Retaining Sales All-Stars
Finding and keeping top talent in preneed sales requires a framework built on purpose, support, and healthy competition.
BY Kelly Kohut
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN Memento Mori - May 2024
Finding top talent for preneed sales teams is a critical challenge, and it can be even more challenging to retain them long term. How do you identify the right people to become long-lasting team members? And how can you provide an effective support system to drive performance over the long term?
Unlike some of my colleagues across the profession, I didn't grow up in a funeral home. I worked in the banking and healthcare industries, and it was only after learning about the difference we can make in preneed sales that I jumped at the opportunity to join the funeral profession. Today, I feel privileged to work with so many like-minded, purpose-driven people, and I'm not alone.
More and more of today's job seekers similarly crave purpose. When you develop a framework built on purpose and a balance of support and competition, your team can stay satisfied and successful while serving as some of the funeral home's most visible brand ambassadors.
Increasingly, today's top talent are looking for more stability, more opportunities for growth, and something more: meaningful work. They're quickly determining their own non-negotiables when it comes to employment that is satisfying and fulfilling.
This means that the people we are hiring – ESPECIALLY Millennials and Gen Z – care more about purpose than income. Now, that doesn't mean they won't seek competitive compensation, but it does mean that some of the best people will not stay just because of good pay.
People who believe they are engaging in work that matters are twice as satisfied, and three times more likely to stay put in their current organization, according to the Harvard Business Review. Purpose is how people fall in love with what they do and also why they'll stay. Folks who derive meaning from their work will be a business's biggest fans and advocates.
Thankfully, we all have the privilege of being in a profession where meaning is core piece of what we do every day.
Finding talent is more complex than simply listing a job.
The first challenge is helping prospective talent understand that we have something valuable to offer. For many, there's resistance and cultural stigma with anything having to do with death and dying. That makes it critical to create, market, and strengthen your employer brand.
Historically we have seen a quickly revolving door of people in funeral and cemetery sales. But we are finding with Millenials and Gen Z prospects that the promise of a high earning potential alone is not enough. We have to talk about the purpose and value of the role - to demonstrate the opportunity for meaningful work.
Recruiting is mostly thought of as an operational function. Recruiters are highly skilled at screening, interviewing, and moving candidates along after they've submitted an application. Where they are less skilled is in building awareness through multichannel marketing and developing and strengthening an employer brand.
One of the core competencies we developed early on at Precoa was to attract top talent from outside the profession, and we found that these three factors are most important:
Just about anyone can be trained to memorize a sales script. It takes a totally different skill set to create consistently remarkable preneed experiences.
What we know about the people who do this is that they care about what they are doing. The best Advance Funeral Planners stick around because they see day-in and day-out that they are making a meaningful difference. It becomes more than just a sales job because you see just how much you are helping people, and by shifting families perspectives about funeral service, your own perspective changes, too.
In other words, when you are invested in the purpose of your work, you perform better, and you stay.
At Precoa, we have about 250 million dollar producers in our organization and if we focus on the top of the top, the average duration of time in their role is 8.9 years.
This is work that can literally change one's life, and it's impossible not to feel a sense of purpose when doing it with that in mind. But our salespeople can't experience this in full if they don't have full support.
For the typical advance funeral planner, more than half of their time is spent on the parts of the job that don't make the best use of their talents. That includes as much as 2 whole days worth of phone calls and follow-ups. The result is lower satisfaction and potentially a cap on their potential earning power.
At Precoa, we have found efficiencies in optimizing where time is spent by salespeople, and one solution is a centralized system for quality appointment setting. This dramatically improves the consistency and quality of appointments, ensuring appointments with families who are motivated to buy AND it improves production because advance funeral planners get to focus on meeting with families.
But that's not the only way to create efficiencies and encourage your preneed team. Before I was with Precoa, we actually centered several incentives around the concept of setting appointments. The winners of the incentive would get to meet with families while their managers would call and set appointments for them. This wound up creating both more efficiency and stronger camaraderie.
This can also be done with other elements of the work - can you use automation and technology for appointment reminders, or nurture campaigns to warm up those colder leads? What other activities can you review that salespeople may find valuable to hand off so they can maximize the time spent selling?
Keeping things exciting and interesting is pivotal for salespeople.
You know that you can be driven by purpose and be incredibly competitive, whether that means competing against yourself or competing with your teammates. I briefly mentioned incentives above, which are great ways to motivate people, but there are lots of creative ways to foster competition as well.
A rankings board is one of these. Being able to see where you stand often inspires people to improve and progress. We've found that the most visited page of our sales platform for Advance Funeral Planners is the rankings page. People check it every day, and often multiple times a day.
Seeing how they stack up gives agents another measurement by which they can learn, strategize, and continue growing. What is really cool is that it also inspires connection and best practice sharing. People look up to the top performers and often reach out for tips and inspiration.
There are also so many creative incentives you can run to help drive production, but keeping these fresh is critical for a couple of reasons. If we just repeat the same incentives each year, people know they are coming, and the excitement lessens year over year. Taking the time to plan ahead and create variety really pays off. The point is that it should be a regular—and fun—part of any effective sales strategy.
As you build a team of top performers, you have to find a way to keep celebrating them.
For example, when someone reaches the Million Dollar Producer milestone for the first time, we celebrate them with a trip to Precoa's home office where they get to experience our culture and get recognized throughout their stay. They also earn a coveted spot on the MDP wall in the home office.
But the celebrations don't stop there. Just like being intentional about crafting a system for setting quality appointments, we can be intentional about rewards. It's not enough to just send people on a trip; you need to create the experience of a lifetime.
From the destinations that get selected to the awards events honoring top performers, the entire incentive experience is meant to reflect how grateful we are for the work our Advance Funeral Planners do - driving back to purpose and meaning.
During every incentive trip, our top producers get recognized with additional excursions, events, and other perks. Beyond that, they're given more space to be creative and innovative in their day-to-day roles, whether that's testing and trying innovative new lead programs or providing feedback. They're trusted, and they should feel like they matter.
One of the things we say at Precoa is: "People are the purpose. Period."
Time and time again, I find that I have the most success when I focus on connection and gratitude. Whether it's meeting with families or coaching Advance Funeral Planners, it's less productive long term to get hung up on short term numbers. The best results actually come when you focus instead on connecting, collaborating, and making every experience as meaningful as possible for everyone involved - the people doing the work, and the customers we are serving day in and day out.
Every day, families are sharing very intimate parts of their lives with us and allowing us to guide them to make a quality plan to help their loved ones after they're gone. This work is very satisfying, and it will always be driven by people and purpose.
Once again, I will note that we hear a lot about the changing consumer, but if we don't take time to learn about the changing worker that will serve our consumers, we do ourselves a disservice. It's up to us to build a comprehensive system to support and develop the up and coming generations of salespeople. Without that, it will be more difficult to retain them and they won't experience all of the meaningful opportunities being a salesperson within the funeral profession has to offer.
Kelly Kohut Kelly Kohut's talent for business growth blends perfectly with her passion for helping funeral homes connect with more families through preneed. With a degree in marketing and an MBA, Kelly honed her sales and marketing skills in the healthcare industry before deciding to pursue a career with a purpose-driven company. She serves as Regional Vice President of Partnership Development at Precoa, where her incredible leadership and skill at cross-functional problem solving make her a key member of every team she is a part of.