Chattanooga Shooting Supplies started 40 years ago, when two hobbyists decided to turn their passion into a business. Today it's one of the fastest-growing distributors in the US firearms industry, with a B2B2B model that runs on its sales force — 30% of the company's 130 employees.
At a glance
- Industry
- Retail
- Employees
- 130
- Website
- chattanoogashooting.com
- Proton products
- CRM
That model works when reps know their customers cold. In 2022, Director of Sales Adam Crews was looking at three roadblocks that threatened to stunt further expansion.
The challenge: everything was locked up in reps' heads
Knowledge hoarding. What Chattanooga knew about its customers — their target markets, their business goals — was never written down. If a rep left, the company would have to rebuild those relationships from the ground up. “When a sales rep left, we'd have to start from scratch, which would lengthen our sales cycle significantly,” Adam said.
“One of the things that kept me up at night is everything was locked up in our sales reps' heads. In order to grow, we need to know our customers better and understand their target markets.”
Adam Crews · Director of Sales, Chattanooga Shooting SuppliesRushed relationship-building. The transactional side of the business left reps little time to build meaningful relationships with clients who were preoccupied with their own customers. The top reps managed to sell consultatively anyway. Hitting the growth goals meant getting that from the entire team.
Customer and product retention. Chattanooga was good at securing new business and nurturing it; holding on to it long-term was harder. A decrease in a customer's orders, a halt in regular product purchases — the early warning signs got missed.
Why Proton: a full customer view, and a smoke alarm
Chattanooga needed something that would hold on to institutional knowledge and help reps build stronger relationships in the limited time they had — and it wanted that from every rep, not just the top ones. Proton CRM stood out on four counts.
A 360-degree customer view. Proton gives reps a complete picture of each customer's activity, so nobody burns time rummaging through old data to prepare for a call. The information is there when they open the account, and the time goes into consultative selling instead.
A smoke alarm for at-risk accounts. Proton proactively flags accounts in danger of slipping away, so reps can prioritize the customers most likely to leave and act before the business is gone.
“Proton's like a smoke alarm. If we see at-risk customers, I can call on my sales managers and say ‘Something's going on here, we're dropping off.'”
Adam Crews · Director of Sales, Chattanooga Shooting SuppliesPredictive analytics. Proton surfaces the opportunities and the risks nobody has spotted yet — sometimes not even the customer.
“We work with a customer who has a heavy ecommerce presence. We noticed a significant dip in their sales from one brand, so we reached out,” Adam said.
“We asked, ‘Hey, what's happening? Have you switched to a competitor? Is there something wrong with our pricing?' They hadn't even noticed the drop. On investigating, they found it was an SEO issue, which they fixed. We helped them identify a problem that, once resolved, boosted sales for both of us. That's what a true partnership looks like.”
Due-to-reorder reminders. Most of Chattanooga's customers follow regular order patterns, which makes any deviation a red flag. The reminders put that deviation in front of a rep in time to keep the order — and the account.
Before
With Proton
Rep knowledge
BeforeTarget markets, goals, and history lived in the rep's head — and left when the rep did.
With ProtonDocumented in Proton, so the next rep inherits the account instead of starting from scratch.
Call prep
BeforeReps dug through account history and juggled gap reports to work out who needed a call.
With ProtonThe Proton Score ranks customers by priority; reps hop on and start reaching out.
A slipping account
BeforeA decrease in a customer's orders, or a halt in regular purchases, went unnoticed.
With ProtonProton flags the account early — the smoke alarm — and a rep calls to ask what changed.
The results: a full day of extra sales, every month
Adam measures the change in sales days.
A full day of extra sales per rep, every month
“Proton's added one day's worth of sales per month,” Adam said. “Sales reps are getting a full day of extra sales revenue attributed to Proton.” At a company where the sales force is 30% of headcount, that compounds quickly.
No more “who do I call first?”
The Proton Score ranks customers by priority, which retired the ritual of assembling account history before picking up the phone. “The Proton Score means our sales reps don't need to dig through account history or juggle gap reports anymore,” Adam said.
“They simply hop onto Proton, see which customers are at-risk, and start reaching out. It's like Proton's answering the ‘who do I call first?' question for you.”
New reps productive without a book of relationships
“Our top Proton user is one of our newest employees,” Adam said. “When she first joined, she struggled with not having established relationships. But Proton's predictive analytics helped her understand what our customers should be buying, which made her much more effective.”
The first recruit to be onboarded with Proton went on to outperform every other newcomer who wasn't.
Account health managers can actually see
Managers used to juggle multiple screens and data points to work out how an account was doing. Now the overview comes out of Proton in one place, accurate and detailed — so at-risk customers get attention early, and management gets to be proactive instead of reactive.
What’s next: vendor reports and day-one onboarding
Adam sees Chattanooga's adoption of AI as the company's competitive advantage, and he's blunt about why.
“I saw a quote the other day: ‘You're not going to lose your job to AI. You're going to lose your job to someone that's using it.' That's where we're at. We want to be out ahead of our competition by doing things differently. And we know that we're leading this charge within our industry.”
Adam Crews · Director of Sales, Chattanooga Shooting SuppliesThe next step points Proton at vendors as well as customers. Proton's vendor reports let Chattanooga show, with concrete data on pitch frequency and success rates, exactly what it delivers for the brands it carries — the case for being a strategic ally rather than another route to market.
And as the company grows, every new sales rep gets onboarded with Proton from day one, so the value shows up sooner.
The bottom line: consultative selling from the whole team
Chattanooga set out to get customer knowledge out of individual heads and to catch accounts before they slipped away. It got both — plus a full day's worth of extra sales revenue per rep, every month, and new hires who are effective before they've built a single long relationship.
Simpler work for the reps, better conversations for the customers. That's what the next stretch of growth is built on.
