- Before
- Before Proton, Johnstone Supply Cafferty Group tracked bids in forwarded emails and individual notes. Asked how many bids they were working, some reps would guess. Quotes went out, and follow-up depended on memory.
- What changed
- Today every bid lives in one shared record in Proton CRM, and branch managers get an email listing their customers’ open quotes.
- Result
- The company can now put a number on how many quotes it wins: a close rate that Travis Reed, the company’s hydronics specialist, puts at 15% to 20%, up from about 8%.
Before Proton, the workflow lived in people’s heads
Brett Stolz, the marketing support specialist who brought Proton to the company, said a refrigeration job could come down to one person: “It’s only one person that knows the information of what’s going on.” When that person was on PTO, the customer might have to wait. “In our industry, we don’t want to have anyone waiting,” Stolz said.
Years ago, when a sales director died unexpectedly, the account history in that person’s notebook, computer and memory went too. Staff scrambled. “[We had] to figure out what happened with this, what was promised here, what was done here,” and customers felt it.
Proton CRM is how Johnstone started pulling that knowledge out of people’s heads and into one record.
“Maybe 10 or 20 or something like that”
In this story, a bid is a job a contractor wants priced, and a quote is the price that comes back. A bid at Johnstone usually starts when a contractor talks to a store manager or an outside sales rep. It goes to a specialist in hydronics, HVAC equipment, refrigeration or geothermal, who builds the quote and sends it back to the rep. The rep sends it to the customer. A single job can need three specialists at once.
Before Proton, that handoff ran on email.
“I would get an email and then if I saw something, I would share the email with somebody else and it was an email chain,” said Travis Reed, the company’s in-house hydronics specialist. He compared it to the telephone game, where the word “doesn’t go around the same way.”
The quote was where the trail usually stopped.
“Our outside sales guys would send the quote to the customer, and then they didn’t have any way of tracking to follow-up all these jobs that they did,” Reed said. If a contractor called about a job’s history, the answer depended on whether the rep kept personal notes.
Nobody could say how much was out there, either.
“We didn’t track anything before that,” said Stolz. Asking reps for a count often wasn’t helpful: “Even asking them, ‘how many bids are you working on?’ [They’d say] ‘I don’t know. Maybe 10 or 20 or something like that.’”
The reminder email managers now watch for
Branch managers at Johnstone now get an email from Proton listing the open quotes for their customers. Some of what’s on it surprises them.
Reed described the reaction: “Oh, I had a six-figure quote. What was that for? Oh, cool. We need to follow-up on it.” Then he added: “They never did that before. Ever.”
Managers now watch for that email. “They get really upset when they don’t get that email,” he said.
The hydronic specialist: one bid record instead of an email chain
Reed designs radiant floor systems and quotes hydronic jobs. He doesn’t call on customers. Outside reps do, and he’s their in-house expert.
He came in skeptical. A former manufacturer rep, he had used several CRMs, most recently monday.com, which his old team customized heavily.
“I was a little leery at first,” he said, about Proton.
In Proton CRM, a bid enters the pipeline when it starts and stays in one record. Specialists are added as owners when a job needs them, so a job that mixes hydronics, HVAC and geothermal carries all three on the same opportunity. Anyone tied to the account can see what was done and what wasn’t.
“It kinda holds accountability, but it also kinda holds an information download instead of going, oh god. What email was that from? Where’s my notes on my paperwork?”
Now he logs most notes with Pronto, Proton’s AI assistant, from his phone. He says who the note is about and what happened. Pronto types it, reads it back for him to confirm and attaches it to the account. “I didn’t have to look it up on the computer. I didn’t have to go into it,” he said. “I just told Pronto to do it, and it tied it in.”
Reed now coaches outside reps to leave themselves a trail.
One rep was bidding glycol for a contractor about 90 minutes from the nearest store, and wanted to save boilers for a later visit. Reed told him to log a call note with a follow-up. “The next time you go to that customer, you’ve got that note in there saying, yes. This is what we talked about last time, and I’ve created that follow-up.”
Reps who see a customer every month or two often now know exactly how to pick up where they last left off.
Reed counts a growing number of outside reps using call notes this way regularly.
Store teams found their own use. An assistant branch manager asked if he could assign tasks to store employees. Two stores now assign tasks by name, set due dates and check them off.
Counter staff can leave an outside rep a note to bring certain literature on the next visit.
“I’m pretty impressed with everything that’s actually been able to do,” Reed said. “It really has opened up a lot more on the CRM side.”
The CRM champion: “Your customer is going to be serviced no matter who they talk to”
Stolz runs the website, e-commerce and third-party integrations such as ServiceTitan. He uses Proton CRM less for bids and more for account conversations, and he logs every one.
“I’m the one that brought Proton in because it’s like, you can’t have a larger organization, which is what we are, and not have people understand what’s going on or what conversations are going on.”
Brett Stolz · Marketing Support Specialist, Johnstone Supply Cafferty GroupWhen he helps a contractor set up ServiceTitan, the note goes on the account. The territory manager, outside rep, inside rep or branch manager who talks to that contractor next can see it and ask how it’s going.
The PTO problem works the same way now. A teammate opens the account and answers the customer, or promises an answer shortly and knows where to find it. “It has saved us a couple of times,” Stolz said.
“You have to put the information in there, but when it’s in there, everyone can use it,” he said. “Your customer is going to be serviced no matter who they talk to because that information is there.”
The team is pushing that idea into relationships, too.
Johnstone loaded its own version of the Mackay 66, a set of questions for getting to know a customer, into Proton. When a rep talks through a visit, Pronto files the answers into the matching fields: a contact’s family, hobbies, favorite team. A rep covering an unfamiliar account can open the profile and start with “Hey. How’d those Vikings do?”
A measurable close rate that leads to more wins
Reed put the company’s close rate on quotes at roughly 15% to 20% and said it’s growing. Before Proton, the team had no way to track it, but he estimated it would “close maybe eight percent.” The team now has a number to push on, and the first lever is follow-up.
Stolz put it plainly.
“Well, first thing, because we don’t follow-up with people,” Stolz said. “We’ll send it out there, and we’ll just say, they’ll get to us if they want it. It’s like, no. Hound them. Talk to them.”
Outside reps rarely open Outlook or schedule tasks, so nothing held them to a follow-up. When Proton was introduced, at least a quarter of them said the reminders would be “perfect,” Stolz said.
The reminder email to branch managers is the first piece of that discipline in place.
What comes next: Eclipse, and starting with the CRM
Johnstone is moving from DDI to Epicor Eclipse. Stolz made that move a reason to buy a third-party CRM. Customer history in DDI’s built-in CRM wouldn’t transfer cleanly, and Eclipse’s CRM lacks the features the team wanted.
“Proton is gonna be here. No matter what information we put in it, it’s gonna live in Proton. It’s not living in DDI. It’s not living in Eclipse. It is in Proton.”
Brett Stolz · Marketing Support Specialist, Johnstone Supply Cafferty GroupJohnstone expects the record to survive the move to Eclipse because it lives in Proton, not in either ERP. Quote numbers will change, so the team plans to readdress open quotes or attach the PDF to the Proton record.
For Reed, the migration is the clearest case for keeping the record in Proton. “It’s not changing,” he said. “It’s the ERP that’s changing.”
