Scratchpad vs Dooly for RIA Prospect Pipelines

Most RIAs grow through warm introductions rather than cold prospecting, which changes what a healthy pipeline looks like. A prospect who was referred by an existing client typically expects a more personal process, several conversations rather than a single sales call, and an advisor juggling a dozen of these relationships at once needs a fast way to see where each one actually stands.

That structure means the value of any tracking tool here is less about speeding up outreach and more about not letting a warm referral go cold simply because the advisor was focused on existing clients that week. A referral source who introduces a prospect and never hears anything back tends to be more hesitant about the next introduction, which makes timely follow-up a relationship issue with the referrer, not just with the prospect.

A discovery meeting typically covers a prospect's goals, time horizon, risk tolerance, and sometimes sensitive family or estate details, all of which need to be reflected accurately in the eventual investment proposal and, in many firms, retained as part of the advisor's own recordkeeping practice. If an advisor relies on memory or a paper notepad, that detail can drift or go missing by the time a proposal is drafted weeks later.

Dooly's note templates can be structured around a firm's own discovery checklist, capturing goals and risk tolerance as the conversation happens and linking it to the prospect's record, though any specific recordkeeping requirement should be confirmed with the firm's own compliance officer rather than assumed from a template.

Log these details after each discovery meeting:

• The prospect's goals and time horizon, so the proposal reflects what they actually said.
• Their risk tolerance, in the prospect's own words where possible.
• Sensitive family or estate details, stored according to the firm's own compliance practices.
• Any recordkeeping the firm must retain, confirmed with the compliance officer rather than assumed from a template.

An advisor with ten or twelve active prospects at different stages, first meeting, sent a proposal, awaiting a decision, benefits from a single grid view rather than opening each record separately to check status before a follow-up call. Scratchpad's bulk editing suits the small, frequent updates a referral-driven pipeline needs, logging a follow-up call or updating a next step in the time between client meetings rather than as a separate task.

A managing partner overseeing several advisors can use the same grid to see, firmwide, which referred prospects have gone quiet longer than the relationship warrants, without asking each advisor individually where things stand.

Neither Scratchpad nor Dooly determines what information a firm is required to document about a prospective client's investment objectives, or how long that documentation needs to be retained. Those questions depend on the firm's own regulatory obligations and should go to the firm's compliance officer or outside counsel, not be inferred from how a CRM template happens to be structured.

What the tools can do is make sure whatever the firm's own process requires actually gets captured consistently, rather than depending on which advisor happened to take good notes that day and which one was rushed between back-to-back meetings.

First, check whether discovery meeting details currently survive from the first conversation to the final proposal, or whether prospects are routinely re-asked the same questions. If details get lost, that points to Dooly. Second, check whether advisors can see their full active prospect list in one place, or whether checking status means opening several records individually. If it takes several clicks, that points to Scratchpad. Third, confirm with compliance that either tool's note-taking fits inside the firm's existing recordkeeping process rather than creating a second, inconsistent record alongside it. A firm that skips this last step risks ending up with two versions of the same client conversation, neither of which is clearly the record of note.