Most cannabis companies use third-party vendors to some degree.

Whether you are ordering raw materials from a supplier or indirectly selling your product through a dispensary, your vendors, and the relationships you build with them are instrumental to your short-term and long-term prospects.

In this article, we will give you three best practices that you can implement in your business to manage your marijuana vendors effectively.

3 Practices to Manage Marijuana Vendors

Vet Your Vendors Wisely

Managing your relationship with your vendors starts before you even agree to contract terms with them. While it can be difficult to assess your vendor’s service before signing a contract, there are lots of resources at your disposal that can inform your assessment.

Look at online reviews and talk to current customers to gain a better understanding of their business. Or, ask for key performance indicators to help you determine if the vendor is going to be reliable throughout the length of your agreement.

Understand Their Business

Although you don’t need to know everything about a marijuana vendor’s processes or business model, it is still important to have a basic understanding of their policies. This should also give you an idea of the challenges they face in fulfilling their promises.

The cannabis industry requires vendors to be flexible as companies figure out their ideal schedules and stock levels. If a supplier holds firm beliefs in flexibility, they might be a great fit for you. If they are a bit more meticulous with how they supply their customers and are not willing to compromise, perhaps they would not be the best fit. Understanding your vendor’s business, to some degree, eliminates potential headaches in the future.

Invest in Vendor Management Software

An investment into a vendor management software solution can be the difference between sanity and insanity for your requisition and sales team.

Using software to manage your vendor contacts, product listings, payment logs, and lab results save you the trouble of needing to build and maintain complex spreadsheets. These documents ultimately help organize your account receivable, account payable, inbound/outbound shipments, and delivery schedules.

The best vendor management solutions can even be used to create purchase orders and production orders to satisfy sales orders, stock levels, or forecasted demand. These systems are key to managing your supply chain effectively.

Implementing an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system like 365 Cannabis can help you manage your vendors along with your entire supply chain.

365 Cannabis comes equipped with robust CRM and distribution modules that manage your vendors, customers, contacts, and orders. It also contains integrated modules such as finance, cultivation, production, and retail that are all interconnected with each other to provide your business with real-time data across your entire company. 

Take managing your marijuana vendors one step further and schedule a demo to see 365 Cannabis’ vendor management solution for yourself.