Proper cannabis training is essential in today's market. Customers must have access to as much information as possible when working with budtenders. After all, an excellent recommendation can easily lead to repeat customers and a boost in revenue. In contrast, a bad recommendation can result in a negative experience that might scare them away from all cannabis products.
According to a study conducted on dispensary staff, nearly all (94%) said they provide specific cannabis advice to customers, with just 55% reporting some formal training behind their recommendations. The 45% without any reported training risk providing the wrong recommendations and losing potential sales.
Here's why you must improve your retail team's cannabis training as soon as possible.
Improved Customer Satisfaction
As a dispensary owner, your customers are one of the most important assets to your company. Building a bond with them can create repeat customers who trust and love working with your budtenders.
In fact, Forbes reports that the value of customer experience should never be underestimated. Most (96%) customers say customer service is important in their choice of loyalty to a store, and their research adds that customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than companies that don't focus on customers.
When your budtenders are educated on various brands' products and their benefits, they are better positioned to offer suitable recommendations to the customer. This will ensure their needs are met and their satisfaction is optimized.
The importance of this cannot be overlooked — increased loyalty to your store improves the total lifetime value of a customer, ultimately keeping you in business.
Budtender Engagement
Engaged budtenders are more profitable budtenders. It's on you to offer your staff engaging ways to learn about various products you sell. When this happens, they are more likely to care about the products, learn about them, and sell them.
These statistics reveal some of the most popular ways to make learning more engaging include:
- Personalized and relevant: 91% of employees want their training to be personalized and relevant.
- Mobile: 90% of employers agree it's beneficial to switch to mobile-based training.
- Availability (digital allows training on any device, at any time): 89% of workers want training available anywhere and anytime they need to do their job.
- Flexibility (i.e., downtime between customers): 85% of workers choose training times that fit their schedule.
Product Specifics
Cannabis brands don't want their products described the exact same way to consumers. They each bring their own unique elements to the industry with their product specifics and expect those elements to be properly highlighted to customers.
There are countless cannabis products in the world with different uses and side effects. When budtenders label them all as the same, it not only takes away from the actual value of cannabis but also takes away from the true value of your dispensary.
Proper cannabis training allows budtenders to highlight these product-specific features that set one product apart from another, resulting in mutually beneficial relationships between you and your partner brands — not to mention the benefits of customers walking away fully satisfied with their purchasing decision.
Employee Retention
Many retailers struggle to attract and retain top talent, and performance is often one of the reasons. When your budtenders are set up to perform well — i.e., support customer needs and answer their questions — they are more likely to find passion in their work and remain with your dispensary.
What's more, giving more focus to your current staff eliminates wasted time of rehiring and retraining employees. According to research, this will also save you a substantial amount of money since it costs between 30% and 50% of an entry-level employee's salary to replace them.
Low Risk, High Reward
Most brand training is free to dispensaries. This keeps dispensaries from having to create their own brand training, and most brands incentivize training in some way to increase engagement and retention of information.
In the end, it's a win-win for management and budtenders. Budtenders can earn various incentives while being better equipped to make appropriate recommendations, answer questions, and even match the perfect product with a customer's particular needs.
On the other hand, management can easily stay on top of staff training and performance to ensure your dispensary runs as efficiently as possible. ZolTrain allows you to hold your team accountable through visibility into the training completion of staff members. This way, your budtenders have the motivation from management to stay on top of training when it's needed.
Consolidate Your Training with ZolTrain
Brand training is typically free for dispensaries because cannabis brands will often pay for and deliver their own product training to your budtenders. The problem is each brand partner may have different forms of training and methods of delivery (i.e., online training, in-person training, app training, etc.), making it difficult for your staff to keep up.
Consider consolidating all training into one single platform for all of your brand partners by encouraging them to team up with ZolTrain for customized budtender training resources. This way, their product training solutions are optimized for engagement and efficient learning while your staff has complete access to all brands in one place. Schedule a demo today.