Why sales team efficiency is more important than it's size. Cannabis businesses have many unusual challenges but one thing that is not unusual is their need for sales. Without sales companies will fail, unfortunately, many salespeople spend most of their time gathering data instead of selling. Jeffrey Graham the founder and CEO of Pistil Data joins Dan Humiston to explain how their innovative platform consolidates retailers' data giving salespeople unique insight that allows them to approach their accounts with a real strategy. Produced by PodConx MJBulls - https://podconx.com/podcasts/raising-cannabis-capital Dan Humiston - https://podconx.com/guests/dan-humiston Jeffrey Graham - https://podconx.com/guests/jeffrey-graham Pistil Data - https://www.pistildata.com/
Why sales team efficiency is more important than it's size.
Cannabis businesses have many unusual challenges but one thing that is not unusual is their need for sales. Without sales companies will fail, unfortunately, many salespeople spend most of their time gathering data instead of selling. Jeffrey Graham the founder and CEO of Pistil Data joins Dan Humiston to explain how their innovative platform consolidates retailers' data giving salespeople unique insight that allows them to approach their accounts with a real strategy.
MJBulls - https://podconx.com/podcasts/raising-cannabis-capital
Dan Humiston - https://podconx.com/guests/dan-humiston
Jeffrey Graham - https://podconx.com/guests/jeffrey-graham
Pistil Data - https://www.pistildata.com/
Dan Humiston: [00:00:00] Today. And I'm Jay bulls.
We're joined by Jeffrey Graham, the CEO of pistol data. Jeffrey, welcome to the.
Jeffrey Graham: Thank you very much. It's good to be.
Dan Humiston: I'm really excited that you joined us. And we, as we talked before, we jumped on the show, what you're doing is unique. We haven't had anybody on the show, that's done anything like this. And, we know that there are many unique challenges for cannabis businesses, that's not new, but sales is one challenge. It's not unique to cannabis. Every company. And his sales is five. Unfortunately, too many cannabis companies make the mistake of trying to build a large sales team instead of an efficient sales team. And I thought maybe to get started, you could, maybe just paint a picture or give us an idea of what a day in the life of a typical cannabis sales person looks like.
That is not using pistol.
Jeffrey Graham: That's a great question. So a typical salesperson. In cannabis, let's put them on a cannabis brand. [00:01:00] Let's say that their primary job as any sales person is to, to sell the product. And they do that either by getting into a new store or by growing their shelf space, getting reorders in stores they're already in they're generally operating within , a local territory that they can reach by car.
And like every sales person, they have to determine, who are my prospects. And then what is my selling proposition? When I approach a retail store, usually cannabis buyer or retail manager at the store. So before pistol, it was really time consuming and really confusing to just even know what was going on in their local area.
There are stores that are opening their stores that are closing. There are products that are coming on and off the shelf. They're brands that are popping up all the time. It's very volatile at shelf in most retail stores for cannabis. So . Certainly knowing where your [00:02:00] competitor may be stocked, where there might be a sales opportunity because a store maybe the type of store that should stock your product, or even knowing where your own products are in stock was a huge challenge for cannabis sellers.
So what a lot of them would do was one of two things they'd spend. A long time looking at cannabis menus, like consumer menus, like weed maps, or they'd drive around to different stores. And they'd look on the shelves and try to see what's going on in those stores. So they spend a lot of time trying to gather information and that took away the time they could actually be.
Dan Humiston: I see, let's move forward. Now that pistol is in place. Tell us how you reduce that aspect of their job and get them more in front of customers and making sales.
Jeffrey Graham: Thousands of retail stores and across the country and hundreds and hundreds, and in most of the states that have legal cannabis[00:03:00] and there are literally millions of products. So what we've done is we found a way to basically. Every day to look at the entire marketplace till see what products are on the shelf, at what price in virtually every retail store in the United States, we've taken that data.
We've sort of, been able to really clean and organize that data and then put it into a mobile application for salespeople. Which is very simple and tactical and says, Hey, here are your prospects. Today. Here are your win-back opportunities. Here's three stores that you're out of stock as of yesterday.
If you want to explore a little bit more about the store here's, what's on the menu, here's a hole in their menu. Here's where your competitors out of stock, and you may be able to go and conquest the store. So we've just tried to boil down this big data universe into something that's really easy and digestible for a salesperson in the.
Dan Humiston: That to me just seems overwhelming. Are you using [00:04:00] the, I see to sale software or access to that? Is that how , you're finding this infamous.
Jeffrey Graham: No. , the problem with approaches that have been in the marketplace for awhile that rely on partnerships with retail stores, is they. Always having just kind of a low percentage of stores in the market. Very hard to get a large percentage of stores to give you their data or a large percentage of brands to give you their data.
Right. You're always going to just have one hand on the elephant. Our approach is to take publicly available. Data that's available, whether it's about stores on the state website or it's about products on the e-commerce menu, all of that data that a consumer uses to understand where they can find their favorite products and where the best price we take that information and we repackage it and organize it for salespeople.
And that gives us an ability to provide. Have you have more than 90% of stores in every market that we operate in. So they [00:05:00] can actually get down to the hyper-local and store level because that's what a salesperson needs. They don't need to know what's happening in the state of Michigan, this month, like that's kind of nice to know.
They need to know what happened in that store yesterday that stocked my product and that's, we're able to give them.
Dan Humiston: And I guess if you had like a run on a product or you find that, let's just say a brand like cookies , is really kicking in, in, within that brand, that's , it's really done. Well, you could probably tailor your pitch to a product in your brand.
That matches that
Jeffrey Graham: Yeah, totally. Yeah. So what we help salespeople determine is who to call and what to say. . If you approach a store cold and yourself. 20 different products across three or four categories.
What do you lead with, how do you convince that buyer that they need that product? So by looking at what products are in stock would have been in stock, how they're priced, you can approach and say, [00:06:00] Hey, look, I think your light. Ultra premium flower category. Your five competitors in the area are stocking a lot of products in that way, and they're doing really well.
Here's our product or the opposite. We have a value product and , we can get a very low price product or consumers increase volume, or, we think your light in a flavor or a certain form factor or we think we're a better offering than this competitor , that you're stocking the store.
So that just gives you. A strategy to engage in a business conversation. And that's what most successful salespeople are able to do is to solve the problem for the person that they're selling to. But unless you have information, you really can't do that effective.
Dan Humiston: And solving that problem makes the customer more dependent on you, more reliant on you and. I could see where this gets to a point where they're anxious to take your call versus like, oh my God, that another salesperson, , if you're solving a problem for [00:07:00] them, because you know what their competitors are doing, that's gotta be a huge advantage because now your cat is your foot in the door.
Every time you call.
Jeffrey Graham: Yeah. , you get sales calls all the time. Of course. And if somebody knows something about your business and is offering you a solution to a problem that you have, that's a call you're going to take. If the person is. I'm trying to gather the most basic information about you and your business.
That's going to feel very time-consuming and feel like the person didn't do their homework. So , we're just kind of like a cheat sheet for the sales reps so that they can do their homework a little faster and they can get out on the road and sell , a little more.
Dan Humiston: the discussion that we've had today has been mainly focused on like the retail side and sales to the retail side. Do you ever see what you're doing expanding beyond that?
Jeffrey Graham: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, at its heart pistol data as a data company, , we find all the products in all the stores and we figure out, what products and what [00:08:00] store at what price. What hour of the day and that's really useful for salespeople, but having worked at a cannabis brand, I know there are a lot of different parts of the industry that also need that information.
An example of that is the retailer, him or herself. I was in Palm Springs last week. You walked down four blocks of Palm Springs. 10 different cannabis, retail shops. They're all competing for the same consumer, whether they know it or not. So if you're selling to the same consumer, it's important to know what those other stores are doing.
What do they have in stock? How are they pricing their product? I may want to be the cheapest store on the. Block, or I may want to be a premium store on the block with the most unique products, or I may want to have all of the trendy products, or I may want to have the core 10 products that we know that everybody wants.
All of those different refills, retail strategies require understanding what's happening in the market, the local level. So [00:09:00] I think that's an example of where else our data could be.
Dan Humiston: the wheels are spinning. I'm thinking of so many places where you could use this. It's such a good idea I had. And again, what I love about the idea the most is it. It's pretty straight forward. It's not very hard to understand and shocked that. You don't have a lot of competition because this is what people really need.
You don't need to add five more salespeople. You just need to make or one salesperson more efficient with his time. It's, it's a brilliant idea.
Jeffrey Graham: Thank you very much. Thank you.
Dan Humiston: And I'm going to have all the links pistol data in the show notes. So if you're interested in making sales, instead of searching for leads and the internet.
Click on the link and I'm sure somebody from data's team will be happy to talk to you. And Jeffrey real pleasure speaking with you today. Thanks for doing this.
Jeffrey Graham: Thank you very much. It was good talking to you.