The Federal Reserve data Funeral Director Daily is citing this week is real. One in five Americans fell behind on a loan or mortgage payment in2025, up from one in eight in 2022. Inflation is outpacing wage growth again. Tom Anderson’s argument is that this tightening environment makes growing revenue per case harder, and that preneed sales are the right response. He is correct about that last part. Where I want you to stop and really think for yourself is around the first part.
Small business owners have a reliable habit of grabbing the most alarming economic headline available and treating it as an explanation for flat sales. The data becomes the story, and the story becomes the excuse. You are required to resist this thinking.
One in five Americans is a meaningful number. It is also four in five Americans who are not falling behind. The real question is how many of the families in your specific market fall into that distressed category, and the honest answer is usually that you do not know.
Your market is not a national average. It is a set of zip codes, a specific demographic profile, a community with its own vibe and personality and employment base and income distribution. If you are serving a retired professional population in a mid-sized Midwest city, the percentage of your families dealing with serious loan delinquency may be well below twenty percent. If you are in a market hit hard by manufacturing contraction or rising rents, it may be higher. But you probably do not know the number, and that uncertainty is worth taking seriously before you reorganize your business strategy around a macro headline or start worrying unnecessarily.
The more useful response to this data is to ask what kind of customer base your current marketing system is actually building. Consumer stress is real and will affect some portion of your families. The funeral homes that feel it the least are the ones who have spent time building relationships with the eighty percent who are not financially distressed, capturing those families in a real database, following up with them consistently, and running a preneed program that creates its own pipeline rather than waiting on at-need volume to show up.
Anderson’s core recommendation, ramp up preneed seminars and sales, is sound. Where I would add to it is the infrastructure piece that most owners skip. A seminar that does not feed a functioning follow-up sequence; and a larger strategy is an event, not a system. The families who attended last spring’s seminar and did not sign that day are sitting in somebody’s notes or nobody’s notes, and the follow-up that should have gone out to them three weeks later, and three months later, and six months later probably did not go out because there was no system to send it. That is the challenge and the gap you must fill. The macro environment does not create that gap. The absence of a real sales and marketing system is what solves this problem for good.
The AI tools available right now are particularly well suited to solving exactly this kind of problem. Account research, CRM logging, follow-up timing, pipeline hygiene, win-back sequences for families who showed interest and went quiet. All of it can run with far less manual effort than it required two years ago. The counselor who should be sitting with a family can stop spending Wednesday afternoons rebuilding spreadsheets if the right infrastructure is in place.
This is important because the parts of preneed sales that cannot be automated are the parts that determine whether a family actually signs. Reading what a person is really worried about when they keep deflecting to price. Slowing down when someone mentions a parent who died badly and the room changes. Deciding whether this is the moment to ask a direct closing question or the moment to be quiet and wait. Those are human salesperson responsibilities. Gartner’s research on B2B buying offers a useful parallel: buyers who spent more time with sales representatives reported less dysfunction in the buying process. That is not a study of preneed sales, but it reinforces the case for using AI to support the salesperson—not replace the human relationship.
Preneed is that kind of sale. Every time.
So take the Funeral Director Daily piece seriously as a market signal, and then set it aside as an excuse. Build the follow-up systems. Know your specific market well enough to know which families you are actually trying to reach and which ones are already engaged with you in ways you have not captured yet. The funeral homes that will feel the consumer debt story the least are the ones who spent the last two years building a database and a pipeline instead of waiting for economic conditions to improve. The economic environment is the same for everyone in your market. What is not the same is your educated and strategic response which will determine whether you end-up with a system that keeps you in front of the right families before they need you.
That is the economy worth building. Your economy and believe it or not, you control it as a business owner and salesperson.
Sources
Tom Anderson, “Wages, credit, inflation. . . . How are those factors coming together to influence revenue per case”, Funeral Director Daily, October 20, 2026.
Gartner, “Gartner Survey Finds Sales Organizations That Provide AI-Enabled Next Best Actions Are 2.6x More Likely to Achieve Commercial Growth”, May 20, 2026. See “Where Human Sellers Outperform GenAI,” reporting findings from a survey of 645 B2B buyers conducted August–September 2025.