As the cannabis markets open up and mature, having a go-to-market strategy becomes important. It is a crucial part of any business, including the cannabis industry, to understand how your business can generate revenue. For Tori, having a strong brand and a team that can help achieve marketing goals is extremely important because it reflects what your customers are saying and what they believe.

So, if you’re an aspiring cannabis entrepreneur, this episode is for you! We are joined by Tori Cole, who was the head of marketing at Cookies and is now the founder of Pono Consulting Company.

Tori and I worked together at a venture company, and the purpose of that company was to launch and create brands in the cannabis industry. I have to say, working with Tori was like earning a college degree because I learned so much. So, without further ado, let’s listen to what Tori has to say about marketing and business strategies for your cannabis business.

A Little Bit of a Background

Tori grew up in Hawaii, embracing her life as a local island girl. She was captivated not only by her beautiful surroundings but also by being close to people who built communities together. In addition, she mentioned that she comes from a traditional Asian Japanese background, where studying was always her primary focus.

“Marketing was really where my heart was, and I truly cut my teeth on marketing analytics,” she emphasized. She began working at HSBC, a major bank, in the credit card division, where she handled and analyzed vast amounts of data. Afterward, she worked at Egghead, the first online auction site, running all their email campaigns and various promotions. Eventually, at Intuit, she managed the full spectrum of marketing functions, except for PR. After seven years, she decided to pursue advanced degrees and earned her MBA from Cal.

Upon returning to Hawaii, she worked for Hawaiian Airlines, where she managed advertising promotions in the eCommerce Department. “Even though I had experience in tech, FinTech, and security tech, I was lucky enough to be brought into mesh brands,” she added. It was then that she entered the cannabis industry, joining Cookies, which she described as a great experience. During her few years there, she learned a lot about marketing brands in the cannabis industry. Now, she runs her own consulting company called Pono, working with cannabis and technology clients.

You can find out more about Tori on Linkedin.

What is Go-to-market?

 According to Tori, Go-to-Market is a term often associated with a B2B environment, referring to how an organization develops a strategy or plan to successfully commercialize or sell a product, whether it is a product launch or managing various routes to market. This process involves working closely with sales, partners, and marketing communications such as social media, email, mobile, website, and PR. It is an orchestration of all these elements to achieve your objectives.

“So, whether it’s a brand launch or a product launch, there’s always a planning cycle that you go through to ensure that people know the product or brand exists and that they want to buy it. You’re stimulating interest and making sure they have a place to go to purchase it,” Tori added.

She also mentioned the relevance of Go-to-Market strategies in our everyday lives as consumers. Tori said, “We go to the grocery store and learn about the products we like on TV. We experience this all the time. We already have a gut instinct, because we’ve been exposed to it so much, to understand the tactics or strategies we see to ensure that we can sell products and services.”

Additionally, she affirmed that a specific strategy is essential, as it clarifies who you’re targeting and how to coordinate efforts. This approach enables the entire organization to work in harmony, rather than having different teams working on different things at different times. Having a well-defined strategy helps to maximize resource spending, such as money, intelligently and monitor the results of the organization’s performance.

Product Launch vs. Brand Launch

Torri asserts that there are distinctions between the launches of a product and a brand. A brand is a perception in the minds of consumers about what an entity is and what it represents. In contrast, a product delivers a specific value to the consumer when there is some kind of value exchange, such as paying money. Products exist under a brand, and a product rarely exists without a brand.

Hence, when considering a launch for a brand in particular, you want to ensure that you’re influencing consumers’ perceptions of the brand and the benefits it may offer them. Tori explained that when launching a brand, you are focusing on people’s minds and their perceptions, and that is what you measure. When launching a product, more often than not, it is also commercially or economically driven.

How to take and read data?

“It depends on how big or small an organization you are, and whether it’s a brand or product launch,” Tori answered. She said that when it comes to brands, she usually looks at whether people know and can recognize them. When they see the brand and are able to recognize it, this is called aided awareness. In smaller organizations, you can measure data by checking the number of people typing in your URL and the number of times you might be mentioned on other websites or in publications.

For larger companies, they look for sentiment, which can also be measured on social media by assessing how many people are saying positive things about the brand and how many people are saying neutral or negative things. Bigger companies conduct sentiment surveys, and there might be some core tenets of the brand that are important to the brand managers and the organization to measure how closely they align with their desired brand positioning in the minds of consumers. Usually, these studies are conducted every quarter, every six months, or every year to observe changes.

Tori explained that a brand strategy is a path to ensure that your brand is perceived the way you want it to be. A launch usually embodies how you want to appear in the market and secure the consumer’s mind regarding what the brand is and how it’s different from other brands. Simultaneously, for product launches, your product roadmap should be closely tied to your brand and serve a particular target audience, so they can see that the product is related to your brand.

“Product launches usually have a lifecycle; they are launched, experience a significant increase in attention, and then you monitor how the product performs, mostly on an economic basis. Over time, interest might start to wane, so you need to ensure that you either maintain that or determine when the right time is for a new product or product refresh and ensure that consumers are comfortable with the transition,” Tori added.

Another data point to consider when making decisions is your staff and the people around you, such as your customers and budtenders. That’s why there are surveys like the voice of your employees or the voice of your customers, which provide crucial contextual data elements that you need to incorporate into your decision-making process. “So, even though we talk about the customer, the end consumer, all the time, there are many people across the value chain that are important to listen to, respond to, and deliver value for throughout the entire cycle,” Tori affirmed.

How to start your cannabis business?

Tori said that it goes back to just like core marketing and business principles. It’s important to know who you are and what you want to put out into the world. It’s also important to know what your brand really represents. “ It requires a little bit of elbow grease and commitment from you as the business owner, or somebody on the leadership team to really say what resources are out there for me, and how can I talk to people to really understand what their path to success is”, Tori added.

In addition to that, Tori believes that there are lots of programs and organizations that are geared to help beginners who want to start their own Cannabis business but it really requires some networking like getting out there talking to people. She mentioned that Cookies have their Social Impact Program and the company really supports how people across various sections of our country want to get into cannabis and get an education about it, and make the important context to really understand the entire supply chain.

Aside from Social Impact Program, there are a lot of programs out there willing to support startups so it’s important to look that up and give it a try and attend the meet and greets if you can and get your name out there.

What are the core values you must possess to succeed in the cannabis business?

Tori stated that she subscribes to many newsletters and enjoys reading to stay on the pulse of the cannabis industry. If you’re not a fan of reading, there are other media available for you to stay updated. She also mentioned that she is an avid follower of MJ Biz and has subscribed to Headset and BDS

“Observing what’s happening in the market can reveal opportunities or showcase organizations that are doing well. You can learn from the successes and failures of other organizations, as well as the challenges they face in their growth. It’s a crash course in what to do and what not to do. Even if you might not be directly involved, you still gain exposure to the industry.

Building your network goes hand in hand with this, as you can ask many questions based on your knowledge, which can take you far down the path of becoming an entrepreneur, securing funding and support from investors, or even launching a brand or product that fits a target audience. You will gain a lot from doing this type of research,” Tori explained.

Handling & Managing Your Team

When you have everything on the line, you already picked a product category, you’re about to launch a product, you get picked up by a couple of different stores and you might be thinking, what’s next, who would be the most critical hires? According to Tori, here are the important people to hire during a certain phase in your cannabis business:

• Marketing team – They are the ones that activate the demands. If you’re right on the mark, you’re continuing to grow, and your strategy is working great then having marketing to get your message out is important. Usually, your marketing team is the person or the group of people who play your conduit role in the buyer organization, your budtenders, they’re also the ones who run your social media or get your messages out over email or mobile messaging if possible.
• Sales – These are the people who have to go and sell the product. They usually work hand-in-hand with marketing to make sure that the sales velocity in the store is really happening and also that you’re picking up more accounts.

In addition, Tori talked about what tools she recommends when growing your team, how you communicate with them, and how to manage all the tasks. She said, “I’ve noticed in cannabis versus tech or anywhere else, texting and phone calls are the number one way to just stay in close communication. So I would say if you’re a highly organized person, just being able to track all of that to make sure that all of the things you need to execute. ”

She mentioned that when it comes to choosing the right tools, you can always pick tools that your people are comfortable using, and the bigger you are then the more shared tools you will need. According to her, the ones that she likes to use are the most simple ones like Google Chat or slack.

“Another surprising thing in the Cannabis industry for me was how quickly everything was moving, so if an opportunity falls into your lap today, you better take action on it tomorrow or the next day”, Tori explained. That’s the reason why she likes working in more agile frameworks which means you might not plan out the whole quarter or whole year but you have a real sense of what you’re doing. That’s why she loves using Trello, a project management tool where she just writes down a short description of what you’re trying to do, who’s assigned to it, and their dues dates. They look at it every single week and that’s how they take action on the most important things at the time.

We discussed the struggle of every business owner and company when it comes to managing and handling a staff especially since we already know that everything moves fast in the Cannabis industry this is what Tori said, “ the most important thing you can do to remove the struggle of getting confusions about each of their responsibilities and tasks is to have a regular meeting”. She also added, “My personal opinion is everybody should self-manage but it requires everybody to know what we’re solving for, what are key priorities to get their art that’s like what your strategy defines their role to deliver it and constant communication.”

Tori also highlighted that she uses 1:1 a lot, she likes to stay close not only with the whole team but also to know each of her staff more. Having a 1:1 conversation with them allowed her to find out if they are struggling with what they’re doing or obstacles with another person on the team because Tori believes that your job as a leader is to remove those obstacles, help and coach them so they can grow as leaders even more.

The Conversion Formula

One of the most important parts of our conversation is knowing to formulate your sales conversion. According to Tori, it’s important in any organization that you’re running or you’re a part of, to understand how that company makes money and the more transparent that is to the rest of the team, the better because they know well and what actions might influence the wholesale business.

“Usually it’s kind of a simple math equation like revenue, which is usually a function of how many customers you have, and how much they buy, and of those customers, it breaks out into how many people know about you, how many people are interested in you, and how many people buy from you. So it’s kind of like a conversion equation. On the other side of the people that buy, how frequently are they buying? How much is their order? How frequently are they coming back? So that’s the basis of lifetime value. Tori explained that all of it can be structured even into department levels.

The Potential for Non-Cannabis Businesses

“I would say the things that intrigued me most that I think people are trying to do is to like to look at what’s happening in non-cannabis as trends”, Tori stated. Especially after COVID, we see wellness through a different lens, the focus on ourselves, the focus on others, and the health-conscious attitude that we need to bring ourselves and quite honestly to the planet. 

Tori said that there are a lot of things to capitalize on in Cannabis, one of that is the packaging. We both noticed that cannabis packaging is so wasteful and from that, we can use a different material that is not only budget-friendly but more importantly environmentally friendly.

“ I think that is such an opportunity for cannabis that we did well on before the pandemic, especially for women and minorities. Having healthy conversations about how to make a product better, a brand’s better customer experience better, is the real strength behind an organization, which comes from having a diverse set of experiences. So I think that that is a missed opportunity for some organizations to foster that”, Tori asserted.

To learn more about Tori and this discussion check out our podcast episode:

I hope this has been helpful to you. Follow me on Ig @highsalwa and go to highSalwa.com to learn more, get some downloads and sign up for an email list and Listen to the High Class Podcast While you are there please leave a comment or suggestions for upcoming episodes.

If you’re competing, or you’re thinking about competing for a license, but don’t know where to start, I went ahead and cleaned up all of my application material, and updated a lot of it and you can get your own copy here: https://highsalwa.com/business-downloads.  It is what I use to win licenses in multiple different markets. I have cultivation, production, and retail that are currently available and I’m looking forward to adding more to give you a head start.