TESTSTSARDSAR

Game On: How Roleplay and Scavenger Hunts Elevate Budtender Skills by Ashleen Aguilar

“What kinda weed is good for sex?”

That was the first question I got from my second customer ever as a budtender in 2016, shortly after adult-use cannabis was legalized in my home state of Washington. He was a huge, red-faced, jovial biker in leathers and fringe, his arm around a similarly huge and jovial woman. They exchanged devious grins as I thought through my options.

Weed for sex? I haven’t been trained for this!

Well, what do I like when I’m high and having sex?

Literally anything – being high and having sex is awesome.

But what would make it even better? Something that makes your skin extra sensitive, gets you out of your head, velvet smooth body high…indica, indica, indica…

The exact strains escape me now, almost ten years later, but the leather-clad couple rode off together with a plain white paper bag full of prerolls that would give them some variety of luscious body feels for their weekend of fun.

The dispensary where I worked had been open less than a year, and the industry as a whole had only been operational for a few months before that. Washington was one of the first U.S. states to legalize adult-use cannabis, with the first licensed dispensary doors opening in Seattle in July 2015. The industry was young, incomplete, and unestablished.

In so many ways, it still is.

I was lucky in that situation with the bikers to already have had a good basic knowledge of common strains and how they should feel. Second day on the job, I hadn’t had any training related to the plant or products — just basic retail stuff, like where the panic buttons are and how we find our schedules. I was hired with the expectation that I already knew everything I needed to know about weed.

That’s a pretty standard expectation, as we learned from our 2023 survey on budtender training, which reported 25% of respondents saying their onboarding training was okay but left them with many unanswered questions.

“When I started as a budtender, I had already taught myself more than what anyone running the dispensary knew. I read the binder they made that was lacking much value, created budtender training programs, and taught budtender training the whole time I worked there. I really felt that it was important we understood it better to really be able to help people well,” said one survey respondent.

Between generally high taxes, high service fees, and financial restrictions for cannabis companies, dispensaries have been reluctant to prioritize staff education, instead relying on the budtender to educate themselves (at personal expense).

But when we look at research about how sales and product knowledge training impacts a population of salespeople, close rates almost always increase when leadership invests in training. So why aren’t dispensaries investing in training for their staff?

My theory is that much of the training out there hasn’t been adapted to a retail setting, so it’s not very valuable to dispensaries. It’s not sales training — it’s compliance and product knowledge-based. Which is important information for a budtender to know, but it’s not helping dispensary leadership teach their staff about the actual brands and products in the store.

When we wrote our budtender training course, Root Knowledge: A Budtender’s Guide to Cannabis, we left out the compliance (which varies from state to state) in favor of information that would prepare any new budtender for the wide range of questions they will be asked.

Then, when we expanded into our dispensary program, A Trainer’s Guide for Cultivating Dank Budtenders, we turned to gamification to help staff trainers connect that basic knowledge — foundational cannabis science, product knowledge, sales, and customer service techniques — with the vendors in their unique market.

Here’s the thing about gamification. A Harvard Business School study found that gamifying education — turning training into fun, interactive, challenge-based learning experiences — increases employee engagement, information retention, new clients, and even revenue. The data also suggests that leadership involvement in a gamified training platform correlates to higher performance among the group.

Budtenders already love to learn about the plant. When we develop ways for them to have fun learning, we’ll have budtenders who are not only well-educated but also highly motivated and engaged, which leads to better service, loyal customers, and more sales.

And what sort of learning tools speak to the stoner mind?

Games! Pop quiz questions! Scavenger hunts! Role play!

A role play scenario, for example, might look like the trainer saying, “I’m a woman in my 60s looking for something to help me sleep. I don’t want to inhale anything, and I can’t eat sugar.” The budtender would search for a product that would help her find rest according to those parameters.

Utilizing these sorts of activities allows new hires to build connections with the hundreds of products in a dispensary quickly and deepens basic cannabis knowledge to a practical, useful level. Not only that, this practice prepares budtenders to think on their feet to find products that satisfy each customer.

These games can even be used beyond an onboarding training period. Staff trainers can use scenarios and product scavenger hunts intermittently throughout a month or quarter to keep the team on their toes and feeling sharp. New options can even be written to help train a crew beyond the basics, such as on new vendors or product types.

Sales training works, and the cannabis industry is still establishing standards for what this should look like. It’s clear from my early days in the industry — comprehensive budtender training is essential, yet it’s largely missing from multiple markets across the U.S.

When dispensary owners invest in budtender training programs, they will empower staff to confidently guide customers, setting a new standard for cannabis retail and ensuring the industry’s continued growth. It’s time for dispensaries to prioritize effective budtender education.

Got an opinion on this topic, or something else pressing in the cannabis space? Submit your opinion piece today for consideration!

Photo by Cova Software on Unsplash

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