Every funeral home owner I’ve ever consulted was able to tell me exactly how many cases they’ve done this year. This number seems to stay top of mind. They usually can also effortlessly recount the previous years’ numbers and give future projections. But when asked how many inbound Shoppers they received in order to close that many cases, only less than a quarter can give a confident answer.
If you don’t know the basic conversion metrics of your business, there is no way you can scale efficiently.
Think of your business like a funnel. There’s a certain number of people who will see your website. Out of those who see your website, only a subset will reach out. A smaller subset of that will have a conversation with you and an even smaller subset will make an appointment. So on and so forth, until the smallest subset becomes your group of paying customers.
The stages will differ between funeral homes, however, it is imperative to have your stages clearly defined and to understand the conversion metrics between each stage. Understanding these numbers can provide clear actionable steps for growth. The more clearly defined the stages are, the better you can diagnose process inefficiencies.
A basic three step sales funnel could track when a potential customer did one of the following:
- Website visit
- Phone Shopper
- Made payment
By simply tracking just these three numbers, a funeral home will know how to attribute any growth or decline in business. Is your website getting enough visits? Is the call to action on your website clear? Are your funeral directors answering the phone? Are they having trouble converting price shoppers? All of these questions could be answered by just these three numbers.
As your tracking process gets more sophisticated, you’ll be able to add on more stages and get more granular data. You could see the performance of specific employees or test the results of different ad copies or sales scripts. You could track the different types of conversion rates of different Shoppers from different sources. Tracking allows you to try new things, learn what works, and continuously reiterate to improve your process.
The best part is that you don’t necessarily need to pay for tools to start tracking your business. You can install a Google Analytics link (for free) on your website and get detailed information on what your visitors are doing. This can help determine if your website design is driving visitors to the action you want them to take.
Tracking call volume is even simpler. If you’re not already logging data with software like Parting Pro, have your staff keep a manual log within a shared spreadsheet on inbound phone calls. Simply just note the time, date, and outcome of each call. Logging this information will only take a few extra minutes, and the data it provides is immensely valuable. You can keep data in a shared Google spreadsheet that your team can access from anywhere or keep it in an Excel workbook on a shared computer. From the logged data, you can start seeing trends and keeping reports.
Defining your stages and tracking the conversions of your sales funnel is your first step to growing your business efficiently. To get you started, here’s a template of a call recording sheet free for you to use.