5 Ways Online Cannabis Brand Education Can Help Vendors Support Their Retailers

As a cannabis vendor, you have seen a tremendous amount of change over the last 10 years. In that time, you have gone from the planning stages of launching your business to gathering up your funding without the help of the banks to navigating a dynamically changing marketplace on a daily basis.

You have overcome all of these challenges. But, as an established cannabis vendor with dozens to hundreds of retail relationships that you are now managing and working to grow, you have a new set of challenges to surmount.

The people, organizations, and collectives that stay vigilant for opportunities to do things differently, remain on the cutting edge, and continue to build personal and professional relationships throughout the greater cannabis industry will be the future of the national, federally endorsed, legal cannabis movement.

This kind of personal touch, attention to detail, and community focus have always served those in the space who are willing to embrace it, and they will continue to do so.

In today’s blog from the experts at Learn Brands - your turnkey provider for online cannabis brand education and more, we will explore five different ways that you can support your local cannabis retailers and partners, increasing their investment in your and your brands and helping to promote stronger sales numbers and market share the right way.

Promote Product Education

Promoting cannabis product education for your brand is arguable the single most critical element of supporting the staff and sales team of your local cannabis retailers. Not only does product education offer the chance for professional development within a population that tends to be pretty passionate about the cannabis they sell, but it empowers them to speak authoritatively on your brands, specifically.

When you offer these kinds of opportunities, you’re going to be sending the message to your retailers that you’re proud of the product that you produce, you’re interested in taking an active role in staff and consumer education, and you’re committed to helping move product off of the shelf, not just onto it.

And when it comes to providing an arena for this learning to take place, there is no better option than using a university-grade online cannabis brand education LMS like Learn Brands.

Besides the ability to customize your learning modules and really reinforce your brand voice and identity with your sales base, online learning is the best way to offer flexible cannabis product training that all team members can participate in, so you can avoid the age-old problem of only half of the staff being present on the days that your education reps make site visits.

Collect Feedback To Inform Decision About Improvements

In the current environment of the cannabis marketplace, your cannabis retailers are your only direct connection to your customer, and they know it.

While you and your team are growing, harvesting, processing, and packaging, they are speaking with customers, receiving constructive feedback, and watching what people buy while gaining some pretty strong insights as to why they are buying it.

This critical data, garnished by your customers and garnered by the people at the registers in your local dispensaries, should not be wasted.

What if you could capture it and utilize it to help inform you about future decision-making for marketing choices, internal investment, or any other big-decision type of change within your company?

With Learn Brands' online cannabis learning management system, you can. Adding questionnaires, perception checks, or surveys attached to your modules, or as stand-alone engagement pieces is easy, fast, and effective. Best of all, it pulls double duty: It shows that you care about what your dispensary partners and their teams think while supplying you with information that can be otherwise hard to get access to.

Maintain Consistent Communication With On-Site Sales Teams

Another great way to support your cannabis retailers is by ensuring that they are in the loop when you do make changes to your marketing, add new products, or launch a new promotion.

When you have a strong and consistent line of communication with your dispensary partners, this isn’t too much of an ask. However, many cannabis brands find maintaining that line of communication (outside of ordering, shipping, and customer care communications) with so many different retailers difficult at best.

We’ve found that lots of cannabis brands are still relying on the same types of communications that they were using when they were only selling their products in a handful of locations. Now, they find that one or two education reps, email blasts, and conventions just don’t provide the kind of up-to-date dialogues that are actually needed as they navigate a crowded market, evolve their brand identity, and continue to grow their bottom line through the development and launch of new cannabis product lines.

Learn Brands can help you incorporate your current comms strategies into a more dynamic, effective, and consistent solution for two-way communication between your cannabis brand and your retailers through the medium of our online cannabis learning management system and its robust collection of tools, allowing territory representatives to focus their time and energy on other initiatives.

Offer Reliable And Timely Order Fulfillment

In today’s world of delayed deliveries, back orders, and general supply chain disorder, another great way to make yourself stand apart as a hero for your retail partners is to simply find ways to generate accurate and on-time order fulfillment.

There’s no easy answer for this challenge, but your dedication, creativity, strong communication, and commitment to quality customer care will demonstrate to the cannabis dispensaries that sell your products that you’re not just another business — you’re a business that cares.

Provide Swag, Merchandise, and Product Samples

And speaking about caring, how about we discuss care packages for the hardworking people on the front lines of your product sales?

Enough cannot be said about the power of incentivizing people through swag, promotional items, and sampling when it comes to the sales teams at cannabis dispensaries. This is a group of people who are passionate and are generally cannabis users themselves.

When you provide shirts, hats, pins, buttons, stickers, and other swag bag type accouterment, you are giving your cannabis retailers’ employees a reason to wear their excitement for your brand on their sleeve — literally.

Sampling ensures that the people inside a given dispensary have first-hand knowledge of the flavors, smells, and effects of your cannabis products so they can speak with authority about them.

Best of all, Learn Brands makes sampling easy, affordable, and trackable. So what are you waiting for? Send those budtenders some love!

LearnBrands Can Help

While we’ve spent this time discussing how your cannabis brand can support its local cannabis retailers and dispensaries, we want to remind you one more time that we are here to support your brand.

With our online cannabis brand education learning management system, you gain a bevy of powerful tools for training, tracking, feedback, and rewards all in one place. So if you’re interested in proven ROI, better relationships with your retailers, and a more consistent level of brand awareness, give our demo a try — it’s free and smells like eucalyptol. How refreshing!