Startup Scratchpad launches workspace commenting system for sales teams

Sometimes companies need an app that can reach over and around other siloed apps inside a workspace to make important connections for their revenue teams.

This is what Scratchpad had in mind when it launched itself and its enterprise CRM platform two years ago. Today the San Mateo, Calif.-based company added to the product what it claims is the first workspace commenting system designed and built expressly for those sales teams. This functionality eliminates the annoying process of searching for and commenting on data and messages in Slack and Chatter while providing the ability to switch easily between messaging apps, Salesforce, calendar, email, notes, docs, and sheets.

It's pretty simple: Every iota of communication simply shows up in the all-inclusive Scratchpad workspace, the first place a sales professional will look each morning.

It can be difficult and time-consuming for sales team members to memorize all the protocols, rules, passwords, and everything else that goes with using sales and collaboration applications on a daily basis. Add the constant pressures of meeting sales goals and other performance metrics, and the job can be daunting indeed.

In sales organizations, easy and fast commenting across all channels for the revenue team is important to achieving success, especially as more sales organizations work remotely, Scratchpad CEO and co-founder Pouyan Salehi told ZDNet. 

"Collaboration tools such as Slack and Salesforce Chatter were never designed and built with sales teams and their workflows in mind," Salehi said. "They were adopted by sales teams because the rest of the company used them. They were bolted to existing sales workflows without consideration of the user experience for salespeople, which creates tremendous disruptions in speed, focus, and data access, while also adding unnecessary drag to the sales team."

Drag is a pervasive problem within most sales organizations, and many have decided to accept it as something they have to deal with, Salehi said. "Sales teams are often overwhelmed with numerous tools that are disconnected from each other and the central source of truth -- Salesforce. Collaboration tools and messaging apps not only contribute to tool fatigue, but they are also not designed for salespeople and their workflows," he said.

The impact is even more devastating when revenue teams are required to collaborate on deals and initiate handoffs across teams, Salehi said. This adds drag to the sales team, creating inefficiencies in collaboration and access to the data necessary to close deals, he said.

Scratchpad's workspace commenting system is designed to fit into existing sales workflows and is instantly connected and synced to Salesforce. Sales team members are relieved of the monotonous switching back and forth between apps, searching across channels and direct messages, waiting for pages to load, and cumbersome setup, Salehi said. This brings the entire team together in a unified revenue workspace that can be monitored 24/7 by a manager. 

Users can sign up for Scratchpad via Chrome plugin or as a web app.