Scratchpad, a fledgling startup that has built a modern productivity workspace directly on top of the Salesforce CRM, has launched a new feature that lets users update Salesforce from whatever website they are currently on, without switching tabs.
The problem Scratchpad is looking to fix is that while Salesforce is the dominant CRM tool for sales teams, it's not always popular from a usability perspective. Scratchpad develops a suite of tools that integrate with Salesforce -- spanning notes, spreadsheets, tasks, search, and more -- bundles them under a nice interface, and sells them as a freemium SaaS subscription. Notable early enterprise customers include Adobe, Autodesk, Box, Snowflake, Splunk, and Twilio.
With Scratchpad Command, which is available for free as of this week, the company is now setting out to help sales teams avoid having to constantly switch between Salesforce and the various web apps they need to do their job. The key benefit Scratchpad Command offers is that users can not only access Salesforce data from any tab (e.g. to check whether a LinkedIn prospect they're researching is already in their Salesforce instance), they can now update their Salesforce instance from wherever they are.
How it works
First, the user has to install the Scratchpad extension for Chrome and authenticate themselves with their Salesforce credentials. They then have to activate Scratchpad Command during the setup process by checking the box.
After that, the user can hit Ctrl J (Windows), Command J (Mac) and the Scratchpad icon on the browser toolbar to be presented with a search bar that lets them search their Salesforce instance or create a new note, task, account, lead, opportunity, and more.
Scratchpad Command more or less brings the full functionality of Salesforce to wherever you are on the web with a single click. So if you're in Slack and a potential lead pops up, you can pounce on it without switching tabs.
Founded out of San Francisco in 2019, Scratchpad recently raised $13 million in a series A round of funding from Accel and David Sacks' Craft Ventures, with Sacks now sitting on Scratchpad's board of directors.