Purity Life is the leading distributor of natural health products in Canada, supplying over 14,000 SKUs to more than 7,000 natural health product retailers across the country, from four warehouses, with a team of 150+.
At a glance
- Industry
- Retail
- Employees
- 150+
- Proton products
- CRM
That catalog is the job. A rep with hundreds of accounts to call has to know what each retailer buys, what they’ve quietly stopped buying, and what they should be buying next — and before Proton, none of that lived in one place.
The challenge: a CRM with “no intelligence”
Purity Life’s legacy CRM gave leadership little visibility into sales activity or what customers actually needed. Getting the full picture of an account meant leaving the CRM for other systems and stitching the answer together by hand, which took time. The sales team ended up bogged down in account analysis and spending less of the day selling.
“It was an old license-based system installed on a server, and we struggled to update it to meet our needs. There was really no intelligence to our old CRM. It was just basic information: what’s the phone number, what’s the email, what’s the last interaction we had.”
Matthew James · CEO, Purity LifeMatthew went looking for a system that would streamline the work instead of holding the team back. That search led him to Proton.
Why Proton: built for distributors, and built to recommend
Three things separated Proton from the average CRM: it was built specifically for distributors, it handed the sales team recommendations, and it showed sellers what customers were browsing online.
“We have thousands of SKUs, hundreds of brands, and data across four warehouses. Proton processes this data and turns it into a meaningful format, allowing our sales team to make informed sales recommendations.”
Matthew James · CEO, Purity LifeThe point was never more data — it was less of it. “Salespeople don’t need the whole iceberg, just the actionable information to make their jobs easier,” Matthew said. “They have hundreds of accounts to call, so anything that reduces analysis time and increases customer interaction is a big win.”
Proton recommends products, tells reps which customers are due to reorder, and shows what a retailer browsed online but didn’t buy.
The platform also reached past the CRM. 40% of Purity Life’s customers purchase online, so an add-on that brought Amazon-style personalization to the company’s ecommerce site carried real weight in the decision. “With Proton, we could leverage AI to tailor the eCommerce site based on customer buying patterns,” Matthew noted.
The rollout: “relatively painless”
“In the whole scheme of things, it was relatively painless,” Matthew said. Proton’s in-house implementation team worked with Purity Life’s external ERP team to bring the key ERP data — transactions, quotes, products, customers — into Proton.
Matthew joked that his ERP provider usually complains about third-party integrations; with Proton, they had no issues.
Training was minimal, because the design didn’t demand much of it. Adoption showed up in the call numbers instead.
“Our reps don’t see Proton as a chore. We have a call target of 50 per week, but some reps are making double that. They’re going above and beyond because they can see their progress every day in Proton.”
Carly Albrecht · Inside Sales Manager, Purity LifeBefore
With Proton
Account research
Before25 minutes per customer, pulled together across three separate systems.
With ProtonMinutes — year-to-date sales, customer status, and buying patterns in one place.
Weekly task
BeforeAbout an hour, once a week.
With ProtonUnder ten minutes, so it happens every morning instead of once a week.
Campaign calls
BeforeTwenty minutes on a call to work through a promotion.
With ProtonFive minutes, with the discounts, promo names, and SKUs already in the campaign.
The results: two years of proactive selling
Over two years in, the numbers hold: 83% less time on administrative tasks, $32k more revenue per active user each month, and 69% of monthly users opening Proton daily.
Reactive selling turned proactive
Reps got their time back from data entry and analysis, and the commission math did the rest. “Our salespeople’s compensation is 50% commission-based,” Matthew said. “Giving them tools to make more money has been a win for everyone. Proton has helped us shift from a reactive to a proactive sales approach, driving significant increases in attributed revenue.”
Now a rep opens with something specific: “Hey, you haven’t ordered this product in X months. Are you buying it from another distributor, or did you forget to buy it? Do you need more?”
Hotter leads that weren’t on the radar
“Proton helps us get a good look at each retailer by showing us their year-to-date sales, customer status, and buying patterns,” Carly said.
“If a customer usually orders monthly but skips a month, Proton highlights this, prompting us to follow up. It identifies hotter leads that might not have been on our radar.”
25 minutes of research down to a few
Work that used to take 25 minutes per customer across three systems now takes minutes. “Proton pulls data from all three systems, so it’s just all in one place,” Carly said.
The bigger change is what that does to frequency: “A task that used to take about an hour once a week now takes me less than ten minutes, allowing me to do it every morning.”
Activity a manager can actually see
“I can track our sales team’s calls, who they pitched to, what they pitched, and the incremental revenue generated,” Carly said. “This daily tracking allows us to monitor progress and meet our targets.”
One place for everything about a retailer
“One of our inside sales reps was on vacation, and I had to send an urgent email,” Carly said. “With no previous history of the customer, I went into Proton and found all the necessary information to solve the issue promptly. It was a perfect example of Proton doing what it does best.”
The same history shortens onboarding: “When I transitioned from an inside sales rep to an inside sales manager, Proton made it easy for my replacement to pick up where I left off. All previous activities were available in one place.”
The bottom line: knowing which activities drive sales
What sets Purity Life apart isn’t the software — it’s that leadership noticed the old system had stopped serving the team and refused to settle for good enough. The goal was never to watch salespeople more closely. It was to understand which activities drive sales, then give the team what it needs to do more of them.
Two years later, the reps making double their call target aren’t being pushed. They can see their own progress every day — and with half their pay riding on commission, they have every reason to look.
