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420 is coming up very quickly and one thing couldn’t be more important. Sure, you’ve probably checked off many boxes: building your discounts, testing your technology, creating your campaigns – but did you remember your budtenders?
At the front line of your dispensary, your budtenders are you trusted staff for making sure you hit your in-store sales targets on the biggest cannabis holiday of the year.
How can you ensure their success? Here are four simple steps to consider.
Establish One KPI for Budtenders
Before you give any directives to your budtenders, take a step back and look at the data and define one KPI. Yes, just one – that every budtender can follow leading up to 420.
Why should you only choose one? Because it will be much easier to unify your entire budtender team around this metric. If every budtender were to assign themselves a KPI, you wouldn’t be able to ensure consistent results across your team.
For example, if one half of your budtenders chose average ticket size while the other chose total sales, you’d have results split by each cohort that weren’t unified around topline revenue metric.
It’s important to select a KPI that’s both closely associated to your topline revenue and each individual budtender can improve. Let’s continue with the same example of total sales versus average ticket size.
The second one could be better because then budtenders can focus on reaching an average order value per transaction via upselling products and adding discounts.
Here are a few common budtender KPIs we measure in Happy Operators:
- Average Ticket Size
- Total Sales
- Total Orders
Think about the KPI you want every budtender to focus, then you can start diving into the data.
Review Past Budtender Performance Data
Believe it or not, you’ve been collecting data on your budtender team the whole time. Now’s the time to review it and put your findings into action.
We mentioned choosing your primary KPI. Once you have it, review historical data to see how your budtenders currently perform.
Select an appropriate date range for collecting data. This could be from the past quarter or the past month so that the performance is more relevant.
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If you’re planning on running 420 brand or product promos, you focus your review on performance specific to those items in those discounts.
Then you’ll probably find a range of values or a bell curve that shows which budtenders are most competent in selling the products and those that need more training.
Now you know which budtenders need support prior to 420.
Create a Budtender Training Program
You have your KPI and past budtender performance data – what’s next? Budtender training and support. This will be critical to ensuring your budtenders sell what’s needed on 420.
Plan on focusing training on combinations of products and brands you know you need to sell to hit your sales targets.
Perhaps you want to push Jeeter, Old Pal, Caliva, or a BOGO discount between your house brand and another. If you know the brands you’re selling, you can then target the training to them.
Here’s a few ideas for how to set up a pre-420 training at your dispensary.
Organize a self-lead session with knowledgeable team members
Your data will tell you which budtenders might know the most about the products you’re planning to sell. Pull them aside and ask if they’d want to lead a pre-420 training. This is a great way to empower your employees.
Schedule a call with brand representative or request marketing collateral
You can always go to your cannabis brand rep and ask if they have marketing collateral for the products you stock. Maybe entertain the idea of brief training session where they can share more info on the products with your budtenders.
Contract a budtender training program provider
These courses will be best for budtenders that need more holistic training on selling cannabis. However, they could come in handy if there’s any employees that need more support in hitting their targets.
Once you’ve scheduled the training, there’s one final step to take before your open your doors on 420.
Offer Budtender Sales Incentives
Who doesn’t love a reward for working hard? Happens all the time in sales. So, why not create incentives for your budtenders too?
At this stage, you’ll have the KPIs you need to hit, the brands you’re trying to sell, and hopefully, every budtender up to speed on how to sell on 420.
Time to spice up the holiday with some fun.
Here’s a few ideas for budtender incentives you can run at your dispensary:
- Set up a contest for who can hit the highest target KPI
- Reward budtenders that sell the most of a certain brand
- Create a secret contest result with other KPIs you know matter that day
Healthy competition is always great to have on the front lines of your dispensary. Best of all, the data you have on hand today can make that process (and all the others we mentioned) much easier.
Interested in learning how dispensaries nationwide use Happy Operators to empower their budtenders? Book a demo with us today. We’d love to show you what we can do.
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