When you start a small business, you’ll quickly find yourself wearing a lot of hats. In the early days you’ll likely be acting as your own accounting, marketing, sales, and operations department. Sales in particular can be intimidating if you don’t have much experience in that area. Let’s review some sales best practices for small businesses in the cannabis space so you can start selling and your business can thrive.
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Cannabis Sales Best Practices
As a small business in the cannabis space, your sales best practices will look a bit different than other entrepreneurs. Here’s what you should keep in mind when creating your sales process.
Identify your market segments
Before you spend a lot of time, energy, and resources making sales pitches, you need to determine exactly who you should be selling to. Spend some time doing market research and identify who your target market is. This research will help ensure you contact the right people when it’s time to sell, which will make your sales success rate much higher. If you sell a variety of products, you may need to segment your target markets into smaller groups so you can find the exact right people to sell each of your products or services to.
Find effective ways to generate leads
This step may take a little trial and error, but you’ll find the right fit eventually. When generating leads, you’ll notice over time which methods are more effective than others. You should keep track of which successful leads come from which sources. That way, during your next sales round, you can more quickly identify the actions you should take to generate the most leads.
With cannabis still being a cash business and each market locked within a single state, cannabis businesses find outside sales and making connections in person more important than other traditional sales channels. Most often, a combination of building relationships in person with buyers, telling your brand story to consumers to increase name recognition (for example via Instagram), and using tools like Confident Cannabis, are what do the trick. One way to generate more leads is to make sure your Confident Cannabis Company Menu is getting as many views as possible. Here are some helpful tips for generating more traffic to your company menu!
Have a process in place for pitches
Once you do capture the attention of a prospective client, you need to hold their attention and really wow them when it’s time for your sales pitch. Again, trial and error will come into play here. Practice makes perfect, so every time you pitch a potential client, take notes on the areas of your presentation that they responded to. For example, maybe a live demo is what shows off your products best. Providing samples, telling your brand story and highlighting products, having a follow up process, or using your Confident Cannabis vendor postcards with any other leave behind materials you have created, may be the right fit for your brand.
Pay close attention to the details of your pitch that catch the attention of your potential clients and make sure to incorporate those elements moving forward. Not sure which products you should pitch first? Conduct and ABC analysis to determine what your best selling stock is!
Identify your value proposition
Speaking of sales presentations, it’s super important to highlight your value proposition every time you speak with a potential client. You need to identify exactly why your client would benefit if they choose to work with you instead of one of your competitors. You need to be able to quickly relay your value proposition in a confident and clear way, so it’s important to practice exactly what you’ll say to clients so that you don’t ever sound hesitant when speaking to them. Your value proposition may change over time and that’s okay, just make sure you know exactly what to say about your current value proposition to wow clients. And remember those segmented target markets we discussed earlier? Each may have their own unique value proposition, so don’t forget to customize your sales pitch to best suit their needs.
Close the sale properly
If you’re a new entrepreneur, you might not realize just how important the post-sales process is. Once a client says they want to work with you, it’s important to get a contract signed and to make sure both parties are aware of what your next steps will be. Have a system in place for properly closing each sale so no important details ever slip through the cracks.
Brush up on how vendors use Confident Cannabis to sell better today!
For more information on how to sell better, check out these posts from Salesforce, Close, and Outreach.