by: Larry Parker

Finding what works for the cremation customer is rapidly becoming a necessity for success in the funeral business. Picture your business as a coin. Your firm is the side and your customers are the other side. The two are bound inextricably to one another. Now, take this picture to the next level. Is your business the heads side or the tails side of the coin? And, consider the more important question. What is it that bonds customers to a business so tightly like the inextricable two sides of a coin? Answer those two questions and both you and your business will grow.

Look at a simple occurrence in funeral homes while keeping those questions in mind. A phone call is received. It is a Mrs. Jones who says, “My husband is in hospice and I would like to know how much you charge for cremation?” Many times the hospice part is left out and the usual question is “How much do you charge for cremation?” Most funeral business managers coach and train staff to handle these calls. Many are quite skillful at engaging Mrs. Jones with a few questions and weaving in rapport building as the conversation progresses. Assume you are the manager of a business with increasing cremation sales. That scenario is played out almost universally in funeral businesses today. Your staff either begins the bond establishment with Mrs. Jones or they lose her. Where do you go from here, or more importantly, on what path is Mrs. Jones placed if she is still there?

Preneed with cremation at an increasing volume is a serious concern for a funeral business wishing to be successful in the future. What is your definition of a preneed case in terms of at need versus preneed and also, in terms of unfunded versus funded? At this point, I need to tell you about half of my bright ideas over the past 35 years were mistakes. The United States Marine Corps has one of its strong unwritten rules, Do Something Even If It Turns Out Wrong! Winners act quickly, take chances and then make corrections quickly when wrong. OK, let’s boldly step out and define preneed broadly as planning for anyone of any age who is alive. It can be funded or unfunded.

Now, back to Mrs. Jones. Under the definition , she is channeled to preneed. All imminent persons are under the purview of preneed due to that broad definition. Most at need staffs are ill equipped and not motivated to give priority to the needs of the living when their training and main mission is to care for the family of the deceased person. Preneed always gets second priority if a death is to be handled. Motivation is a funny thing. Suppose you contract with a professional preneed operation which defines preneed only as funded sales on non-imminent individuals below a certain age – 90 perhaps. That arrangement would be hazardous to the future success of your cremation business. Why? Because the majority of cremation customers who approach your organization are either imminent or want unfunded planning in the beginning.

Commission driven operations are partially successful in marketing to potential preneed cremation customers. Some provision of incentive or compensation for handling persons with negative oncology diagnoses, hospice patients and older 80`s and 90`s groups needs to be used. Without that provision, you are simply driving a steady stream of potential cremation customers to your competition. Experienced managers see the ready willingness of cremation customers to move on to another firm as one of the differences between today’s cremation family and the burial family.

In seeking solutions we start with the step of defining the problem or situation. If you want your eyes opened regarding your business, try this. Follow every phone call, email, letter or walk-in for a short period of time, a week or two perhaps. Track that person through preneed, at need, sales call process, personal call handling or any other post-contact action or inaction by your staff. Keep tracking after the collection period ends. With the preneed contacts, it can go on for weeks.

Obviously, the entire staff gets involved in this process. What path was each person placed on, who decided on that path and why? You want to know every step taken with each contact. When were potential customers lost or intentionally dropped? What staff action resulted in the customer taking the next step-thus moving toward that inextricable bond with the firm? What was the satisfaction level of each customer? What caused each terminated relationship? All this takes some real digging. Some firms start with one hour or several hours of contacts just to coach staff on how to collect and track what’s happening.

There is a principle in planning that says there is value gained in going through the process in addition to the value in the plan itself. The same is true with your tracking of contacts. Staff members sharpen their customer service skills as they participate in this process. At the back end of the process, you have the findings which can be used for comparison with customer feedback, restructuring of policies and procedures, and training of staff.

A customer feedback system using the internet gives today’s manager a powerful edge in strengthening the bond with customers. Cremation.com starts customer feedback in the preneed and at need arrangement conference with a short verbal explanation and take-home illustrative sheet. All feedback is channeled via the internet to the manager’s business intelligence dashboard. The results measure customer satisfaction levels with each funeral director or preneed salesperson and with the firm itself. For comparison, the average figures for the relevant state and country-United States or Canada are given.

The process is very customer friendly. Just one question in the form of a rating, “ On a scale of 1-10 how satisfied are you with your recent arrangement at the Smith Funeral Home and Crematory?” It is followed by an opportunity to make any desired comment in an open-ended fashion. Managers use the feedback information to prepare staff training programs, to take personnel actions and to adjust policies of the firm.

The economics of advertising in the typical cremation marketplace is causing a shift from print and yellow pages to the internet. Strengthening customer relations by improving employee skills in this area makes sense and brings in more money. The sharp manager can benefit by finding and delivering what works for the cremation customer.

Contact tracking and customer feedback strengthen the relationship between a firm and its customer base. That strengthened relationship provides fertile grounds for identifying “referral ambassadors” Most of those will be family members who have experienced a cremation with your firm and are motivated to continually refer future customers to you. Recognition and stroking are essential and can be accomplished easily with today’s email. Two pertinent questions to be answered by a location manager are; Who is your Referral Ambassador Coordinator? and, Who are your Key Referral Ambassadors?

Tracking, feedback, recruitment of ambassadors are all actions of an internal nature, within the firm. For the next bold step in acquiring new customers, consider market expansion, an external approach. The typical burial market extends out for 10-20 miles from a location. Cremation markets go farther, about 50 miles. That’s limited by removal times. Complaints by families start to come in when the removal time extends beyond an hour or so. Let’s assume you choose to subscribe to Cremation.com and list your cremation oriented website in all the significant towns or cities in a fifty mile radius. An increase from 20 to 50 miles increases your cremation market area from 1,257 square miles to 7,854 square miles, more than a six fold increase. The entire cost to do this amounts to around a dollar per day. Customer firms see an increase in cremation sales. Some are experiencing phenomenal results when they combine Market Expansion with Contact Tracking, Customer Feedback and Ambassador Referral.

The internet is reshaping marketing and the greatest news is that it is costing less. Yellow pages and newspapers are gradually slipping where advertising is concerned. Internet surpasses all media in content delivery. Furthermore, the delivery is at customer demand on a 24/7 basis. Funeral home managers and owners are gaining back the ability to accomplish in a 50 mile radius what their grandfathers did in a small town, village or community of yesteryear.

Larry Parker is President of Cremation Marketing Systems, Inc.-Cremation.com. He has owned and operated recently sold funeral establishments for thirty years, managed the sale of $millions in cremation preneed and a greater amount in unfunded plans. His background includes graduation from the Funeral Director Program at Fayetteville Technical Community College, Masters of Science in Health Administration at UNC, Chapel Hill, NC, seven years as an officer in the United States Marine Corps and ten years elected to the North Carolina Crematory Authority, a part of the State’s Board of Funeral Service.

Link to find local funeral homes
http://www.cremation.com

by: Amrita Jamuda

The sales of your restaurant cannot be increased dramatically. You have to improvise and innovate new plans and strategies for this purpose, which will enable you to make a difference in the sphere of restaurant industry. You need to remain aware of some marketing tips and tricks. However, this is not the end of the task rather; it is just the beginning. You have to employ these strategies and plans with meticulous attention for increasing restaurant sales and for generating best possible outcome in the long run. As most of these steps are tested and tried by a large number of restaurant owners, you will not have to think about the effectiveness of these strategies or tips.

Take The charge of the Marketing Blitzkrieg Yourself

This is the most vital thing that you should not ignore at any cost. Obviously you can opt for professional assistance of some restaurant consultants, you should actively participate in this marketing campaign. Your active participation will inspire and encourage your employees and other restaurant staffs to server better.

Marketing in Your Locality

You have to comprehend the simple fact that a large section of your daily customer comes from your locality. Therefore, you have to promote your restaurant in your locality first. After that, you can spearhead your marketing campaign in other areas. It has been observed that almost every restaurant gets approximately 80% of its customers from its locality and therefore, you should not neglect it at any cost.

Be Hospitable

This is the key to success in this domain. Customers cringe at the very though of over-crowded restaurants or restaurant bereft of common amenities. So, the first thing you have to do is to make your restaurant clean and tidy. It should be visually arresting and at the same time you should offer quality service and food. And don’t forget to be hospitable; otherwise your entire endeavor might go to vain.

Check The Quality of Your Service Yourself

You can arrange a mystery dinner for this purpose. This is the best thing you can do to pinpoint the flaws in your marketing campaign and your service. This will enable you to check the service quality and quality of food yourself and thereby it can help you to formulate solutions to eradicate these problems.

Offering Something Extra and Unique

You want to attain a discreet identity, you have to offer something more than what your customers are expecting from you. This will definitely help you to retain your existing customers and at the same time you will be able lure other customers in your restaurant. In a nutshell, this will add an extra edge in your marketing campaign.

http://captivaterestaurants.co.uk/

Amrita Jamuda is a search engine optimizer and presently researching on restaurant marketing strategies for http://captivaterestaurants.co.uk/

by: BNET

by: Mark Gavoor

Demand Planning is a dynamic process. The goal is to provide a realistic prediction of sales of the upcoming months enabling the supply chain to procure raw and packing materials that will produce the right mix of finished products, at the right time, to meet anticipated sales demand. If the product is not available at the right time and place, customer service and sales will suffer. If the product is available but the sales do not materialize, there will be excess inventory that both ties up working capital and warehouse space.

Demand Planning is, of course, an enhancement and improvement over mere forecasting. Forecasting takes historical sales or shipments and used statistical methods to project what sales will be in the future. Statistical forecasts cannot really be used for new products and harder to use for promotional offers simply because the history does not exist.

So, we “Demand Plan.”

This sounds better than forecasting anyway. Forecasting is about predicting the future. Planning sounds much more solid, determined, thoughtful, and hence, predictive. It is a plan. A plan is like a blue print. Yes, this is what we plan to make and what we plan to sell. What could be easier? To boot, we use the best minds in the company and maybe even involve customers to develop the Demand Plan. We begin with a baseline Statistical Forecast and then tweak it with human intelligence and insight. We collaborate with Sales and Marketing which are the functions that shepherd both new products and promotions through the system. They know the volumes upon which the new products and promotions were justified.

Or do they? Ah, herein lies the rub.

Will the new product sell as expected? Will the promotion deliver the sales lift as expected? In the Supply Chain, we are often responsible for managing the Demand Planning process. This includes data management, preparing the base statistical forecasting and planning and managing the various meetings leading to the Demand Plan. We have all the responsibility but not necessarily the equivalent authority. We get judged and are essentially responsible for Demand Plan accuracy which can be tracked:

Individual Item Error:

%Error = ((Plan – Actual)/Plan) x 100

Or

%Error = ((Plan – Actual)/Actual) x 100

We are not responsible for Actual (Sales or Shipment). We are only responsible for the Plan and only partially responsible at that. We share the plan development with Sales and Marketing. Yet, somehow we own the Accuracy KPI (key performance indicators). Fair or not, that is the way things work.

If we are responsible for the Demand Plan and its accuracy … we need to take the authority that is often only half granted. When something does not make sense we have to be like a football referee and “throw the flag,” the BS flag, when our business partners make overly optimistic estimates for new products and promotions. After all, new products and promotions are the creations, the babies, of Sales and Marketing. They are proud of their babies and like all parents have great expectations for them. Heck, we hire optimistic people in Sales. It’s an important attribute.

That’s all good, but when we know that the Demand Plan is beyond what ever happened before, we have to throw the BS Flag and call the penalty. Certainly, we have to be data based as much as possible. We need charts because “hockey sticks” are best seen visually. Sometimes to illustrate the point, we need to aggregate at the sub-family or family level to see the historical anomaly of what is being proposed.

We may lose the battle when overruled by the General Manager or President but at least there will be some recollection for at least the next reporting period. After that all anyone will remember, with the exception of ourselves in the Supply Chain, is either a bad customer service trend or an excess inventory problem.

So, don’t be afraid, toss the BS flag and create some robust dialogue!

Written by Mark Gavoor.

http://www.cadentresources.com

For more information, please send an email to: ldewit@cadentresources.com

Twitter with us: http://twitter.com/demandcaster

Mark Gavoor, Supply Chain Thought Leader and Editor of The CRIB, has 32 years of experience in Quality and Supply Chain Management in the consumer products, automotive and defense industries. His experiences include warehouse, transportation, inventory, and customer service management and continuous improvement. He also has led the implementation and optimization of SAP in the Supply Chain at two companies.

by: CaptureYourFlag