Scratchpad vs Dooly for Partner-Led Consulting Pipelines

A partner's week is split between delivery work for existing clients and business development for new ones, and the second usually loses. Updating an opportunity record after a coffee meeting or a scoping call is easy to postpone when there is a deliverable due for a paying client that afternoon.

That is a real constraint neither tool removes. What they can do is make the update, when it does happen, fast enough that it actually gets done instead of pushed to 'later.' A firm with three or four partners each running their own book of relationships also tends to have no consistent view of total pipeline until someone manually compiles it before a partner meeting, which is its own separate cost.

The detail that decides whether a proposal lands is usually something said in the scoping conversation: a specific pain point, a budget range, a timeline constraint tied to a board meeting or a fiscal year end. If that detail lives only in the partner's memory or a personal notebook, whoever drafts the proposal is working from secondhand recall.

Dooly's note templates give that conversation a structure to land in, and link the important lines straight to the opportunity record, so a proposal writer who was not on the call still has something concrete to work from.

A partner juggling eight or ten active relationships at different stages benefits from seeing all of them in one grid rather than opening each record separately between client meetings. Scratchpad's bulk editing is well suited to the small, frequent updates, a follow-up sent, a proposal awaiting signature, that a partner can knock out in a few minutes between calls rather than treating as a separate task.

Its Deal Spotlight view is also useful for a managing partner trying to see, across the whole firm, which relationships have gone quiet longer than they should have.

Sales and business development spend runs around 15% of revenue as a rough SaaS benchmark, and while a consulting firm's cost structure looks different, the underlying point holds: partner hours spent on business development that produces no record of what was discussed is time the firm cannot easily learn from later¹. A firm that cannot say why its last five lost proposals did not land is repeating the same untracked mistakes on the next five.

That pattern is easy to miss because each individual meeting feels productive at the time. It is only when someone tries to answer 'why do we keep losing to the same competitor' across a dozen deals that the absence of a written record becomes an actual, measurable cost rather than a vague feeling that something could be tighter.

If a firm's proposals are mostly written by the partner who ran the scoping call, the bigger gap is usually stale pipeline tracking between meetings, and Scratchpad's grid is the faster fix. If proposals are drafted by someone else, an associate, a director, based on a partner's notes, the bigger gap is that the notes themselves are thin or missing, and Dooly is built for that handoff specifically.

Firms with both problems at once, which is common, tend to get more value starting with whichever gap is costing more proposals right now. A simple way to find out: look at the last three proposals that went nowhere and ask whether the record shows what the prospect actually said, or just the fact that a meeting happened. A record with substance points to a stale-pipeline problem; a record that is nearly blank points to a capture problem.

Use these checks to match the tool to the gap:

• If the partner who ran the scoping call also writes the proposal, look first at stale pipeline tracking between meetings, which Scratchpad's grid addresses.
• If an associate or director drafts the proposal from a partner's notes, thin or missing notes are the bigger gap, which Dooly's templates address.
• Check whether details like a pain point, a budget range or a timeline constraint live only in the partner's memory.
• Ask whether an update between meetings takes seconds or requires hunting for the right record, since adoption follows speed.