Owners
Precoa’s producer growth as proof of what infrastructure buys you. Lead generation, engagement follow up, continuous coaching, and an integrated tech stack (Sales Studio, Everplans: PS I have even more sophisticated systems now…) took 42 more advance funeral planners past the million dollar mark, more than 475 total. The case for results coming from systems, not personality or luck or an occoasional seminar sprinkled in like an afterhtought.
Source: connectingdirectors.com/74254-precoa-honors-new-million-dollar-producers
Cremation Club, pricing transparency case study. The advertised $99 cremation is layered under annual membership fees that scale by tier, with a waiting period and an age cutoff on the higher levels. Read as a headline, it looks like a bait and switch. Run the real math instead: on the mid tier, fees plus the cremation charge total around $1,200 over ten years, and either outcome, an early death or a long life, still leaves the buyer better off than someone with no plan at all. The piece uses this as a mirror for how independent owners price and explain their own preneed offerings, not as an endorsement or a takedown of the company running it.
Sourcing: built from the published Cremation Club membership terms, figures are as reported in that review, not independently confirmed.
Pre-Need Agents
Wink’s Q1 numbers as a demand check. Whole life sales past $1.3 billion, up 18.2 percent year over year, final expense at 69.5 percent of that category, average premium near $4,109. Evidence the funding vehicle behind preneed is getting stronger, useful against any agent who thinks the product is a hard sell right now.
Source: insurancenewsnet.com/innarticle/life-insurance-sales-rise-across-all-product-lines-in-q2-wink-reports.
Families
Cremation Club, reframed, standalone. The pricing looks complicated on paper. Run the real math instead of reacting to the headline: someone who dies before paying in roughly $1,200 or more comes out ahead of having nothing in place, and even the slower path still ends in an affordable funded plan instead of an at need scramble. Not a defense of the structure, a lesson in reading any membership or prepaid offer by what it actually funds.
Most people have not written down what they want, and the decision defaults to a family member, more often a daughter than a son.
Sourcing: built from the published Cremation Club membership terms, figures are as reported in that review, not independently confirmed.
Sales Talent
Audience note: mid career professionals, generally 30s to 60s, who have worked across two or more industries and can sell, build, close, lead, or create commercial momentum but do not have a conventional credential or tidy career label. Sometimes, these folks make excellent pre-need agents; and I consider myself a member of this group so I like to speak to you too in my content work.
the Gartner list of what does not automate. Live negotiation, multi stakeholder relationship work, reading unspoken buyer intent, allocating attention across deals, these stay human while research, list building, logging, and scheduling get absorbed by AI. Buying groups built through sustained rep engagement are 13 times more likely to be high quality deals, per Gartner. The tools are changing which tasks fill your day, not which skills make you valuable. Don’t ever forget that.
I know a recent story where someone got dragged through a recruting process that got lost inside AI. They forgot, or never knew in the first place, what truly makes a sale happen and they lost this talented rep’s interest because it appeared they use too much AI to design their recruiting process. Not exactly the same story but a story of trying to grow your business without the right sales minds in charge.
Source: abc17news.com/stacker-ai/2026/09/11/9-sales-tasks-that-agents-are-taking-over-in-2026-and-4-that-humans-have-kept