We recently had a podcast interview on the Dispensary Marketing Podcast with Brandon Quan from Cannabudmarketing. They’re a cannabis SEO and dispensary marketing agency.

In this session we discussed:

– How to leverage artificial intelligence to drive more sales to your dispensary

– How you can reduce wage inflation with AI

– Four levers that can help weaponize your dispensary sales data

– What dispensary owners should focus on in 2022

You can view the full video here:

We spoke about a lot of things that will be highlighted below. But we highly encourage you to take a look at the full video!

Tell us a little bit about yourself, how you got things going, and how you got into the space.

Yeah, Brandon. A little bit about myself.  I’m an older guy than maybe your past podcast guests. I’ve had over 25 plus years in,  sales and marketing experience. About 10 years ago, I left the corporate world and started my own business, helping software companies with sales and,  marketing initiatives had some awesome clients,  along the way.

And then,  as I say in life, you learn from one of your failures, and one of my clients, was,  another AI and machine learning company and that client failed. It was an utter bust. But what I learned from there is, you know, a couple of things is that there’s a, there was gonna be a huge potential and AI space.

And number two doesn’t matter what software that people are using or software that you’re trying to sell. People want a good user experience. And

with that, I mean, something that’s,  you know, easy to use. So as this, the company was imploding through events, I met my future co-founder.

So my future co-founder was visiting from India here. He used to live in Atlanta, and he used to work as a technical architect for general electric, right. A Fortune 50 company. So we met through mutual friends having a few beers, and he pitched me this idea of a prototype head of an AI,  platform that could help businesses doesn’t matter what vertical, drive repeat buyers.

So I guess it was phase one, as you may know, a lot of these startups happened,  the impetus of these startups maybe just happened in a casual conversation, maybe over,  over beers. And initially was just, we drew up plans on a cocktail napkin if you’ll, and it just kind of evolved from there as we, as we grew and morphed.

And then one of those verticals that we morphed into is in the cannabis space. 

So tell us a little bit about how exactly the software works. 

So we, our goal is to our, our mission, if you will, is we leverage businesses’ first-party data, help them weaponize that to help them drive growth.

And where do you get your first-party data that could come from a handful of places, but typically from your e-commerce platform, or point of sale,  platform. So with dispensaries, it is coming from our point of sale platform. So we pulled data via an API, you know, run it through our AI engine, our software, and then it spits out recommendations from there.

So for the most part, is it just the recommendations, or do you have a data set on the back end where now dispensary owners can then make actionable decisions based on,  the recommendations that your AI has? 

Yeah, it’s,  we got a data set and then now you can execute under recommendations.

So what we can do is pull the data and we in essence can do four things. So we can take a look at the potential profitability. Of a dispensary’s customers. 

We can predict on a macro level if,  the dispensary has data based on what someone’s likely to buy on a macro level, based on geographic demographic, psychographic, or behavioral characteristics,  number three, we can predict on a micro-level what each person’s likely to buy.

It’s similar to what you’re seeing with Amazon and our product recommendations and Netflix,  with their movie recommendations or now we can also do,  inventory level prediction.

So we can predict how much of these,  CBD hemp drops here will sell how much of it will sell in a given,  day, week, or month. So now we take all that information. It’s in a pretty little dashboard, but we go beyond pretty dashboards. Now we can enable you to execute a truly data-driven omnichannel campaign.

How long do they need to be using your software, or how many transactions do they need to make your software effective?

Yeah, that’s a very good question, Brandon. So obviously the more established dispensaries that have a large number of data sets they’ll do better, you know, with the predictions, you know, ideally just bare-bones when,  verse coming in or you’re a brand new dispensary, you know, ideally, you know, minimal maybe a thousand of, you know, purchase orders.

We always say between 30 and 70% accuracy rate, maybe for the younger dispensary, it’s gonna be 30%, but for the more established one, it’ll be,  you know, closer to 70, but the good a thing with AI, it gets smarter over time.

One of the things that piqued my interest is the whole email, text, and social media stuff. From my knowledge, a lot of software companies just send out general blasts. I’m assuming you can do it more customizable?

Right. There’s not necessarily any targeted thing on a per-customer or basis. So as you’re saying, we can then curate specific messages for the people that want.

Cause marketing dollars, especially in today’s day and age, labor, shortages, and inflation, you know, marketing dollars are too precious to waste. And to your point, you want to be highly curated because if you’re highly curated, that’s gonna improve the customer experience and help drive growth for that dispensary.

If you like these questions you’ll be sure you enjoy the full interview here:

Cannabud Marketing is the top digital marketing agency for Cannabis Dispensaries. Our specialized expertise will put you in the best position to succeed when working with us.