Scratchpad Improves Efficiency For Sales Teams

"The most important thing about PubNub is its reliability, I don’t have to think about it.” Justin Zhang, Engineering Manager at Scratchpad

Meet Scratchpad 

Scratchpad is a workspace designed for salespeople to quickly access and update Salesforce. Their mission is simple: to make salespeople happy by providing them with a revenue team workspace to streamline their day-to-day work. 

For sales teams, it’s important that they focus on customer relationships, not constantly switching between tabs to update fields and next steps in Salesforce. Scratchpad combines notes, tasks, pipeline management, chat, and collaboration into one simple revenue team workspace, always connected to Salesforce. Compared to switching back and forth between apps, copying and pasting data in Salesforce, and using multiple browser tabs to keep track of to-dos, Scratchpad removes the tedium of data entry for reps so they can focus on closing more deals. 

As a workspace designed and built with sales teams in mind, it’s crucial that Scratchpad is able to provide their customers with the speed they need to improve efficiency, which enables them to sell more. To help accomplish this, Scratchpad relies on PubNub. 

Leveraging real-time collaboration features to improve productivity

Scratchpad leverages PubNub for real-time updates and collaboration features. “We use PubNub to accomplish a lot of what we do,” said Justin Zhang, Engineering Manager at Scratchpad. With these real-time features, users in the Scratchpad app can receive updates on sales metrics and see shared notes and configuration fields within Salesforce. Additionally, users have the ability to comment on specific fields and records in real time. 

During the implementation process, Zhang credits PubNub’s Javascript documentation for helping his team easily build these features into their app. And since getting up and running, they have continued to utilize PubNub’s functionality, like Presence, to deliver dynamic information to users in a channel.  

Using PubNub, Scratchpad synchronizes client-side applications to deliver digital collaboration capabilities to sales teams. When one person makes a comment in their app, it immediately gets pushed to all the people who have that particular page open. They can then communicate in real time through PubNub. 

This is crucial because it enables their customers to share information and collaborate in real time—improving efficiency—which helps to create more sales opportunities. 

Making the switch to a reliable partner

Prior to PubNub, Scratchpad was using their own in-house system to power their app. However, they knew that building real-time updates and collaboration features at scale themselves would be difficult to maintain, which is what led them to PubNub. 

“Our real-time capabilities need 100% uptime,” said Zhang. “Dropping one message is so devastating, and we have customers that depend on us for reliable updates.” Now by relying on PubNub, they are able to provide their customers with the speed and reliability that they need to streamline the many different aspects of sales.

“The most important thing about PubNub is its reliability, I don’t have to think about it,” said Zhang. “It has succeeded in being a good abstraction layer to the push and sync notifications and other functionalities that we use.”

Streamlining workflow for better results 

For Zhang, a core part of his role at Scratchpad is focused on architecting new product ideas and functionalities. As he looks to the future, he is excited to see how his team can use more of PubNub’s functionalities to enhance their user experience. 

By using PubNub, Scratchpad can operate reliably to power real-time collaboration features for sales teams. This improves productivity and ultimately helps to create more sales opportunities for customers. 

If you would like to learn how PubNub can help you power real-time features at scale—get in touch with our team of experts.