Don’t Let Budtenders Tank Your Cannabis Brand with Luna Stower

Tips to Promote Budtender Loyalty and Product Sell Through

Make sure you are educating budtenders and connecting with your target audiences so you can establish a brand presence and create meaningful experiences for potential customers.

Luna Stower, Chief Impact Officer at Ispire Vape and Dope Hardware will be guiding us through a winning training program for budtenders and her top tips for creating strong communities of cannabis consumers.

During this webinar you will learn:

Step by step market entry strategy for cannabis brands
Budtender incentivization and relationship building action plans
The secret to building a cannabis community that consumers actually want to be a part of

Budtenders are your outside sales extension – what they like they will sell. Are you creating relationships that last, or producing enemies of your grass?

Webinar Highlights

Exploring Budtender Turnover Rates

00:00:51 – 00:04:29: Guillermo Bravo and Luna Stower, Chief Impact Officer of Ispire Vape Tech, explore the rapid rotation of budtenders in dispensaries and strategies to reduce staff turnover. Luna shares her unique perspectives, from selling cartridges to dispensaries and producing white-label vape products and devices for retailers. She attributes the high turnover among budtenders to low pay, stressful retail environments, lack of consumer loyalty to brands, and inadequate professional development.

Luna notes that budtenders need more support and respect, likening them to pharmacists without the corresponding training and recognition. Guillermo Bravo advises brands to shadow budtenders to experience a day in their life to understand the value budtenders bring to a dispensary. This immersive approach could provide insights into their challenges, fostering loyal relationships between brands and budtenders.

How Can a Cannabis Brand Create Meaningful Relationships With Retail Staff?

00:06:38 – 00:10:03: Guillermo Bravo and Luna Stower address the high turnover rates among staff in the cannabis industry and how brands can establish meaningful relationships despite this constant flux. Luna Stower delves into loyalty programs that integrate with backend systems for an incentive program. By capturing budtenders’ data, brands can maintain contact with them even after they’ve moved on to other roles. She highlights initiatives like awards, podcasts, and educational platforms aimed at empowering and recognizing their contributions.

Luna believes the industry needs to value and retain talent, pointing out instances of individuals leaving the cannabis field despite substantial investments made in their training and education. She highlights the lack of accounting for this turnover at an industry level, prompting a conversation on the importance of investing in staff training and marketing for long-term sustainability in a crowded market.

How Can Brands Improve Budtender Relations Through Training?

00:10:03 – 00:13:33: Luna Stowers discusses how cannabis brands might be missing the mark in training and engaging budtenders effectively. She suggests several business plan strategies incorporating regular updates and engagement with budtenders. Recognizing these individuals’ diverse backgrounds and needs, she highlights the importance of understanding their daily lives and catering to their cultural preferences, such as providing food during events or gatherings to foster loyalty and a sense of being valued.

Luna calls for the industry to acknowledge a budtender’s sophistication and dedication to their role through accreditation or formal recognition. She also discusses examples of brands implementing initiatives to incentivize and engage budtenders through gamified competitions, like embedding branding in products and investing in training programs for brand ambassadors. She underscores the need for brands to allocate resources and focus on strategic business development within the cannabis industry rather than being consumed solely by day-to-day operations.