Your rep has a full week of store visits on the calendar and a box of samples in the car. On Friday your boss asks what came back from last month's visits, and what you have is a list of stores and a few photos. You're fairly sure those visits did something, and by next Friday you'd like to be able to show it.
It helps to start with why the visits matter so much here. Most paid advertising is closed to cannabis brands in New York, so the choice usually gets made at the counter, by a budtender deciding what to recommend. The visits are how your brand reaches that person, and the real question for Friday is whether anything from them stuck.
At our events, budtenders ask brand teams the same few things every time. How was this grown, how was it extracted, and what's the difference between this and the jar next to it? Those answers are what they repeat to customers, so they're the part of your product they need most.
What they tell us about store visits is that the rep usually walks in mid-shift, with a line at the register, and nobody can step away to listen. In the few minutes there are, more than half of the talk goes to the founder's story and the packaging, and how the product is actually made gets a sentence. Stores rarely fill that gap themselves, since most run almost no product training of their own and the state's required training covers safety and the law.
What helps is a short origin story and most of the time on how the product is grown and made, in words a budtender could say out loud to a customer. When a question comes up that the rep can't answer, saying so and following up with checked information works better than a guess, because a budtender can't stand behind a guess in front of a customer. A one-page sheet that matches what the rep said lets staff check a detail a week later.
The cheapest fix is the calendar. A rep who asks each store for a slot before opening or at shift change gets people who can actually listen, instead of people watching the line. An evening away from the store works even better, with dispensary staff who came on purpose and brand teams who have time for what they really want to know. Sara B. Gluck of Above Board came to one of our Budtender XP nights and put it neatly: "A free preroll does not make a budtender an advocate. A conversation might."
Brand teams tell us the hardest part of any visit or event is showing the result to whoever signs off on the budget. Training can be counted, though, if you keep four records from the start:
Your boss will probably still ask about sales, and four short records won't replace that number. What they do show is whether the visits reached the people who decide what to recommend, which stores listened and what those stores still need from you. That's a report someone can make a budget decision with, and it also tells the rep where to go back first. The first entry can go in on Monday, right after the first visit of the week.
How can a cannabis brand reach budtenders in New York? With most paid advertising closed, brands reach budtenders through store visits at a quiet hour, before opening or at shift change, and through evening events away from the shift, such as Budtender XP.
What is cannabis product training? It's the time a brand spends showing dispensary staff how its products are grown, made and different, so budtenders can explain them to customers.
When should brands train budtenders? Outside the rush, before opening, at shift change or at an evening event off the shift, when staff can actually listen.
Can brand samples go to dispensary customers in New York? No, retailer samples are for the store and its employees to get to know the product and can't be given to consumers.
Does brand product training count as New York's required budtender training? No, the state's Responsible Workforce Training is a separate requirement that covers safety and the law, not product knowledge.
Source: Work'n'Roll Budtender XP events. For persons 21 and older. General marketing information, not legal advice.
