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SCRATCHPAD, WHICH DEVELOPS PRODUCTIVITY EQUIPMENT IN SALESFORCE FOR PRODUCT SALES TEAMS, RAISES $13M COLLECTION A LED BY HOBBY VENTURES

Home » News » SCRATCHPAD, WHICH DEVELOPS PRODUCTIVITY EQUIPMENT IN SALESFORCE FOR PRODUCT SALES TEAMS, RAISES $13M COLLECTION A LED BY HOBBY VENTURES

In case you work in sales, there’s a great chance Salesforce will be a crucial tool — the customer romantic relationship management (CRM) platform claims almost a fifth of the market in terms of income, more than triple its closest rival.

Yet pervasiveness doesn’t necessarily mean recognition, with common Salesforce problems ranging from “clunky UI” plus “too much data entry” to “it’s just not user-friendly. ” But one start-up is setting out to make Salesforce a more enjoyable and successful experience by building a modern work area directly on top of the CRM.

Launched out of San Francisco in 2019, Scratchpad has created the suite of productivity equipment spanning notes, spreadsheets, duties, Kanban boards, search, cooperation, and more. The company bundles all of them under a friendlier interface by which they can interact directly using their sales data plus workflows. Scratchpad is designed to release sales personnel to do them best and today announced they have raised $13 million inside a series A round regarding funding led by Put together Ventures, with participation through Accel. Craft Ventures’ David Carriers will now sign up for Scratchpad’s board.

“Most revenue teams contain highly trained and highly prepared salespeople spending more than half of time doing administrative work rather than selling, ” Scratchpad TOP DOG and cofounder Pouyan Salehi told VentureBeat. “Scratchpad decreases and nearly eliminates wearying admin time, increasing product sales performance across the organization. ”

Scratch that will

The Scratchpad platform was developed from “thousands of conversations with product sales professionals and designed particularly for their needs, ” Salehi mentioned. This includes Scratchpad Notes, which will sales reps can use throughout or after calls to report insights or collaborate together with others — and which in turn connects directly into Salesforce. The woking platform also offers different views intended for managing pipelines, such as a main grid view, which is basically in-line editing for Salesforce information, circumventing the need for spreadsheets.

Above: Scratchpad: Main grid view

Users can also produce Kanban boards to provide a more in depth overview of deals at every period.

Above: Scratchpad: Kanban board

Scratchpad offers a search interface that enables consumers to search for accounts, contacts, network marketing leads, notes, and more — this can include content stored in Gmail, Yahoo and google Calendar, Slack (which Salesforce is usually on the cusp of buying for $27. 8 billion), or the web.

“If you are searching for some sort of prospect on LinkedIn employing Google Chrome, you can simply use Scratchpad search to see if the prospect has already been in your Salesforce instance if that person’s details need to be current, ” Salehi explained. “Or if you’re looking at your date for an upcoming meeting with a client, you can access all of your appropriate Salesforce information related to the client directly from the calendar occasion without having to switch tabs in order to Salesforce. ”

Elsewhere, Scratchpad is designed together with collaboration in mind, enabling customers to share sales notes to members of their team — so if a sales management finalizes a deal, all sounds can be easily passed to the consumer service team.

Scratchpad operates a software-as-a-service (SaaS) business model, with tiers starting from free from the $39 per-user team arrange and onto the business system, which comes with customized costing. In terms of deployment, users can add an extension in order to Chrome or go through an ardent web app in any additional web browser. The user then wood logs into Scratchpad using their Salesforce credentials.

Environment

In truth, Salesforce is already a fairly extensible program, with AppExchange supplying a ton of integrations with thirdparty enterprise applications. In fact , Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff gave and trademarked the term “App Store” and registered typically the domain before gifting it all to Steve Projects ahead of Apple’s venture into the field of smartphones. Salesforce’s success within the last couple of decades is in huge part due to its partnership environment, with countless third parties building extremely successful businesses off the back of it.

So isn’t what Scratchpad is now offering already conceivable through other integrations? Not too, according to Salehi, who says the problem isn’t so much about extensibility as it is about usability.

“Usability is what issues most for revenue groups, ” he said. “It is why you see implementations regarding Salesforce with all sorts of custom remaking and extensions, and yet playing god of those customizations remains not of very good. In fact , we see a negative relationship between extensibility and end-user adoption. Many of these extensions really are primarily at the database level of Salesforce. Very few stretch to the user interface so they are definitely not optimized for end users. ”

While work flow will of course vary drastically between Salesforce customers, a large number of users will keep notes or even to-do lists in individual documents, such as Word, Surpass, or a Google Doc, and after that copy/paste the relevant text in to Salesforce. Alternatively, they may simply “stick with the status quo, ” as Salehi puts it, boost records directly in Salesforce.

“The unlucky reality is Salesforce is an incredible database but is not user friendly for the purpose of salespeople to actually use, ” he said. Scratchpad is normally ultimately looking to reduce the hrs wasted on admin.

In its short lifetime, Scratchpad has managed to hold a pretty impressive roster of shoppers, including Adobe, Autodesk, Field, Snowflake, Splunk, and Twilio. And while it was built purely with respect to Salesforce, the company is accessible to expanding its horizons down the road.

“We have plans to bring Scratchpad to CRMs, but today the pain is indeed deep and pervasive to get sales teams using Salesforce, we started there, ” Salehi said.

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