Budtenders are the entry role and frontline workers of the cannabis industry - they’re the final instance for closing the cannabis sale (unless you buy your cannabis online).

Because the budtenders are the primary spokespersons when it comes to cannabis sales, recommendations and education, they have a crucial role in this industry. Still, unfortunately, most budtenders lack the tools, education and motivation to excel at their jobs.

This article is for budtenders who want to excel at their job and retail stores that want to employ and retain expert budtenders.

Customer Service

Let’s start with the fundamentals of working any retail job: Customer Service.

Customer Service should be by far the most basic principle to teach your budtenders. Still, we often see that the customer service skills of many budtenders are lacking.

When walking into a cannabis retail store, we see the budtenders wait patiently behind a counter where they stare at the POS system in front of them or, worse, at their phones.

If we’re lucky, they may at least say “hello” or nod at us, but we only rarely have a budtender leave the counter to come up and approach us adequately.

When I was a budtender, I quickly learned that the question, “Do you need any help?” was always answered with “No.” Meanwhile, the question, “Are you looking for anything specific?” would always start a conversation with the customers.

This made me realize that we, as idle human beings, don’t want any help, but we do want to talk about ourselves and our preferences.

Another thing I observed is that many budtenders are okay with saying, “No, we don’t have this,” or “No, I can’t help you with this,” instead of trying to find alternative solutions and going the extra mile to support their customers.

Lastly, the lack of education, tools, support, and adequate payment from their employers often makes budtenders feel unequipped and dissatisfied with their jobs. As a result, you most often have staff with no incentive to learn and become better at their jobs, as they think, “Why should I work hard, learn on my own, and go the extra mile for our customers and the store when I’m barely able to pay my rent?”

And honestly, this is a reasonable way of thinking, given that budtenders shouldn’t be exploited and work relentlessly just to get paid a minimum wage.

So, to improve your customer service, we recommend the following:

For stores that want to retain their talents and be known for providing excellent customer service:

• Pay your budtenders more or, at minimum, a living wage
• Invest in education for your budtenders
• Invest in relevant tools that make budtending easier
• Supply your budtenders with product samples as an incentive and a way to increase product knowledge

For budtenders who want to provide excellent customer service:

• Present yourself well: Keep a confident posture by standing straight with your chest open and your shoulders relaxed
• Make eye contact with every customer who enters the store and maintain eye contact as you talk and listen to them
• Actively approach customers: Leave your till and make your way toward the customers on the sales floor
• Ask open-ended questions like “What are you looking for?” to start the conversation with your customers
• Listen attentively to your customers: Be present, nod, say yes or repeat what they said to show them you’re listening.

Once you have mastered the foundations of customer service, you’ll be able to move into the more specific cannabis-related skill and topic of product knowledge.

Product Knowledge

The critical thing that budtenders should have, yet most of them lack these days, is product knowledge — especially RELEVANT product knowledge.

Again, repeat after me: RELEVANT product knowledge.

Here’s an example of what I mean when talking about relevant product knowledge:

Irrelevant = Budtender can explain cannabis history and geographical lineage (e.g. Kush vs Haze vs Afghanica vs Himalayan types)

This knowledge is absolutely irrelevant to product sales because we’re not living in the past, and we’re not selling actual heirloom varieties from across the globe.

Relevant = Budtender can explain that the product they recommend smells gassy, is covered in trichomes, and lacks flavour but is smooth to smoke.

This knowledge is relevant because it brings us to the present moment of discussing the actual product quality of the product that the customer intends to purchase, thereby informing and persuading the sale.

However, when it comes to product knowledge, there are a bunch of hurdles that budtenders need to overcome:

1. Being able to afford the products they want to try → Solution: Incentives and free samples from their stores and producers, or becoming a certified Sensemillier Cannabis Tester
2. Gathering relevant product feedback → Solution: The Sensemillier Grading Platform
3. Using product insights and feedback of other employees on the sales floor → Solution: The Sensemillier Grading Platform

As you can tell, we have built our Grading Platform to enhance product knowledge and reduce the hurdles budtenders face when trying to acquire these relevant product insights.

On the one hand, our Grading Platform gives the budtenders a clear, standardized, and educational way of assessing their products. On the other hand, with the Retail plan, the Platform gathers the product feedback of all your employees in a unified product menu that allows you to search and filter for the key features of each evaluated product.

Last but not least, the Grading Platform is also a superb community-building tool, which is very important because establishing a proper community is the last piece of the puzzle to retain staff and customers and ensure your store goes from surviving to thriving.

Community

Community is the core of thriving cannabis businesses. Why?

Because humans want to belong and develop meaningful relationships.

Establishing a proper community in and around your store guarantees that your employees feel like they belong to something meaningful and wholesome, where they’re cared for and play an important role in the well-being of your community.

Further, in contrast to this internal community building, building an external community for your customers where they feel part of your store helps to retain customers, which is essential for your store’s success. Why?

Because most of your store's revenue doesn’t come from big-ticket sales of one-time customers but rather from the continuous medium to smaller sales tickets of your returning regulars.

Here are some tips on how to turn customers into regulars:

• Remember their names
• Remember their purchases & preferences
• Engage & educate them meaningfully
• Invite them to events and consume together

To remember customer names, I personally used to have a ‘name journal’ where I’d write down the names of my customers and what they looked like. This helped me a lot to remember the various names of a ton of customers, and I could personally see what a significant impact it had on my interactions each time I approached someone by saying their name.

Regarding their purchase history, preferences, education, and event organization, using our Grading Platform can help to facilitate all of this. Let’s see how that works!

First of all, if your store is signed up for the Retail Plan on the platform, you can create a customer feedback link that allows you to connect your customers to account to your database so you can view their product evaluations, which empowers you to get their feedback on specific products and figure out what types of products they like and don’t like. Further, by introducing them to the Grading Platform, you’ll automatically educate them by giving them a tool that teaches them everything they need to know about cannabis quality and professional product evaluation.

Once your customers have acquired this vital knowledge of cannabis quality, you’re then also empowered to have more engaging and meaningful sales conversations as you’re now speaking the same language.

Lastly, let’s look at how the Grading Platform can benefit your event organization.

There are already a bunch of cannabis retailers who have picked up on the fact that community building through events is a vital tool for the success of their stores.

The retailers in Vancouver have been doing a great job hosting cannabis-friendly educational events for their industry friends and customers.

For example, the retail chain Burb regularly hosts its Book Club events while ARCannabis Stores hosts its annual ARCannabis Cup, and 1st Cannabis is hosting its annual North Van Cannabis Expo.

Because these events are so vital for the well-being of our industry and the representation of your company culture, we’ve also been hosting over a dozen events throughout the past three years called the Cannabis Café in BC’s capital, Victoria, on Vancouver Island.

Our experience of hosting and attending these events has taught us something very important, which is that organizing an event doesn't have to be much effort and reaps plenty of benefits, ranging from increased business reputation and customer loyalty to an improved well-being of your employees and community.

The easiest way we’ve found to organize our events is to just put up a couple of microscopes in a nice venue, encourage people to grade their products through our Grading Platform together, and otherwise just let them network to form meaningful relationships with each other.

As you can see, there are plenty of ways to support your budtenders and improve their skills and well-being. Again, your budtenders have a crucial role in this industry and should, therefore, be well-treated and supported.

One way to support your employees and organization instantly is to start diving into product grading to establish a solid foundation for product awareness and education around quality and product differentiation.

Sign up for the Retail Plan on our Grading Platform to dive right into the most robust solution for cannabis education, and check out our educational offerings like Scope Club and our Retail Workshops.

We look forward to connecting with you and supporting you on your way.