By Sasha Banks-Louie
Casket makers have for centuries made a living from human burials, and the fact that we are all going to die has provided a predictable source of recurring revenue. But today, people are choosing a different way to celebrate the lives of their loved ones—and it’s changing the business.
On the surface, the prospects for death service providers seem good. Two-and-a-half million people die each year in the US alone, generating $17 billion in revenues. By 2040, the number of deaths is expected to reach 4 million.
But for casket makers, the outlook is challenging as people turn increasingly to cremation rather than burial. In 2012, over 43% of people who died were cremated, according to the National Funeral Directors Association. That's double the rate from just 15 years ago. In states such as Nevada, Washington, and Oregon, cremation rates exceed 70%.
With more than $600 million in revenues, funeral services firm Batesville Casket Company is among the largest manufacturers and distributors of death care products in the world.
But with demand for its core products weakening, Batesville realized it needed to overhaul its growth strategy or risk losing its commanding global market share. “We had to completely reinvent our business,” said Kimberly Ryan, president of Batesville Casket Company.
Diversification Is Key
Integral to that reinvention was the firm’s diversification strategy. The company has expanded its product portfolio to include non-traditional revenue streams to maintain its market leadership in both the burial and cremation markets.
But the cremation line alone was not enough to reach the firm’s profit targets. A traditional burial funeral runs about $10,000, while cremation products have an average sale price of less than half of the average burial. If Batesville was going to maintain its market leadership, it needed to sell more volume to offset the lower price points.
So, with its new portfolio of products and services—and a new sales strategy designed for volume—Batesville had the ammunition to arm its sales force and grow the business. Or so it thought.
What the firm didn’t have, however, was a standardized process that would align the way its reps were selling with the new way its customers were buying.
“In the past, we had 135 reps who managed their sales territories in 135 different ways,” said Chris Charlton, Business Integration Manager at Batesville.
Standardization Required
While this distributed sales structure worked fine with a single product line and market segment, as the firm grew into new markets, this lack of standardization made it difficult for reps to effectively manage their accounts and deliver modern customer experiences.
Customers were beginning to configure new types of products and service bundles themselves; new channels such as social networks, e-commerce websites and mobile apps are becoming more prevalent. With an expanded portfolio and changing market dynamics, Batesville recognized the need for sales standardization.
“We needed a vehicle to provide one standard process for our entire sales organization,” said Charlton.
Once a single selling process was in place, Batesville needed to make it accessible to every one of its reps. To do this, the firm implemented the Oracle Sales Cloud platform that allowed its salespeople to access all of the company’s customer and product information in real time, over their mobile devices.
“In this brave new world of mobility, selling in the cloud accelerates the speed at which reps can deliver value to the business,” said Diana Kinker, director of the company’s SMART Program, which develops and manages the firm’s sales and marketing analytical resources and tools.
Because of the cloud’s immediate impact within its sales organization, Batesville has extended its cloud platform across other lines of business.
“We plan to expand the use of our cloud-based sales automation and CRM tools to marketing, credit, and other support organizations that also interact with customers,” said Charlton.
Also key to Batesville’s cloud strategy is the use of predictive analytics, which has led to more proactive and profitable decision-making.
"Delivering real-time, predictive analytics to the field is by far the biggest benefit of moving our sales operations to the cloud. The immediacy and depth of insight has strengthened our customer relationships and improved the productivity of our sales reps,"said Kinker.
In a time when industry disruption is the norm, the cloud delivers the speed, access, and scale to help businesses adjust priorities, reinvent their value propositions, and grow.
For Batesville, the cloud platform not only enables new solutions as their customer preferences emerge, it also empowers sales reps and other line of business personnel to connect with customers at every stage of the buying journey—improving customer experiences and business performance before, during, and after the deal is done.
Sasha Banks-Louie is a brand journalist for Oracle.
