 

[Newby]

Selling preneed is not hard if you are in a good funeral home. That makes all the difference.

Use a database. Your most likely prospects are the people in the neighborhoods around the funeral home and the relatives of people who's funerals were there.

Talk to every one of those. Record in your database your notes and history with them.

Everyone will be one of three things
1. Yes today
2. Yes someday
3. No

How well you database market to the #2s will determine your long term success.

That right there is your free monkey dust for today.

 

[FortHoodTX]

Thanks, I'll look more into database marketing. I'm putting together a direct mail campaign and as soon as it's approved, I'll look to target those groups of people first. I'm just really wanting to maximize the value of that huge filing cabinet of existing PN customers, though. There has to be more business that can be produced from it...

Our 3 funeral home locations are a household name in the area so at least I've got that going for me. We do more business than anyone else.