Scratchpad nabs $33M Series B to continue building sales workspace

Scratchpad, a startup that is building a tool to make it easier for salespeople to enter data into Salesforce, has expanded that mission to give access to the information it’s collecting to the whole revenue team. Apparently, investors were pleased with that expanded approach, and the company announced a $33 million Series B today.

Previous investor Craft Ventures led the round with participation from Accel. The round follows the company’s $13 million A round a year ago and a $3 million seed in Fall 2020, bringing the total raised to almost $50 million.

Company co-founder and CEO Pouyan Salehi says that the funding is directly related to the product expansion, which has resulted in increased usage and sales. “The interesting part was it really evolved from just this single player tool if you will, or a single player mode, where an individual salesperson sees a lot of benefit to all of a sudden that benefit being felt and being visible across the entire revenue team,” he told me.

That has resulted in better penetration inside customer companies and larger deals. “This idea of a revenue team workspace that was really just a nugget of an idea a year ago, seems to have really started to take hold across these revenue teams,” he said. The end result is this product expansion has become core to the company’s growth strategy.

The startup is continuing to employ a bottoms-up sales approach, where they use a free product to attract sales people, who then act as brand ambassadors spreading the product inside the organization. The approach appears to be working with Salehi reporting tens of thousands of users inside thousands of companies using the product.

“These organizations have adopted Scratchpad for managing their sales pipeline, taking and sharing notes, working their to-dos, forecasting with their managers, making handoffs between teams easier and collaborating with their revenue teams more effectively,” according to the company’s description of the product.

As the number of users has grown, the company has grown from around 10 employees to close to 50 today with plans to add more over this year as growth allows. One big way the company looks for diverse candidates is by looking at competencies and motivations, rather than experience that correlates directly to a tech startup.

“What this has done is open the door to hiring folks that traditionally may not have looked like they were a fit on paper. And that’s worked out incredibly well for us because we’ve been able to hire folks that have no experience in software, no experience in technology, no experience in sales, but have still come from backgrounds or experiences like retail, hospitality or therapy, that on paper is a big jump to technology, but we’ve been able to unpack what makes somebody successful here,” he said.

Among the companies using the product today include Allstate, Twilio, Pitchbook and Talkdesk.