We have good news for you! Your existing data can already be used to improve your top line and bottom line. And with your great team and well-stocked store, it’s not even that complicated because you are already collecting the data you need. The missing piece is an intuitive, actionable way to unlock your potential.

Whether you mostly sell the products you grow and manufacture in-house, or you wholesale a variety of brands, every cannabis dispensary and retailer needs to focus on their customers and their profits. Store managers often do well by stocking products based on personal preference and intuition, but with the rapid growth in the competition, there is a constant need to innovate and differentiate.

Empowering your budtenders, product buyers, marketers, and managers with a simple and intuitive view into your sales data can be a powerful tool to level up your team and your operation. Here are a few examples of important questions that can help your team to customer loyalty, revenue, and profits:

Every medical dispensary and some retail stores collect information about their customers that can tie purchases to an individual. This data can provide a detailed understanding of consumer preferences and opportunities for aligning offers with desires.

Empowering budtenders to quickly and efficiently understand past purchases can make customers feel heard, connected to your brand, and more likely to return or purchase more products. Enabling marketers with hyper-personalized messages and deals is well proven to increase repeat purchases and increased order size.

Most importantly, if you’re wasting time and money on poor communication, your customers will go to another dispensary or store where they feel seen and understood.

One of the fastest ways to increase revenue and profit is to have high-margin products that your customers want to buy.  There are two basic ways to think about what are your “best” products:

• By volume – the products that your patients and customer purchase most often are usually popular items that you want to keep around and well stocked.  Are these products moving because there is genuine desire or because they are heavily discounted?
• By margin – the products where you make the most money (revenue minus cost) are the best for your business to promote and sell.  More importantly, products that make little to negative margins are typically a waste of shelf space and can be replaced with a more productive offering./li>

Being fully aware of your product margins as well as your product volume, and ideally positioning your best sellers to have your highest margins, can immediately increase the financial outcomes of your dispensary or retail store.

If a customer wants a certain product and you’re currently out-of-stock, that can result in lost revenue and a frustrated customer that may choose not to come back the next time. On the other end of the spectrum, buying too much inventory can cause cash-flow problems and take up precious space in your back room. Where the product is perishable, such as raw cannabis flower, purchasing too much can cause some product to lose quality or revenue if it has to be reprocessed or thrown away.

For all these reasons and more, it’s critically important to align the buyers’ purchase orders with your customers’ store purchases so that you also have a just-in-time supply. The best way to know what you’ll need and when is with predictive modeling from your past sales to future demand.

Efficiently aligning supply with demand can make your buyer’s job easier and more targeted while saving time and money for the business. Not to mention making sure your customers have exactly what they want when they want!

The answers for each of these three questions can be found in your point-of-sale and accounting software where you’re already collecting a lot of valuable data. What other types of data are you already collecting?

Although each state in the US, and every country outside the US, has different regulations, nearly every dispensary ore retailer is collecting the following types of data:

• Financial
• Sales
• Product & inventory
• Discounts & deals

More sophisticated organizations are also tracking:

• Throughput
• Supply & demand
• Spot pricing
• HR / Payroll
• Compliance
• Waste

You have the location, the data, and the team to really succeed – but where and how do you get started?

The first and most important step is to clearly state what you want to accomplish in plain English. For example, “Our store wants to increase customer retention” or “Our management wants to increase overall product margins by 10%”.

After everyone agrees on the goal, the next step is to identify what type of information (repurchase rates, customer segments, product margins by category, etc.) will help inform your decisions. That information can then be tied back the source data that you’re already collecting in your point-of-sale, accounting, and other systems.

Then, it’s important to start focused and pick one specific objective to align the team. This is critical! The best way to see immediate returns is to have a laser focus on one goal that is clear to everyone involved. As your team gets more comfortable interpreting and using your data, you’ll find that every project after the first becomes easier and quicker to implement, track, and succeed.

The last step is to start using your intuitive, actionable data to improve your business! It’s important that your reports are metrics answer “what do I do with this information?” quickly and efficiently so your team feels empowered and enlightened. If your data is confusing or doesn’t make sense, it’s not your fault! If the reporting isn’t immediately understandable and actionable, it’s either the wrong information or it’s being presented in the wrong format for your team.

If you’re still stuck, we offer a free data consultation to get you started on the right path.  If you’re interested in the examples above, we have dedicated modules to help you work through each consideration.  And you can always send us a note to chat about what’s on your mind.

Overall, data can be an incredible toolkit and ally in your journey to be the best dispensary or cannabis store for your customers.