Opinion / Guest Column
The following is an opinion piece by Eric Offenberger, CEO of multistate cannabis operator Vext Science. The views are the author’s own and do not reflect High Times’ reporting. It originally appeared in Cannabis Confidential, Todd Harrison’s Substack, where Offenberger is a guest contributor, and is republished with permission.
An MSO operator argues the industry spent a decade funding the wrong discipline. The customers were always there. The job was never persuasion, it was conversion.
The Pitch and the Close
Cannabis operators have been spending money to solve a problem we don’t have. The problem we were told we had was a demand problem. The new adult-use consumer had to be persuaded. National cannabis brands were going to emerge the way they did in alcohol after Prohibition. Whichever operator got the packaging and the lifestyle photography in front of consumers first would own the category for a generation.
It was a clean story. The industry bought it. A lot of capital went out the door against it. But it was the wrong story.
The customers for cannabis already existed. They had existed for a long time. The work in front of an operator was never persuasion. It was conversion.
Anyone who has ever run a sales floor knows the difference. There is the pitch, getting someone interested who wasn’t. And there is the close, taking the transaction from someone whose interest is already there. Two different jobs, two different sets of people. Cannabis operators have staffed for the pitch when the work has always been the close.
I argued in April that the licensed retail door is the structural moat in this industry. This piece is about what wins inside that door: which discipline produces returns, why most of us have been funding …
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Author: High Times Contributors / High Times
