CBE’s Tech Stack Consideration List: Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software

Anybody who has worked in cannabis sales can tell you the first thing about the business is managing relationships. Beyond a financial transaction, a dispensary’s relationship with its customers is built on trust, practicality, and good service.

The same can be said of that business’s relationship with its software providers. Every dispensary has its own unique needs when it comes to customer relationship management (CRM) software, with major differences between smaller mom-and-pops and large multi-state operations. That relationship needs to be built on trust that the software will operate as advertised; be practical to use for dispensary staff, management, and ownership; and provide good value to the store’s operations.

To help you get started in your CRM partner-finding journey, Cannabis Business Executive has compiled its top CRM service providers for retail operators of all shapes and sizes.

For content creators and frequent messengers: springbig

With its SMS and email marketing features, brand marketing tools, and consumer and patient analytics, springbig is one of the top CRM platforms in cannabis today. As springbig CEO Jeffrey Harris told CBE in November, “We’re as much a communications platform as we are a loyalty platform.”

By getting dispensary customers to sign up for the loyalty program and collecting their demographic and purchase data, springbig enables retailers to segment store visitors by various metrics, and target those customers in relevant marketing campaigns (via email, text message, or push notification), all from the springbig platform.

springbig also allows product brands to tap into that engaged customer pool and send targeted messages via text that also boost dispensary partner sales. By integrating with POS systems, retailers can also target messaging to only the relevant audiences to maximize marketing dollar ROI.

For all its CRM, loyalty, and messaging features, retailers may be forced to reconsider springbig at the register: subscriptions start at $400 per month (after a $950 setup fee), and increase by approximately $100 per month per additional location. The price escalates for text message marketing services: that feature can cost more than $10,000 per month depending on the number of messages sent and their frequency. The company signs customers to annual contracts, so retailers will need to be mindful of potential market downturns when budgeting for services.

For just about everything: Flowhub

Flowhub is mainly a POS service, but its revamped Maui platform offers CRM features that make it worth a look as an all-in-one marketing and sales platform.

For starters, the company’s Greet app–its customer check-in and POS queue tool–allows medical patients and recreational customers to sign up for the store’s loyalty program at check-in, streamlining that process so budtenders can focus more on answering the customer’s needs rather than pushing a rewards program. The app also allows customers to leave notes for budtenders to further facilitate conversations.

While CRM is not the company’s core competency, Maui also integrates with other CRM and rewards platforms, allowing retailers to view various datasets in one platform. Flowhub’s in-app analytics tools also can help retailers identify and better target consumer segments

Flowhub licenses its software package on a custom pricing model based on transaction volume, sales, and market, with social equity discount pricing available for qualifying licensees. “Our platform is built for interstate commerce. So when interstate commerce opens up, we can flip a switch and you can transfer products among all stores across the entire supply chain,” company founder and CEO Kyle Sherman told CBE in October.

For covering the basics: Dispense

An Ecommerce platform first, Dispense is another platform whose CRM features warrant consideration, especially for retailers shopping for their entire tech stack. Borrowing from its parent platform, Tablelist, Dispense’s CRM features include online chats (with recorded history), visit, order, and spend history tracking, and allows retailers to categorize customers by key demographics, including senior and veteran statuses, birth dates for rewards, and whether they are subscribed to a loyalty program. This customer data can be combined with Dispense’s Ecommerce tool to create SEO-rich content that connects the right customers with the right products.

What might be most useful to data-savvy retailers is that Dispense data is downloadable in CSV format, allowing them to find further insights into their data. (Admittedly, this feature also shows the limitation of Dispense’s in-app analytics, but this is a decent tradeoff depending on an operation’s in-house skills). For co-founder and CEO Kyla Sirni, it’s more about retailers “owning customer relationships,” as she told CBE in early December.

At $500 per month, per location, Dispense can be a cost-effective option for smaller operations (1-5 locations), but it does offer fewer CRM features compared to other companies on this list, especially when it comes to customer outreach. But it covers the basics and the native Ecommerce tool can help curate a strong digital customer experience.

For wholesalers and brands: Outfield

Outfield is a different kind of CRM platform compared to others on this list, but it is targeting a section of the market that these others are not: brands, distributors, wholesalers, and cultivators.

Outfield is a gamified CRM tool for field sales reps–those that conduct educational vendor days for product brands, fulfill sales orders during in-store visits, or perform the dreaded cold sales calls. 

“You can essentially take a person’s visit, understand what they did, who they spoke with, and what they accomplished at a particular event,” Outfield CEO Austin Rolling explained to CBE  earlier in December.

By gamifying the platform, Outfield manages to overcome the “Big Brother” fear and gains buy-in from sales users. The results of that participation include sales insights for wholesalers and distributors, and an intrinsic motivational tool for individual reps.

The platform starts from $14.99 per user per month. The company is still getting acquainted with the cannabis industry, its track record in other high-volume sales industries, like nutraceuticals, consumer electronics, and CPG, gives it plenty of financial room to take its time to do things right as it continues to make inroads in the cannabis market.