Scratchpad, a startup that has a tool to make it easier for salespeople to enter data into Salesforce, has expanded that mission to give the entire sales team access to the information it collects. This broader approach has had investor support that has produced a Serie B of 33 million dollars.
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 the fall of 2020, bringing the total raised to almost 50 million.
Company co-founder and CEO Pouyan Salehi says the funding is directly related to product expansion, which has resulted in increased usage and sales. “The interesting part was that it really evolved from a single-user tool, where an individual seller collects a lot of benefits, and all of a sudden that benefit is visible across the entire sales team. , "He said.
That has resulted in better penetration within companies and larger deals. “This idea of a sales team workspace that was really just an idea a year ago seems to have started to take hold with these teams,” he said. The end result is that the expansion of this product has become the center of the company's growth strategy.
The startup continues to employ a bottom-up sales approach, in which they use a free product to attract sellers, who then act as brand ambassadors spreading the word about the product within the organization. The approach appears to be working with Salehi reporting tens of thousands of users within thousands of companies using the product.
“These organizations have adopted Scratchpad to manage your sales pipeline, take and share notes, work on your to-do's, forecast with your managers, facilitate handoffs between teams, and collaborate with your sales 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 around 50 today, with plans to grow this year as growth allows. A great way the company looks for diverse candidates is by looking at competencies and motivations, rather than experience that directly correlates to a tech startup.
“What this has done is open the door to hiring people who traditionally didn't seem to fit the role. And that worked incredibly well for us because we've been able to hire people who don't have a background in software, technology, or sales, but still come from backgrounds or experiences like retail, hospitality, or therapy, which on paper is a huge leap into technology. , but we've been able to figure out what makes someone successful on the team," he said.
Companies using the product include Allstate, Twilio, Pitchbook, and Talkdesk.
