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Scratchpad, a company that has built a modern productivity workspace on top of Salesforce, has raised $33 million in a series B round of funding.
While Salesforce remains one of the most used customer relationship management (CRM) tools, claiming an estimated one-fifth of the CRM market, this doesn’t always translate into popularity — “clunkiness” and a “lack of user-friendliness” are just some of the common complaints that abound.
Founded in 2019, Scratchpad essentially builds on Salesforce’s utility, serving busy salespeople with the tools they need to get their job done more quickly — less switching between tabs and apps, and more time selling, is the name of the game.
A typical workflow involving a Salesforce user might involve keeping notes in separate Word or Excel documents, and then copy/pasting sections into Salesforce as required. With Scratchpad, users can get access to features spanning notes, spreadsheets, tasks, Kanban boards, search, deal collaboration and more, all consolidated under a single interface on top of Salesforce, and sold as a SaaS subscription.
“Salespeople are overloaded with technology and tools like CRM software, call recording, email sequencing, note taking, and much more,” Scratchpad cofounder and CEO Pouyan Salehi told VentureBeat. “Yet, most [sales] reps still use general-purpose spreadsheets, docs, note apps, and task managers to do their jobs, only to then suffer from hours of manual data entry to update their CRM to appease their managers.”
The San Francisco-based company has claimed a slew of big-name customers over the past few years, including Algolia, Ironclad, Quora, Twilio, and Udemy.
“Our mission is to make salespeople happy — happy salespeople drive more growth, foster better cultures and team dynamics, and create delightful customer experiences for their businesses,” Salehi added.
Up to scratch
Scratchpad had previously raised around $16 million, the bulk of which arrived via its $13 million series A round last year. With another $33 million in the bank from existing investors including Craft Ventures and Accel, Scratchpad is strongly positioned as it looks to capitalize on recent momentum which has seen it bring a slew of new products to market. These include Scratchpad Command, which allows users to update Salesforce from anywhere on the web; a new unified workspace for calendar, sales notes, and Salesforce; and a workspace commenting system for sales teams.
“Scratchpad is becoming a must-have for the sales team tech stack,” Salehi said. “This means account executives, sales reps, revenue operations, sales leaders, sales enablement, and customer success teams finally have a modern unified workspace connected to Salesforce that makes salespeople happy and helps revenue teams produce more.”
As a $200 billion-plus company today, Salesforce’s success over the past two decades can be attributed to a number of factors — chief among them, perhaps, has been the ecosystem it has nourished, with support for third-party applications and integrations through AppExchange and countless companies building million-dollar businesses off the back of the Salesforce platform.
Scratchpad serves as a further example of the Salesforce network effect. But it also acknowledges several truths — that Salesforce is the dominant CRM, but not everybody enjoys using it; that they typically use multiple tools in tandem with Salesforce; and they waste a considerable amount of time on repetitive admin.
“Revenue teams are literally paying their reps to complete administrative work instead of revenue-generating work,” Salehi said. “Worse yet, the data quality in most CRMs remains poor, and sales process adherence is mostly a dream creating drag across the revenue team. This drag slows salespeople down, keeps revenue teams from operating at peak performance, cultivates unhappy salespeople who often sell less and churn, and can yield poor experiences for customers.”
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