Harnessing Consumer Influence with Best in Grow

Although cannabis is blazing a trail to legalization state by state, consumer data is still difficult to discern. As recently discussed in Forbes, the cannabis consumer persona for targeted marketing is elusive, mainly because the industry is so new, and there isn’t enough data to accurately define cannabis consumers. Additionally, outside of the legal markets, not only are cannabis consumers still hesitant to talk about their consumption habits, specific purchase information such as producer, strain, and dosage are rare.

After studying psychology and behavioral economics at Harvard, Jake Levin, and Andrew Duffy dove into cannabis to better understand how consumers made their purchasing decisions. “We knew there was so much misinformation out there,” Levin stated in an interview with CannabisTech. “As we learned more about the industry, we learned how much influence budtenders have, and the role they play in this industry is unlike any other,” he continued. In fact, few other industries have any role like that of a budtender.

“Our background in academia and experiences in finance led us to become obsessed with how the cannabis industry would grow and take shape as more non-users became exposed to the industry.” So the duo set out to build a tool to help the industry, and ultimately cannabis brands, harness the powerful customer influence of budtenders. With a little brainstorming and an investment from Canopy Boulder, the concept for Best in Grow, was born.

Asking Levin to describe precisely what the software does in an interview with CannabisTech, he replied, “I like to think of ourselves not as a SaaS or data company, but really as a decision science company.”

Harnessing The Budtender

Good budtenders are critical to the cannabis industry. In order to easily incorporate cannabis into their lives for health, wellness, or even recreation, consumers rely on the knowledge, experience, and opinion of their budtenders. In fact, surveys have shown 92% of consumers take the exact product recommendation from the budtender. By creating a software platform promoting increased transparency, accountability, and communication along the entire cannabis value chain, the Best in Grow platform improves the cannabis consumer experience by empowering budtenders with better industry, compliance, and product information.

Value-Added Feedback
Additionally, Best in Grow connects a dispensary to all of their brands directly for education, training, and sales support. Brands now have a direct connection to the front lines and really support their dispensary partners in a much more powerful way. Best in Grow gives cannabis companies the tools for understanding point of sale decision making and create products consumers will love. Using Best in Grow tools, cannabis brands can increase the value of the data they receive from budtenders and retail sampling programs.

Many cannabis brands know providing samples for budtenders helps them to understand the product and make accurate recommendations to consumers. However, often vendors get little to no useful feedback from those samples. In fact, some sales reps often question whether or not the sample products ever actually make it into the budtender’s hands. The Best in Grow platform offers an innovative way to encourage participation through incentives and gamification, allowing budtenders to increase their score and ranking within the system based on individual participation.

Familiar Platform Redesigned for Canna-Business

Living in the age of information, we have dozens of ways to communicate and share personal experiences. From snapping to tweeting to posting and texting, apps like Slack, What’s App, and social media outlets provide numerous channels for communication. However, the trick is learning how to leverage the technology to create value and learning throughout the chain of communication in your business because many of these apps fail to provide real business function.

Promote Better Internal Communications
Communication, education and sharing information are crucial for advancing the industry and developing integrity as the industry grows. Recognizing the desperate need for more streamlined communications and value-added, timely information, Levin and Duffy designed the social platform specifically for budtenders, compliance officers, business owners, and even brands to communicate with deeper purpose.

Understanding the demographics of budtenders, the Best in Grow platform is geared toward engaging and empowering the budtenders in the legal cannabis market in a familiar, yet functional way. Knowing that budtenders are constantly on the move, the team went with a “mobile-first” application to put primary functionality at the fingertips of those who use it and bring an always-connected mentality to cannabis.

Integrated Software Utility
In this day and age of modern technology, we all know “there’s an app for that.” Unfortunately, this is also part of the problem – there are simply too many apps. Best in Grow hopes to narrow the field by providing a one-stop-shop for dispensary managers and owners to keep their employees informed, trained, and on the cutting edge of cannabis laws and regulations.

By integrating API’s from other standard business software applications such as Human Resource applications like payroll and scheduling, Best in Grow promotes employee buy-in by locating all their resources and tools into one convenient software application and toolbar.

To learn more about the Best in Grow platform, and how they can help your business harness cannabis consumer data while keeping your budtenders at the top of the communication chain, contact Jake Levin or Andrew Duffy for a demo of Best in Grow today or visit www.bestingrow.io to find out more.