In this interview, Steve, founder and CEO of Confident Cannabis, explains how his company— a software platform serving licensed cannabis labs and a B2B wholesale marketplace— faced growth stagnation despite a 60% market share among North American testing labs. To break through a saturated market of roughly 250 identifiable labs, they partnered with SaaSMQL to run an account‑based marketing (ABM) campaign that combined targeted email drips with direct‑mail gift boxes (branded mugs, coffee, and a one‑pager). SaaSMQL handled the entire workflow: lead list cleaning, copywriting, gift‑box fulfillment, UTM‑tracked landing pages, automated form routing, Slack notifications, and round‑robin sales scheduling. The campaign generated about 20 demo bookings—a ~10% conversion from emails and shipments—leading to 2–3 closed contracts with an average annual contract value of ~$12,000 and several more opportunities in the pipeline. Steve highlights the seamless technology integrations, the value of personalized direct mail in a niche market, and the strong ROI, noting that a single contract would have paid for the campaign. The discussion underscores the effectiveness of integrated, multi‑channel ABM for highly specific B2B audiences.
Chapters
So Steve, I want you to start, just tell us a little more about yourself and Confident Cannabis. What does your company do? What's your role there?
Sure. So I'm the founder and CEO of Confident Cannabis. My co-founders and I, we, we started the company about 5 years ago to help solve what we thought and believe still is the biggest problem in the legal cannabis industry. Which is trading business to business being too hard. And so Confident Cannabis is a software platform designed for legal licensed operators across North America. And we've helped them simplify their wholesale testing and trade. Uh, we have two products. One of them is our lab testing platform, which is used by about 60% of the operators in North America across 30 different markets. Um, our second product is our business to business wholesale marketplace. And that's currently only live in California and Oregon. We are based in California technically, although COVID, we've scattered all over the place now. And yeah, we're growing quickly with the market.
Yeah, you guys are in a great niche for sure, especially nowadays. And tell us a little more about the, you know, why did you reach out to us? What prompted you to started working with us and what was the goal that you were trying to achieve?
Yeah. So as I mentioned, we currently work with about 60% of the cannabis and hemp testing labs in North America. And that's both a good thing and a bad thing. It's, it's good to have a high market share like that, but it's, it's difficult to grow. And, uh, you know, even though the market itself is growing, there are a number of new labs starting all the time. It's hard to keep the growth rate up when you've saturated the market like that. So what we wanted to do was kind of go to the next level and really build an account-based marketing campaign where we can target our identified leads. And, you know, the list of labs is fairly short. There's only about 250 of them in North America. So there are only, you know, a few hundred leads that we would want to go after and they're fairly identifiable because the list of licensees are public in most states. And so, you know, just general kind of, you know, SEO, SEM, that's not really going to drive the— move the needle much. And so we wanted to target them specifically with an email drip campaign and, you know, direct mailing gifts and gift boxes. And so as I was looking online for different services who could provide just the fulfillment of the boxes, that was initially just what I was looking for. So sort of like a pack and ship company, and I was dreading all the work that we would have to do, you know, filling the boxes and printing FedEx labels and, you know, ordering the swag and all that stuff. Then I came across SAS MQL, who does— really just did it all for us. So, um, you know, I, I love the fact that you guys did a combination of email and direct mail. So you kind of synchronize those two campaign channels. Um, I know you do other channels like LinkedIn. LinkedIn isn't something that is as relevant for the cannabis industry. So we didn't use that part of your service. But, um, the fact that you kind of took it from inception, even the copywriting for the email campaigns, that was helpful. Took a lot off our plate. We have a small team and we have a lot to do, and so to not really worry about executing this was really appealing. And so yeah, we reached out and signed up with you guys, and we recently concluded the campaign for our lab account-based marketing, which is very successful. Happy to talk a little bit about that in a minute. And we're considering doing it for our B2B marketplace soon.
And yeah, we found from the beginning that you guys were the perfect candidate, both from an ABM type of strategy, obviously, because you have a very specific market and they're very well identified. Your targets are really well identifiable. And so we have to go very in-depth within those accounts. And like you said, we specialize in running this integrated campaign. So just sending the box usually doesn't cut it. It's great when you start combining multiple channels against the same audience, which is this 250 labs and the owners or other, other roles within those labs, and then try to engage them with this, uh, with this message across all the different channels. And, uh, yeah, in fact, we saw a lot of engagement was a combination of the emails, the direct mail, people going on the landing page and signing up, people replying to the email. And we saw it across the board, and actually we were pretty impressed by the, the level of engagement that we were we were having. Can you tell us more about the results of this program, what you're seeing from your end?
Yeah, yeah. So we did get a lot of engagements on the emails. I think part of the reason is because the targets that we're going after don't really get a lot of marketing, relevant marketing. The lab space is small and narrow, and to talk about cannabis lab software is very, very niche. They don't really get many people talking about that kind of thing. And so that's helpful. Also, people don't really send them gifts, and so to get a little box with a mug and some coffee that's nicely packaged and branded, I think was really helpful.
Yeah, and I was saying, we decided to go for you, I think we finalized on the nice little gift box with the mug and the one-pager just to share, kind of what the direct mail looked like. So this kind of the theme around this nice little gift box and your branded mug, branded box, and the one-pager describing your platform, that's what they received.
Yeah, yeah, and so people really enjoyed receiving that, they were flattered, and so they were happy to reach out and we had many, many demos. I think we got, something like 20 or so, which represents about 10% conversion rate of, you know, emails and box shipments to demos, which I think is pretty high. And then, you know, many of those demos ended up converting. Frankly, a lot of them, or maybe not a lot of them, but some of them were already in our CRM. We had contacted maybe a couple years ago and then just, you know, didn't followed through or hadn't followed up with them. And it turns out they, you know, in the meantime had probably gone with a different solution and then weren't happy. And then we just kind of got them at the right time. And they said, you know, perfect timing, we're reevaluating our software. Let's set up a call and we, you know, won several accounts like that. So all things considered, we probably generated, I mean, our average annual contract value is roughly $12,000 a year. It varies, but that's ballpark what it looks like. And so, even just signing one contract with this campaign with you would have made the campaign pay for itself. And I don't have the numbers off the top of my head, but I think we probably signed 2 or 3 by now. And then, you know, we've got like another 3 or 4 in the pipeline in some form of pitching or onboarding. High likelihood of converting those as well. So yeah, from an ROI perspective, this was a very worthwhile thing to do.
This is what we like to hear. At the end, you can generate engagement leads and all of that, but if you don't, if you're not able to convert them and you don't have the ROI, it's not something that's gonna be valuable. So it's great to see that they're actually closing and closing pretty fast. And the engagement was not just after they received the box, but they engaged throughout the sales process and actually became customers, which is great. And I saw we also got a lot of engagement, 20+ people that booked a demo, but there were many others that have a reply or maybe they're not ready yet or they might be in the future. So there was a ton of overall engagement from an account perspective. And then I'm glad to see that many of them converted. Down the funnel.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was great. You know, working with you and your team, you know, was also really, really great. I love the fact that you guys kind of get technology and integrations well. You know, we had a really nice pipeline of tools so people would, you know, get an email, click to a landing page, track it with the UTMs, fill out a form, Book a time with Candley, that would send a Slack message to us so we could have visibility and, you know, what's happening. And it would round robin between our sales reps according to their availabilities. And it was just all very, very seamless with very little kind of manual coordination there. And, you know, your help with, you know, cleaning the leads list, identifying potentially new leads, getting email addresses for everybody, doing all that web research and data entry. The Airtable that you created to share with us was very, very helpful as well. So yeah, the whole process was just very easy to work with and communicating with you over Slack was great. You were very responsive. Never really felt like you were too busy for us or anything like that.
That's awesome to hear. I'm glad that the automation that we created are working because we saw that if you're not able to quickly follow up, you want to have that instant notifications so that your team can immediately follow up when someone requests a demo or have a question. And so that's why we set up those automations from the beginning, and it's great to see that they're working and you get value from it. Steve, thank you for sharing the project and the results with us. Really appreciate it.
