People buy anyway.
That is the sentence I want you to sit with before you keep reading. Because the excuses you are collecting right now, the ones about gas prices and grocery bills and uncertainty and “maybe next year,” those are real concerns people are carrying into your presentation. They are also the same concerns people carried with them to gas stations all summer and then drove 400 miles over Labor Day weekend anyway. And maybe even bought themselves a new car. Travel records got broken. People who said they could not afford it found a way, because they decided the experience mattered more than the potential strain on their pocketbooks.
Nobody woke up on the Friday before Labor Day and said the economy fixed itself. They just decided they were going on with their lives anyway.
Your prospect is doing the same calculus every time you sit across from them. They are weighing what they want against what they fear, and somewhere in that equation is a version of this purchase that makes sense to them. The job of a real salesperson is to find that version and help them see it. What the weaker ones do instead is hear the first objection, nod sympathetically, and write the day off. Then they go back to the office and blame the economy. You must get comfortable with your ability to drive toward the real objections by continuing to ask tough questions and then sit quietly and wait for the answers.
I have heard that excuse about the economy in good times and bad. It is a constant. When rates were low, it was uncertainty. When employment was strong, people were too busy. When things tighten up, suddenly nobody can breathe. There is always a reason not to buy, which means the economy is never actually the variable. You are the variable. You must create your own economy.
If you are sitting with families right now and walking away with blank paper, the question worth asking yourself is not what is happening out there in the world. It is what is happening inside that room when you are in it. Are you creating the kind of conversation that draws someone toward a decision? Are you listening for the real objection underneath the surface one? Are you giving them something they actually want to say yes to?
Most people do not plan their funeral on purpose. They have to be led there. That is not a knock on them. It is just how human beings work. We avoid the uncomfortable thing until someone we trust makes it feel manageable, even meaningful. If you are presenting pre-need like a transaction, a form to sign and a check to write, then of course the economy looks like a wall. You have given them nothing to move toward.
The pre-need sale is never really about the product. It is about the person sitting across from you and what they are afraid of leaving unfinished. Families who care about their kids. Couples who watched someone else’s family get blindsided. People who remember exactly what it felt like when there was no plan and no money and grief was doing all the decision-making. When you connect the purchase to that, the monthly payment becomes a different kind of number.
That does not happen automatically. It happens because you built a skill set, practiced the craft, and stayed in the room long enough to find the real conversation. The salespeople who cash the big commission checks are doing exactly that. The ones with skinny kids, as the old saying goes, are accepting the first answer they get and calling it a trend while they boil hot water for their Top Ramen at lunch.
If the economy has become your explanation, I want to challenge you to take one honest look at your close rate from six months ago versus today. If it dropped, ask yourself what changed. Your territory did not change. The population did not change. The mortality rate certainly did not change. What changed is the level of resistance you are meeting, and the question is whether your skill is sharp enough to work through it.
Because here is what I know after thirty-plus years in this: resistance is information. It tells you what the person needs before they can say yes. A weak salesperson hears resistance and stops. A real one hears resistance and gets curious.
You are responsible for your own economy. That sounds like a bumper sticker until you actually internalize it, and then it becomes the most clarifying idea in the business. Your results are not a reflection of what is happening on the news. They are a reflection of how many conversations you had, how deep you went in each one, how well you listened, and how effectively you gave someone a reason to act today instead of later.
If the families in front of you are not buying, they have not been given something they truly want to own. That is the diagnosis. The economy is the alibi.
Fix the conversation, not the excuse.
-John