I start this post with the question, "Could the monument industry survive without giving kickbacks to funeral homes?"
Before you answer, "Yes, of course it could," you need to give thought to the hush-hush relationships that exist as bagmen from the monument industry make their regular calls on funeral homes giving payola for referrals.
What are your thoughts about this practice? Is this "all is fair in love, war and business," or an unacceptable practice based upon greed?
Burton Fletcher
www.USAMonuments.com
Burton@USAMonuments.com
Before you answer, "Yes, of course it could," you need to give thought to the hush-hush relationships that exist as bagmen from the monument industry make their regular calls on funeral homes giving payola for referrals.
What are your thoughts about this practice? Is this "all is fair in love, war and business," or an unacceptable practice based upon greed?
Burton Fletcher
www.USAMonuments.com
Burton@USAMonuments.com
2 comments:
Could The Monument Industry Survive Without Giving Kickbacks? Interesting question. We never gave "kickbacks". The funeral homes who represented us were paid a 25% commission. They showed our products from a display and/or sales kit, made a sale and wrote it up on our contracts. The funeral home has provided their customer an additional service. The consumers knew the funeral directors were representing our company since the sale was written on our contracts and we did the billing. This arrangement worked very well for many years until the time came where funeral homes decided to buy direct and make more money. Oh well, just anothe of the changes in the death care industry (I hate that term-sorry about using it).
I could go on but I am interested in hearing other people's opinions on this subject.
Mike Moore
I sell wholesale to certain funeral homes that choose to sell monuments and/or inscriptions.
The funeral homes that refer work to me do so for nothing in return (other than the occasional favor); I in turn give those families a discount (10% to 25%) based on who referred them. I tell the customer “I am giving you --- discount on behalf of Mr. Smith, who has never asked us for anything in return other than to give his families excellent service”. Is a couple of thousand extra dollars over a period of time really going to help that FD? Or is making him look good going to help him more?. I just blow off FD’s who asked for “commission” for simply referring work to us. I did ask one once (after he posed the same question to me) if I would get a “commission” for referring a call to him and he got mad and walked away.
Yankee Stonecrafter
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