By Joey Haas
Transcript of our video interview with West Foulger at Envision Strategic Partners
Heather:
Hi everybody. Thanks for checking in with us at Funeral Innovations: Trends, Tips and Technology, where we chat with industry leaders to discuss marketing trends, business tips, and technology innovation, and we discuss how digital marketing helps you better serve your families. I’m Heather, I’m the director of marketing here at Funeral Innovations
Joey:
And I’m Joey, I’m the marketing and design coordinator at Funeral Innovations.
Heather:
And today we have on West Foulger from Envision Strategic Partners. Hi, West. How are you?
West:
Hello, thanks for having me on.
Heather:
Thanks for being here. To kick it off, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and about your business?
West:
Excellent. My name’s West Foulger. I own a company called Envision Strategic Partners and work as a chief operating officer. We were founded as a company in January of 2015. So we’ve been at this for about five years now. Prior to starting Envision Strategic Partners. I was the sales manager at a family owned funeral home here in Salt Lake City called Larkin Mortuary, they have four funeral homes, and they do about 1200 cases. We kind of took the success that we had at Larkin Mortuary over about a five year span. We had a lot of questions and, and other family-owned firms saw the success that Larkin Mortuary was having. And so myself and Spencer Larkin, our co-founder of Envision Strategic Partners decided that we would create a third-party marketing company and bring our tools and resources and training basically to the marketplace. So within a short five years we’ve been able to grow the business tremendously. We work with 30 brands across the country operating now in 13 states. And just, couldn’t be more excited about the future of Envision Strategic Partners and, and just being able to have the opportunity to help a lot more funeral homes with their pre-need sales and marketing.
Heather:
Awesome. And before we jump into our second question, would you just describe a little bit, like what you give the firms that you partner with, what your services look like?
West:
Absolutely. It’s really a win-win relationship. And, and we really look for the right partnerships. So it’s funeral homes that want to be proactive in their marketing strategy and to really want to compete in that preneed space. There’s a lot of wonderful funeral homes that do an excellent job on that need side. But the really only way, in my opinion, of course, I’m a little biased to really drive future business. And future growth is to have a strong pre-need program to go out and talk to families before the need arises and to feel your filing cabinets with future business. And there’s a lot of other ways to go about, you know, hoping that families call you at the time of need through, you know, TV and radio and phone and digital marketing and things like that. But the only real guarantee that a family is going to call you as if there’s a pre-need for them in the filing cabinet. So it’s really, in my opinion, again, the best strategy. So we really run a turnkey operation on the pre-need side, not when they partner with us. And we contract with them to run their program. We’re going to do everything from finding, recruiting, hiring training, motivating their sales team. Many of the funeral homes that we start with start from scratch. They don’t have anybody really proactively working pre-need. And so our approach is to say, you know what, you focus on the at-need side of your business and let us handle the preneed side of the business so they can get rid of the headaches of, of trying to manage that, manage salespeople, hold them accountable, make sure leads are followed up with, make sure they’re correctly and professionally representing your brand. We really take that, and then from that standpoint, we help the lead generation, CRM support, digital marketing with our partners there you guys at Funeral Innovations that help us with our Facebook marketing for our clients. And then of course with our insurance partner, which is Homesteaders Life. And then of course we, we bring a whole nother array of support with having them on our team and one of our strategic partners with their account executives and the things that they do internally to really help funeral homes from a marketing perspective. So it really, you know, we, we take care of it all. We, we, we track our success send monthly reports, make sure the funeral home owners are, are, are well aware of the activities that are going on help coordinate lunch and learns community events. Of course some of that stuff slowed down in the last few months, but but with that being said it really kind of takes, I mean, most funeral home owners, what I’ve found is they will say, you know, we’d like to do this. We’d like to do more community events. We’d like to do more lunch and learns like to do more seminars. But they just get busy and it’s, it’s it’s difficult to market those events, to handle RSVPs, to send out reminders, and then actually execute the event and do the presentations. So we basically just take that burden completely off of the funeral home owners, let them focus on what they’re good at and that’s doing funerals and trying to manage their at-need operations. And then just really try to professionally be ethically and caringly run a preneed program that is consistent with this what’s important for, for their brand.
Joey:
Gotcha. And so you kind of touched on it a little bit, but do you think you could talk a bit more about how the pandemic kind of impacted the pre-need business? Especially during that March April May time period?
West:
Yeah, I’d be more than, Oh, I don’t really know that I want to talk about it, but I’ll talk about it. It’s been interesting. Obviously you have to quickly adapt. I think that was one of the things that we realized. We were on a trajectory to have a phenomenal year. January, February, in fact, March ironically, the things were kind of happening in the middle to the end of March with the pandemic March was our record month as a company. So we closed March very strong, but of course if had a lot to do with the momentum and the activity that we had in January and February, cause it freed sales, everything’s got a little bit of a lag. So we finished March really strong. Of course then everything kind of kicked in. We immediately just started, to figure out that we can’t now meet families face to face. That, that was probably one of the biggest realizations that we had is that there were a lot of fears or a lot of unknowns of people pulled back a lot canceled appointments. The things changed rapidly. So we quickly moved to and thankfully with Homesteaders Life and, and their support, being able to offer options for families to still fund insurance policies without a face-to-face meeting, we immediately just created digital presentation kits where we were able to, you know, take each of our clients general price list, casket price lis, and created a full, full color presentation kits that we could email to families that we could then present to them through a virtual conference, so to speak. I’m also realizing that now a sale is maybe going to be a two, three, four step process that we’re not going to have that set the appointment, go in their home face to face and, and close the sale. It was really going to require multiple steps, which then also required for us to to retrain the staff on how to set appointments how to use new technology. You know, I don’t know what it is about the funeral industry, but you know, there’s been technology that’s been around forever that a lot of other companies have used for a long time. And all of a sudden, we’re just now teaching people about zoom and go to meeting and, and the resources and tools that can now be used. So I think that the longterm impact is actually going to be very positive, that we now have three ways of helping families with that. You can come to the funeral home, we can come to your home, or we can meet online. And we never really explored that third option very much. And so now for some people, especially the, the younger generation and into the future, I think that we’re always going to have that third option available for families who would prefer and just say, hey, if we can do this all online, we’re comfortable with that. We can still see people’s faces. We can still have interaction. You know, I think there’s definitely a part that we all miss right now of that real human connection of actually, you know, meeting people, shaking, hands, giving hugs that’s all going to come back, but, but but the right now we have to just understand this is our new reality and we have to be comfortable with it. And if, of course you adapt or die, right. No pun intended. So that, that’s just some of the things that we’ve done here. And then of course, just the way we conduct sales meetings and training you know, we’ve luckily at the end of last year, we rolled out a series of online training videos for our pre-need sales team that all new people have to watch and kind of go through an assessment. Luckily we had that done. And so that really helped us with continuing to be able to train. But you know, as far as the classroom trainings and travel and face to face stuff, but I think in the end it’s made us a lot more efficient and, and realizing that we can still do our job with technology, that we really probably wouldn’t have done just kind of doing things the old way, because we’ve always done them that way. It’s forced us to, to change and adapt and in the end, I think it’s gonna make us a lot more productive.
Heather:
That’s great. And you talked about how you incorporated technology, adapted quickly and how you did see that dip in pre-need. Have you seen anything shift in the past couple months or talk about what’s working with pre-need now that we’re a little further down the line?
West:
April for sure was our bottom. I mean, we definitely hit a floor, you know, from a sales perspective. And I would, you know, with the connections we have across the country and other marketers, and I mean, we all, I mean, that fear just set in and we definitely April was, was a struggle to kind of adapt to the changes. But then, May we got a little bit better June, we increased a little bit more so April by far, I’m sure, probably consistently across the board was, was probably about as bad as it was going to get as everybody was trying to learn and adapt to the new norm as everyone’s saying. Right. So and then we continue to just kind of stay on course with our meetings and our training. And again, May we, we picked up June, we picked up and July this month, we’re actually we’ll beat last year’s July. So I think that, you know, as long as you realize that this is gonna be a, I mean, we didn’t know how long this was going to last, if you went into it with, hey, this is gonna be over with in 30 days, let’s just ride this thing out. You’re probably in trouble right now. But we thought, well, we don’t know, this could last a month. This could last a year. And we’re now finding that it’s lasting a lot longer than we had all hoped for sure. But the other thing though that we really realized is there is we believe that there’s an increased awareness that, that families are actually more aware. I don’t know if it’s that maybe just as much death as we’ve been talking about in the news and all this kind of stuff that there’s a, there’s an awareness of what’s important. And the things that we need to prepare for. I think the preparation has kind of been a a theme across all industries you know, buy as much toilet paper as you can type of preparedness. So I think our mindsets changed. The luxuries, vacations, things of that nature have become less important and preparation has become more important. I think we look at things differently and that’s made an increased awareness. We’ve seen the amount of calling and inquiries in increase at funeral homes. Obviously there’s not walking business cause people are afraid to go out, but but where there is an increased awareness and one of the things too, I was going to mention our approach in, in in April, especially because we were having a hard time setting appointments, we wanted to keep the activity going. And so we really, we actually created phone scripts, which were just checking-in scripts and that really made a difference to keep the pipeline moving. So we had challenges of, you know, what don’t even call and try to set appointments. Let’s just call as many people as we can and see how they’re doing, see, see how they’re getting along. You’re just, you know, again, strengthening that relationship. So we use text messaging and email and phone calls and ringless voicemails as well, just to basically call people and, and just say, how’s this impacting you? How are you doing? Is there anything that you need? And we’ve got a really good positive response that the people were you know, were kind of surprised so to speak that we were, you know, calling out for any other intent other than just seeing how people are doing, but that’s obviously in the future going to, you know, show that we care and, and, and strengthen that relationship for those families down the road.
Heather:
That approach that empathetic non salesy approach is something that we’ve been talking about internally. And that’s been coming up in some of the trainings, marketing stuff that we keep on top of, so kudos to you for jumping on that right away. And it, it definitely builds that connection with people in a time when they’re not ready to make a sale.
Joey:
So, yeah, I think it’s a really good tip. So kind of moving into the next question is what do you think are the top three things that funeral directors should do to better connect with their community around pre-need? So this could be, you know, marketing or sales, and you kind of touched on that previously, but do you have any suggestions for the top three?
West:
I would say the top one is to not pull back. That that’s probably the one thing that we’ve seen the most is, and this is just a natural thing in the funeral industry, and I’ve still been able to wrap, trying to wrap my head around it, but when things like this happen, funeral homes want to naturally pull back, Oh, that’s, you know, like super sensitive. Let’s pull back our marketing, you know, people are dying. And it’s true, right. But I think that don’t, don’t pull back if anything you know, get, get your word out more. Now you might want to change your message just a little bit, but I don’t think that, that, that we pull back during this time and we changed the message to that course, the message of empathy and relationship building and things like that. But there’s been, even within our own accounts, several owners, you kind of said, we want to, you know, let’s stop marketing on Facebook, let’s stop doing this. You know, we don’t want to come across insensitive, and this is a difficult time for everybody. Now, geographically, we have to be aware of that as well. There’s other areas that have been hit a lot harder. We’re in the state of Utah and we’ve been fairly fortunate. We have a client in New Jersey who they were. I mean, they were in like the epicenter. So there’s a little bit more sensitivity to kind of what was going on there. But I think number one is don’t pull back. Now’s the best time to get your message out, to get your branding out, to make people aware that you’re there and that you care. And I think again, being proactive in communicating with families the options available, some of the content that we’ve changed on Facebook, for example, is just letting people know that we’ll get you, you know, phone arrangements are available. Proactively communicating this is what we’re doing in lieu of traditional funeral services and viewings. Just being really proactive in that messaging of we’re still here to help you. We’re still here to create a, create a meaningful service for your loved one. We’re going to do it a little bit differently. But I think that there’s been, unfortunately, a lot of families have, have missed out on some of those more traditional methods. And then just, I think that, you know, training, training, training. As the third one is that, you know, while we’re making these, these changes, I think that you can’t just make decisions at the top level of your organization and expect for everybody to understand what’s going on, but just, you know, real good training with your staff and, and effective communication. And then of course, you know, just letting people know that the precautions. I don’t think a lot of funeral homes have been very good at this, with the precautions that are being taken at your funeral home to make it a safe place where people will feel comfortable. I mean, I’ve seen all kinds of, you know, things about, you know, this is the no-handshake zone or, you know, suggestions on, you know, using your words and your eye contact as opposed to your touch. And I mean, just again, just really actively communicating both with your staff and your families that that there’s, the things are different, but we’re still here to take care of you the best we possibly can.
Heather:
Yes. We have been finding that too, that people really they’ve made changes to their services, but they’re not telling the public. So then the public doesn’t know what to do. They don’t even know where to go to look and they’re unsure on if it’s safe and they can’t find it. So it’s really communicating that I agree is super important. I was interested in what you said about training. Are you using, you said you were using video tools before the pandemic hit. Are you doing those more? And are they short training videos that you send to everybody? How does that look?
West:
We do. So initially for the, actually for the first during the month of April as a management team we had a meeting every morning, obviously we wanted to be on top of things and we actually had a daily call with our entire sales team in the afternoon. So, which is not something we would ever normally do, but we wanted to just, and we had everybody was concerned. And so they were very well attended. And just to make sure that we were getting the training out. The other thing that we did which was really vital is that not everybody can attend every meeting. And so we recorded every meeting and then we released that as a recording. So when you’re dealing with training and just understanding that there’s never, ever going to be a time where everybody can be at attendance and there’s always going to be staff, that’s going to miss those online meetings that we recorded, every meeting. And it’s really been a cool experience because we just started a YouTube channel. And all we did was just recorded those and, and then transferred them to our YouTube channel. So they could go back and we titled those. And it’s so if we had any specific training, technology training, CRM training, online sales tools, things like that, people can now, instead of having to repeat ourselves over and over again, which we find ourselves doing all the time is to say, hey, you know, we actually discussed that in our meeting last week, I’m going to send you the video link. So again, they can go back and they can refresh and they can watch those. And, and and then it’s now it’s really quite honestly, those are now future tools for us, for new counselors and things where we’ve done so much of that. I think just in the last six months or so, we’ve, we’ve got 30 or 40 of our meetings that were ones that we wanted to record and make available on our YouTube channel that people can go back and watch. And so we’re not, again, efficiency, right? We find ourselves on the phone retraining, you know, we have 70 salespeople across the country. You know, we’re constantly having to repeat ourselves and have that same training conversation. Now we can say, hey, we did a training on that in February or March or whatever. I’m gonna send you the link on, on cremation or on zoom or on how to use the CRM to send out emails and things like that. Now we have the ability to just send them to a link and have them watch the training without us having to spend a lot of time there. So another absolute benefit was okay, well now, instead of having to train people on an individual basis, we train the group once you record it, and now that’s available for everybody to watch it anytime.
Heather:
I think this is one of the other silver linings of the pandemic is learning lessons like this. I mean, you did engagement, you did reassure your employees and now you’re more efficient in your training. So win-win-win on that one.
West:
Absolutely. I totally agree.
Joey:
So you talked a little bit about the future of pre-need but do you have any predictions about what the next three to six months of pre-need sales will look like?
West:
I think they’re gonna continue to go up. I think that the, the, the increased awareness has some to do with that. But I also think that we are just changing the way that we’re communicating with families and offering that third option. We’ve seen the trend from April go like this, and again, July’s I mean, we’ve, we’re now going to beat last July. So I think that, I think that trend is gonna continue going in that direction unless something crazy happens that we can’t really predict at this point. But I do believe that we’re going to continue to see an increase. I also think that there were probably a lot of people and, and I know this for a fact in our prospecting where a lot of families said, you know, we do want to do this, but you know, now’s not the right time. Or let’s just wait until things are over with. So I think there is a a pool of people that would have planned that are just kind of putting it off. So I think we’re seeing some of that now in this month is that maybe families that we would have normally probably met with in April or may or June are now comfortable to meet with us now that they’re some of those initial fears and scares are gone. And we understand this pandemic just a little bit more. So I think we’re going to continue to see an increase at least here and in our other firms. And we’ve seen that really across the board geographically, that there will continue to be an increase in maybe even a little bit of a, of a, of a peak or a spike in that of people that have been waiting to plan until things are over that now we’ll have maybe a larger group of people who’ve been just putting this off because of the pandemic who are now comfortable to plan and meet with someone either. And we’re still doing in-home appointments and funeral appointments. And then of course the third option of the online visit too. So I think there is a group of people that have just been wanting to do it, but then have been waiting. And that’s direct communication from our families is that this is something we want to do. We’re just going to wait until things kind of settled down. So when they do, and they have, in reality, for most businesses, things have settled down and people are a lot more comfortable. They’re not as scared. So I think we’ll continue to see an increase now
Heather:
And along those same lines of kind of trends that you see or and bringing back in the technology a little bit. Are there any tools that you wish funeral directors were using or any tools that you wish existed to help this process?
West:
I don’t know if there’s any tools that, that we don’t have that we that we’re not using. I think the biggest challenge is getting everybody to use the tools. So, you know, again, the funeral industry, we, you know, we’ve always done it this way. And so, you know, I’ve always met with families this way. I’ve always done arrangements like this. The younger generation of funeral directors, I think it really adapted quickly to the changes cause it’s technology that they use in either their business or, or their personal lives. But it’s really just you know, trying to just understand that I don’t think that things are going to change that much. And, and really in reality there’s, there’s several brands that have done things like this a long time ago, where, you know, especially cremation brands and different things where they, you know, like we can just take care of us all on the phone, or we can meet online, or I can come to your home and take care of this. You don’t even need to leave your house. So I think that that’s kind of where we’re, where we’re headed for sure, but it’s not that there’s, I think we have all the technology that we need and the tools they’re readily available. It’s really just holding everybody’s feet to the fire to use those tools. So I think that, I mean, again, industries outside of ours have been using this stuff for a long time and you know, now we’re realizing, okay, well, if we want to continue to stay relative, we have to do these things. So it really is just, you know, holding people accountable and holding their feet to the fire. And, and you know, some of those funeral directors that have been around for 30 or 40 years that still, you know, use a fax machine and write paper contracts you know, things have changed. You got adapt.
Joey:
Definitely, definitely. Heather, you want to go ahead with the last question?
Heather:
Sure. So we ask everybody this question West, what’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned while serving in this profession, and that can be from your time at the funeral home or in, in a more third party marketing.
West:
I kind of thought about that when I read it when you sent this to me yesterday afternoon, and my biggest thought on that and the thing that I’ve learned is that people need help, but they don’t know where to start or who to call. And so they don’t. So you have to be proactive. That that’s the one thing is that, you know, despite all the messaging and the marketing and stuff that we can do, that fear of death exists, and everybody knows they’re going to have to face it. Everybody knows at some point in time, they’re going to have to come into a funeral home and make funeral arrangements. And there’s even some curiosity there, but there’s a hesitation as a general rule, I believe for people to pick up the phone and make a phone call. And so people, they need help and they don’t know who to call. They don’t know where to start and it’s our job to reach out to them. It’s our job to proactively reach out to people. So again, in the industry, there’s been a lot of fears of, well, what does that mean for our brand? Or are we ambulance chasers? You know, there’s all these weird things that are out there. And we actually create that I think within our industry, it’s an internal conflict because as we go out and do these things, the lunch and learns and events, and reach out to families, they’re grateful for the contact. They’re grateful that someone is reaching out to them cause they don’t know who to call. They don’t know where to start. They don’t know even know what questions to ask when they’re in this space of, you know, this is something we should think about. And I think it’s a fleeting thought. A lot of times of, you know, it was probably something that we need to do, but then that fear kicks in. Well, I don’t want to go to a funeral home. I don’t, I mean, is there going to be a funeral going on? Are we going to see something we don’t want to see? And they kind of pull back, so people need help and we have to proactively reach out to them and deliver that message. Cause they’re not going to come to us for it. We’re never going to be able to do anything, to get people, to line up the door and take care of their funeral plans. Cause it’s a, it’s a fear that people have, but there’s a sincere curiosity. I think that they have as well, that if we reach out to them, they’re going to be very, very receptive. So they are, I think they’re hungry for, for help and they’re hungry for information. And we’ve got to stop pulling back and trying to be ultra-sensitive and hypersensitive that we might offend somebody. There’s nothing. I mean, I’ve been doing this for over 20 years, even sending direct mail, we’d get nasty notes back on a piece of direct mail that we’re, you know, that how dare you send me this and when we need you, we’ll call you, take me off your mailing list. That’s always going to exist, but the sheer number of people that are hungry for the information more than outweigh those who get offended by our message. And we need to not worry about the squeaky wheel, so to speak and keep delivering the message consistently. I mean, it’s amazing that the, you know, we’ll do an ad on Facebook and one personal comment negatively about that ad, but that ad also generated 50 leads, right? So we have one person who’s saying, how dare you put something like this on Facebook? This is, you know, this is morbid. I mean, there’s all these words that they’ll use, right? But then you have a whole nother group of the population. That’s saying I’m interested in this information. Those are the people that we need to listen to. We need to stop listening to the people that we’re offending. Cause we’ll offend them no matter what we do. And just to understand that, that we can’t give those people that much attention. People are hungry for help and they need to know who they can reach out to. But more than anything, we have to reach out to them first. Cause they’re probably not going to call us.
Heather:
A hundred percent agree with that great insight.
Joey:
Yeah, definitely very well said. So that, that is all the questions we have. Thank you so much West for joining us. We really appreciate your time. And thanks for joining us this week on Funeral Innovations: Trends, Tips, and Tech. So we’ll be posting this video on our blog, on our YouTube channels and you’ll be able to access it on our Facebook feed. So feel free to check back and we’ll be back with another show soon. So check back in with us next week. If you have any topics you’d like to see discussed or someone you’d like to hear from in an interview, add it in the comments down below and be sure to visit our website at funeralinnovations.com. Thanks so much.
West:
Perfect. Thanks Joey. Thanks Heather. Appreciate your time. Thanks for having me on. Take care.
