September 24, 2026
If a customer comes to Tony Wehrs at Dakota Riggers with a part he doesn’t recognize, he uses his Meta glasses to snap a picture. Then he sends the photo to Pronto, the AI helper inside of Proton, to help get more information.
“If a customer brings in something and I have no clue what it is, I can snap a picture, feed it in there and it’ll give me 15 answers, or a link to a website where I can find it,” Wehrs said.
That product question is the last step in a chain that starts with the item master. Before Proton, fewer than 5% of Dakota Riggers’ SKUs had useful content in the company’s old catalog, according to Ben Kuhns, VP of Sales & Marketing.
The company’s growth had outpaced the detail in those records.
For nearly 45 years, family-owned Dakota Riggers has sold rigging, tools, fall protection, and safety equipment from Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Kuhns joined 21 years ago, when the company occupied part of one building and had just over 20 employees.
It now fills that building, has expanded into three others nearby, and is approaching 50 employees. It ships to at least 40 states in a typical month.
And now Dakota Riggers is using Proton.ai’s CRM and PIM modules, along with its AI assistant Pronto, to support its national ambitions.
“It’s just the little guy trying to take on the big guy,” Kuhns said. “We’re punching back.”
The company replaced its ERP in November 2024. The new system opened the door to live pricing, inventory, and customer data on a rebuilt e-commerce site.
It also exposed a problem that had been waiting inside the old ERP: the product data was nowhere near ready.
Three people at Dakota Riggers talked to Proton about using Proton CRM, Proton PIM, and Pronto. Kuhns owns the product data and the e-commerce rebuild. Casey Nickell is the sales manager and restructured the sales team this year. Tony Wehrs moved from the showroom to be the first person moved in a new inside sales team.
The foundation under all three is the same.
Proton PIM enriches the item master. The ERP holds live inventory, pricing, and quote history. Proton CRM and Pronto put all of it in the sales team’s workflow.
Kuhns’ problem was volume.
Dakota Riggers has more than 16,000 active SKUs and more than 25,000 inactive ones, some of them custom items that come back when a customer reorders. In the old ERP, a SKU might have a brief description, weight, and cost. Images and detailed attributes were rare, so the marketing team had to find them before a product could go online, and a rep with a detailed customer question went to a paper catalog or a manufacturer website.
“It could take a minute. It could take 30 minutes,” Kuhns said. Some answers required a call to the manufacturer’s rep.
Dakota Riggers sent Proton its active and inactive SKU lists. Proton PIM enriches each record with the specifications and attributes that match its product category, and Dakota Riggers reviews and approves the content before it moves into use. In the first demonstration, the team loaded Dakota Riggers’ own SKUs and generated roughly 50 attributes with a click. Finding the same attributes by hand could take anywhere from 10 minutes to two hours per SKU, Kuhns said.
“Beforehand, depending on the amount of SKUs, it could have taken a week, two weeks to gather all the relevant information and images,” Kuhns said. “Now with the PIM, farm to table, it could be a matter of hours.”
A large group of products used to force a manpower question: how many days and weeks would it take? That question is mostly gone.
“Now the floodgates are open,” Kuhns said. “Let’s put it all on.”
Nickell does not spend his day in the item master. He spends it asking Pronto questions about the business.
“What categories have we had the most success in? What accounts are doing well? What accounts are not doing well? Who’s making call notes? Who’s not?” Nickell said.
He asks what sales look like this week, and he uses the same tool for product questions: what Dakota Riggers has in stock for slings with a 21,000-pound vertical capacity, for example.
Before Proton, the answer to most of those questions lived in the ERP behind a part number and a purchase history search, or in someone’s head.
The follow-up problem was worse. A quote went out, and whether anyone chased it depended on memory.
“Whereas in the past, a lot of times you just kind of quote and forget,” Nickell said.
Reps now dictate call notes into the Pronto app. Tasks carry comments, so a rep can record that he reached out to a contact on a given date and the next teammate can see it. A quote that sits too long without an update gets a red flag.
The whole team sees the same pipeline.
“There’s a better cadence of following up on things with this because you can set up your tasks, your call notes, and then it’s a lot more of a priority because I can see it. The team could see it,” Nickell said. “Now everybody knows, hey, these quotes are outstanding.”
Nickell says Dakota Riggers is converting more quotes. Proton currently pulls in every quote ever written, including canceled ones, so a clean conversion rate depends on reps moving deals through the opportunity pipeline, a habit the team is still building.
He points to changed behavior: reps follow up, and customers give a yes or a no. In his words, there’s now visibility about what’s going on in the business day to day.
The old alternative was hoping for the best.
“Now at least you have an idea of what’s truly going on. And there’s a true follow up system to that.”
His own calendar changed, too. Nickell runs weekly sales meetings and builds the presentations for them; he pulls the data out of Pronto in seconds.
“Between call notes, researching product vendors’ availability, and then formulating my meetings, I bet I’m saving five or six hours a week,” Nickell said.
The time shows up as preparation.
“Now I have that extra time to get that preparation done,” he said. “It’s almost like I’ve come over prepared for those meetings now versus feeling like I’m getting down to the wire of preparation.”
Wehrs brings experience from the showroom, where customers ask detailed product questions and newer reps are still learning the inventory.
“Specific questions about PPE or rigging applications, Pronto does a really good job actually,” Wehrs said. “And the live inventory tracking there is huge, too.”
During training, the team tested Pronto with questions about in-stock slings and their specifications. Kuhns recalls a skeptical salesperson asking for an in-stock product that met a particular specification. Pronto returned ten matching SKUs.
“You could tell he was shocked by it,” Kuhns said.
In Nickell’s account of the training, the questions continued: choker and basket capacity, inventory, and the product sheet. Each answer led to another question.
“It gave people more of an understanding of, ‘Okay, if it knows this, what else does it know?’” Nickell said. Before, the same questions meant calling someone at the store, or sending an email and waiting for a reply.
For Wehrs, the questions do not stop at specifications. “Even just asking about what vendors provide which products. You can ask it that and it answers it fluently,” he said. “Rather than having to dig into the system, find a part number, look at purchase history, you can ask a question and have an answer in three seconds.”
The follow-up cadence also changes Wehrs’ conversations with customers.
“The only way you could follow up on a quote is if you either remembered it or made a note somewhere,” Wehrs said. “This holds you more accountable. I don’t know how we live without it, to be honest with you.”
At the time of the interviews, Dakota Riggers was preparing enriched product content for its rebuilt e-commerce site. The team expected customers to find more specifications on their own and ask fewer gap-filling questions. Those outcomes had not yet been measured.
At the time of the Casey/Tony interview, the sales team had turned on a trial of Proton’s Order & Quote Entry Automation, which reads incoming quote requests and builds the draft quote for a rep to review. Nickell said the team has not done much with it yet. For Kuhns, the products form a sequence: PIM prepares the product data, CRM brings it into the sales process, and order automation could remove more rekeying from quotes and orders.
“Once you start saving time here, you just look at yourself in the mirror,” Kuhns said. “Where can I save time anywhere else?”
“We’re not afraid of change, we’re not afraid to change things up,” Kuhns said.
