Dale-Time

I’ve got a few minutes during a quiet visitation, so I think I’ll try and catch everyone up on the NFDA Convention in New Orleans

I’ve been to enough of these through the years that they start to look familiar. You can break the review of a convention down into a few catagories; new products, new services, new versions of old stuff, the regulars, meetings, and speakers.

NFDA Convention has primarily always been about products. Things that funeral directors buy to resell to customers or things that they buy to help them do their job.

The convention floor is filled with so many different products that it’s hard to get through the whole floor in one afternoon and even harder to remember what you saw and what you liked.

Here’s what caught my eye this time.

A wireless portable sound system. This was compact, clean sound, plenty of power and a neat and easy-to-haul case. It came with built-in wireless Microphone, cd player and a hookup for an ipod.

Memory Glass – This is a product where they take a small portion of ashes and swirl them into blown glass. They come in pendants, touchstones, and bigger table models. They are priced right and practically indestructible.

Electronic Filing System – This is a slick system that scans all of your documents quickly and easily places them onto your computer in easy to find folders.

Electronic fingerprint system for cremation services. This is a great service and slick equipment that allows you to electronically fingerprint a body at the first call and then track the body through the whole cremation.

Now there were hundreds more things that I saw. And it would be great if I could afford to buy lots of all the great looking urns and jewelry and set it up in a beautiful display in my funeral home. But the reality is that each new product requires training and a new sales pitch. Not just for me but for the dozen people on my staff that end up showing our customers that product. And this would be in addition to the caskets, vaults, urns, jewelry, printed material and services that we already provide. So I try and narrow it down to just a couple new things every trip. Otherwise the staff gets overwhelmed and the new products get shoved on a shelf or stuck in a closet.

Here is an example. Two years ago I signed up for a webcasting program so we could video tape our services and put them on the internet. It is a slick system. (But remember I’m a geek at heart and like gadgets) It can be used anywhere and I also hooked it up to our in house video system. I try and use it on every service I plan. But the rest of my staff is a little electronically challenged (and that’s OK). So because they don’t quite understand how to set the whole thing up and the family isn’t asking for it because it’s a new thing, it doesn’t get used or promoted the way it should. Not because it’s not a good service/product, but because it’s just one more thing added to the list of services and products that funeral homes are now trying to offer to keep up with the changing society. Yet we never seem to eliminate the old things we provide right away. So there is this transition period where we have so much stuff that we are trying to do that sometimes the new stuff doesn’t get the attention it needs to take off.

This is unfortunate for all those vendors who have worked so hard to get their product in front of us at the convention. Some of these vendors are even complaining that funeral directors at the convention are arrogant, stuck up, or just plain dumb that the FD’s can’t see that they need to use their product. To them I say, “lighten up, Francis”, (a  favorite quote from a Bill Murray movie) You forget that it probably took a year or more of trial and error, prototypes, changes and tweeking before you decided your product was ready to show to the public. Don’t expect them to always “get it” in a 5 minute infomercial on a busy convention floor.

What you new vendors don’t know is that many of us have seen hundreds of products show up on the Convention floor, create a lot of buzz in the press, and disappear in a couple years. I can pretty much guarantee that “Hot Rod Caskets” won’t be around in 3 years. We don’t see the “return to sender” Art Caskets anymore do we??

I’m Dale Clock. Thanks for listening.