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At many cannabis retailers, managing dispensary marketing and inventory are separate functions with different employees managing them. This is totally rational, of course.
But what if these two separate functions could support each other?
Consider how inventory affects marketing for a moment:
- If you have more inventory than you can sell in 14-21 days, you’re going to have aging inventory
- The average retailer holds 54 days of inventory at any given time, some of it well over 90 days old
- Old inventory gets heavily discounted and promoted
- Text and email marketing to your customers becomes a lot of deal blasting to drive people in-store to take that aging inventory off your hands
- You find yourself in a perpetual loop of discounting old inventory because you continue to restock beyond 14-21 days
There’s a singular fix to this problem: transparent, real-time data tools to manage inventory.
Escape the Discount Doom Loop
When you can make restocking decisions that prevent you from holding too much inventory, you can free your marketing from an endless doom loop of heavy discounts on old shit.
Imagine how differently you might manage your wholesale relationships!
Here’s a scene:
Your Wyld rep calls you out of the blue to reorder every flavor SKU they have available. They manage to reach you and you answer, but now you’re under the gun to figure out how much of each SKU you’re going to reorder while trying to assess if the bulk discount or seasonal special is worth taking greater advantage of.
You fire up your spreadsheets while they’re talking to you, trying to build rapport, and you’re passively saying “uh huh” while you crunch numbers or wait for things to load.
Under the gun, you make your best guess on reordering because you can’t focus through all the data while having a phone call and decide to order a little extra than you think you need, just to get the discount.
Now imagine that same scene a different way, empowered with the right tools to make the data easy to understand:
The rep reaches you out of nowhere, and you quickly log into Happy Buyers to pull up your Restock Report. You shoot the shit with the rep while you click the “Wyld” filter and see all the Wyld SKUs from your order history.
The report tells you exactly what quantity of what SKUs you need to reorder. You realize, that while enticing, you shouldn’t order those extra cases to get a marginal discount.
You click the export button, and send the CSV over to your Wyld rep.
The rep opens up Apex Trading and pops your order into the system, firing off an order invoice back to you to execute along with the COAs and product assets.
5 minutes later you end your phone call, happy and ready for the next thing, confident you only bought what you needed to meet your demand and not run out of stock. Your Wyld rep knows they got you exactly what you wanted for a smooth, quick, and pleasant transaction.
Bonus points for the retailers that didn’t have to get on a call at all, but proactively used Happy Buyers to reorder on their own schedule and Apex Trading to send a purchase request over to their brand reps. This can be handled across all brands on the shelves in your store.
Have Your Cake and Eat It Too
This is the exact kind of win/win scenario Happy Cabbage and Apex Trading are creating for retailers and brands.
When you are armed with the right tools to purchase inventory to meet your demand in 14-21 days, you don’t have aging inventory stagnating on your shelves. Brands will then start to better understand accurate demand and won’t overproduce based on sales data that is skewed.
And that brings us back to the point of this article.
With much less or almost no aging inventory, for both retailers and brands, your marketing stops being only daily or weekly deal blasting. You can start campaigns for high demand SKUs with higher margins, highlight what you do to give back or engage in the community, and promote events.
You have room to get more creative, do collabs, and elevate your brand in a truly differentiated way from your competitors. In other words, you make a better impact on your customers and will make more money.
Profit is necessary to run a healthy business. When you manage inventory ineffectively by using too many spreadsheets and not well built tools like Happy Buyers and Apex Trading, you get caught in the discount doom loop.
Your customers start to become deal chasers rather than loyal advocates.
That’s what we’d all like to see, right? If you agree, LFG!
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