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OWNERS
Davis Becker Funeral Home in Boardman, Ohio ran an event on September 30th called Dying to Know. More than 50 people walked in on a Tuesday evening. Thirty professionals from 20 partner organizations set up tables covering probate, estate planning, veterans honors, cemetery planning, grief support, and funeral options. A panel closed the evening. No price list in the room. No sales pressure. When it was over, attendees asked when they could do it again.
That reaction tells you everything, if you know how to read it.
What Davis Becker built that night is a community relationship moat made visible. A corporate buyer can acquire your building and your name. They can hire your staff and copy your website. What they cannot do is call 20 local professionals who will show up on a Tuesday night because they trust you. That web takes years to build, and it takes intention.
*For ash flash analogue subscribers, I have a longer piece on the story above which also explains exactly what you must do to leverage the time and energy you put into something like this so that it still produces sales.
The Foresight 2025 study puts a number on why this matters. Among 483 funeral professionals surveyed, 76 percent said they educated families about their options during the arrangement conference. Among 5,075 consumers, 37 percent said they received that education. Professionals estimated families understood their options 61 percent of the time. Families reported 29 percent.
That gap is a timing failure. The arrangement conference is the worst possible moment to educate a grieving family. They are in shock, running on no sleep, and making the largest financial decision of their adult lives with no preparation. Information delivered in that room does not stick like it does in other rooms. The Dying to Know event moves the conversation to a completely different moment: no grief, no pressure, no pending transaction, and an audience that showed up voluntarily. Somehow, mysteriously and magnetically attracted to you and your business.
Joe Weigel made a related point in American Funeral Director. Families preplan because they do not want their children making decisions alone under pressure. The emotional driver leads. But families cannot act on an emotional driver they have never had space to recognize. The arrangement table gives them no space. An open house in the community, with no transaction on the table, gives them all the space they need.
Click here for a more in-depth piece I wrote on this subject:
The Gift of a funeral plan: What Pre-Need Is truly offering and How to Protect It
When a family already knows the plan, they can spend the first days after a death doing what they need to do: grieving, gathering, telling stories about the person they lost. They are not sitting in …
One attendee, a woman named Shannon, came after seeing the event promoted through a local professional connection. She told staff she had always known she needed to think about this but never knew where to start. She spent the most time at the estate planning table, took materials home, and asked when the next event would be scheduled.
Shannon is the person the arrangement conference never reaches in time. She is also the person who, when she eventually calls a funeral home, will call the one she already walked into on a September evening with no pressure. That is the community relationship moat, and Shannon is protected by it.
The NFDA’s 2026 public relations campaign is generating 5.2 billion potential impressions nationally. That is a real tailwind. National visibility makes local conversations easier to start. It does not produce local trust. The family in Boardman does not make a planning decision because a story ran in a national outlet. They make it because someone in their community opened a door and made it feel safe to walk through; and when they did, they felt like they belonged.
Independent Funeral Group reaching record membership is another important signal. Owners are looking for shared resources because the competitive environment is harder and they know it. The community relationship work Davis Becker demonstrated is exactly the kind of infrastructure you have to build yourself, with your partners, in your zip code. The model transfers, but you are responsible for building the relationships.
The practical question is whether the Dying to Know format is replicable without Davis Becker’s specific network. The event itself is the easy part. Invite 20 local professionals, reserve a space, set up tables, and promote it through your community channels while your partners promote it through theirs. The harder part is that the 20 partners who show up are a product of relationships you may or may not have been building deliberately. If you have not, start now with the partners you already have. Four or five tables. A brief panel. Permission-based sign-in at each table so you leave with contact information for people who just told you they want to hear from you again.
Low pressure does not mean no follow-up. If 50 people walked through your door and you have no mechanism to reach them again, you ran a wonderful evening that produced nothing durable.
What made the Boardman evening worth reporting is what it reveals about the kind of relationship an independent funeral home can build that a regional acquirer cannot manufacture. The question is whether you are building that deliberately, or assuming it exists because you have been open for 30 years.
Shannon asked when the next one would be. That is one of the only metrics that matters, but once again, you can’t be too passive. Don’t put in the time and effort without a means of capturing simple contact information at the very least.
PRENEED AGENTS
You Are Selling the Gift, Not the Funding
You hear it all the time:
“I don’t want my children to have to make these decisions.”
Not a word about interest rates. Not a question about how the trust is structured. Just that one sentence, spoken by a parent thinking about the people they love and what they would be left to manage. That in combination with the usual sense of relief that follows should be an important queue for you the agent.
Joe Weigel made this point directly in American Funeral Director. Preneed marketing tends to lead with inflation protection and funding mechanics because those are the easiest things to explain. Families preplan because they do not want their children standing in a lobby not knowing what to do, or arguing over details at a moment when they should be grieving. The financial benefits support the decision. The emotional reasons make it. So, as in any other sale, people buy with emotions and justify with logic.
That distinction changes how a conversation should start. The agent who opens with rate sheet comparisons is answering a question the family has not asked. The agent who starts by asking about the children, what they are like, how close the family is, what the prospect worries about leaving undone, is in a different conversation entirely. Kenneth Johnson learned this through cold calls. His own words, reported in Connecting Directors: his ego got in the way. West Point, two master’s degrees, and none of it mattered to the stranger on the other end of the phone who just wanted to know why in the heck are you calling me? The work, Johnson concluded, is not about the salesperson. It never was.
The practical implication is this. The preneed contract has real mechanics that families deserve to understand. How funds are held. What the family still pays at time of need. What happens if the buyer relocates to another state or passes sooner than expected. Those questions matter, and an agent who cannot answer them cleanly loses credibility at the worst possible moment. But those answers belong in the middle of a conversation that began somewhere else entirely, somewhere near the children, somewhere near the worry, somewhere near the thing the prospect is actually trying to solve. How much time are spending building this problem? Because though it might seem like extra unnecessary effort, you will find it easier to sell and at higher prices and contract sizes when you put in the reps.
The Foresight data from 2025 adds a layer that every preneed agent should take seriously. The arrangement conference is statistically the best-qualified preneed conversation available, because the family is already present and the subject is already on the table. But families retained very little of what they were told there. The grief, the decisions piling up, the unfamiliar terminology, all of it competes with the information being shared. A preneed agent who positions themselves earlier, before the loss, before the pressure, when the conversation can be about peace of mind and a genuine gift of love to the family, is working with a fundamentally different kind of attention from the prospect.
Two items currently active in the market underscore why carrier selection belongs in every preneed conversation. A Tennessee indictment, 52 counts, involving death claims filed on living policyholders, remains an open legal matter. A South Carolina regulatory action seeking rehabilitation of two Advantage Capital insurers was reported by Insurance NewsNet on September 17 and is not yet resolved. Neither is a completed conviction or completed rehabilitation. Both are reminders that your reputation as an agent is partially secured by the financial strength of the carrier behind every contract you place. Families in your community will not distinguish between the carrier and the person who recommended them. Pull the A.M. Best ratings. Know where the funds are held. Be able to answer the portability question before it is asked.
The very first question you ask and every single one after that should have purpose and should be designed to build rapport, trust, and a completed insurance contract.
“So, what brings you in today…”
Even a simple, open-ended and somewhat vague question like this, can give you everything you need to open the door to a fresh, meaningful and productive conversation about how to cure this emotional burden.
FAMILIES
One Sentence
A parent and an adult child are one conversation away from something that would spare them both significant pain. According to a 2025NFDA consumer survey, 91 percent of Americans say talking about death is healthy. Somewhere around one in three adults has an advance directive. The Conversation Project’s 2018 survey found that 32 percent of Americans had actually discussed their end-of-life wishes with someone who needed to know them, while 92 percent called those conversations important. The belief is nearly universal. The conversation is rare.
The gap is not a values problem. It is a first-sentence problem. Nobody knows how to start, so the conversation stays on the list of things to get around to, and the list never gets shorter.
The sentence is simpler than most people expect. “What would you want?” That is it. Asked genuinely, with enough quiet after it to let an answer form, that question opens most of what needs to be said. What kind of care. Who should be there. What matters about the end. What the person does not want to leave unresolved.
What the silence costs is concrete. Research suggests a typical estate runs about16 months from death to settlement. Families arriving at the arrangement conference without a written plan begin asking logistical questions immediately: how many death certificates will we need, who settles the accounts, what did she want. Those are not the questions a grieving family should be spending their first hours answering. A written plan hands them a map before they are standing in the dark looking for one.
The practical floor for what that plan should cover is worth stating plainly. Burial costs run $8,000 to $20,500 all in depending on choices and location. No state legally requires a burial vault, even though it is frequently presented as standard. Veterans who qualify can be buried in a VA national cemetery at no cost to the family. These are not obscure facts. They are the kind of information that changes a family’s financial picture meaningfully if they know it in advance rather than in the arrangement room.
Bryson’s reporting in American Funeral Director makes the timing point precisely: families start asking estate questions earlier than funeral professionals expect, and they arrive at the arrangement conference already behind. The conversation that should have happened over coffee six months ago is now happening under fluorescent lights with a director they just met.
One question over coffee. “What would you want?” The answer does not have to be complete or formal. It just has to exist somewhere outside one person’s head, in writing, accessible to the people who will need it.
Follow-on: Write the three-question version of the conversation a daughter can have with her father over coffee, no forms required.
SALES TALENT
Who Decides When the Machine Hands It Back
AI agents are completing purchases, making calls, and executing payments without human involvement. That sentence would have sounded like speculation eighteen months ago. Complete AI Training reported it as current practice in September 2026. Apollo Research is documenting agents that research suppliers, negotiate terms, and process payments on behalf of buyers. Gartner’s 2024 survey of 1,026 B2B sellers found that sellers who partner effectively with AI are 3.7 times more likely to meet quota.
Something real is shifting inside sales workflows, and the most important question it raises is not whether AI will handle more of the process. It will. The question is who designs the rules that determine when a human steps back in.
Sales teams are being told right now to write explicit handoff rules: which commitments require human approval, how consent is logged, where the machine stops and the person takes over. Those rules do not design themselves. The people who can write them well are the ones who have closed enough deals, lost enough deals, and retained enough relationships to know where trust actually breaks in a live transaction. That knowledge does not come from a credential. It comes from years of being in the room.
Early in my career in luxury automotive, the moments that decided outcomes were almost never about product knowledge. They were about reading what was actually happening. A buyer who had gone quiet was not disengaged; something had shifted in the conversation and they were processing it. The instinct to slow down, ask a different question, and wait for the answer was not in any training manual. It was built from repetition and loss and watching what happened when you got it wrong.
That kind of judgment is exactly what the handoff rule is trying to codify, and exactly what AI cannot generate on its own. Someone has to have experienced the moment to know which moment it is.
The Wiley finding puts the human dimension of this into a different frame. Among workers who said a manager was available to them, 84 percent reported they were very likely to stay in their role. Among workers without that availability, the number fell to 41 percent. The gap between those two numbers is a manager who shows up consistently, pays attention, and is present enough to notice when something needs a human response. That is the same instinct that makes a salesperson good at handoff decisions. It is not teachable from a slide deck. It accumulates.
Reevo’s mobile AI sales app, launched in October 2026, focuses on keeping deals moving when sellers are away from their desks, capturing field conversations and syncing them to the sales pipeline. The tool is useful. But the field conversation it is capturing was still initiated, shaped, and closed by a human who knew when to push and when to wait.
The valuable capability in a world of autonomous agents is not the ability to run the process. Plenty of tools will run the process. The valuable capability is knowing which decisions the process cannot make, and having enough field experience to see those moments before they pass.
Follow-on: List three decisions in your last job that a machine would have gotten wrong, and what you saw that it could not.
-John