Scratchpad vs Dooly for PR Agency New Business Pitches

The first call with a prospective client is usually diagnostic: what happened, what the client is worried about, who they need to reach, and what has not worked with a previous agency or in-house effort. A strong pitch depends on that first conversation being captured accurately, since the strategy presentation that follows has to speak directly to what the client actually described, not a generic communications framework.

An agency pitching four or five prospective retainers at once needs to keep each one's specific situation straight, which gets harder the longer the CRM record lags behind what was actually discussed. Founders who run new business personally, rather than delegating it to a dedicated hire, feel this most acutely, since they are also the ones fielding client fires and staffing decisions in the same week.

A founder juggling several retainer pitches often knows exactly which reporter a given prospect is worried about, or which competitor is out-covering them, without needing to check anything. That knowledge lives in the founder's head and in a polished strategy deck, not in Salesforce, which is fine right up until a second person has to pick up that pitch, or until there are too many active conversations to keep straight from memory alone.

The moment an agency crosses that line, usually somewhere around four or five simultaneous pitches, whatever is not written down starts getting confused between prospects, and a client who mentioned a specific concern in the first call notices immediately if the strategy pitch that follows treats them like a completely generic account instead.

Scratchpad's grid handles the mechanical side of that problem: stage, next step, and expected close date for every active pitch, all editable from one screen instead of four or five separate Salesforce records. Its Deal Spotlight view flags pitches that have gone quiet, which matters here because a prospective client weighing several agencies at once tends to go silent for a stretch while deciding, not because interest has actually dropped, and a founder who reads that silence as a loss risks giving up on a pitch that was, in fact, still very much live.

The detail that makes a pitch land is usually specific: a particular news cycle the client is worried about, a competitor who is getting more coverage, a leadership team that wants to be more visible before a fundraise. Dooly's note templates give that diagnostic call a place to land in structured form, linked to the opportunity, so whoever builds the strategy deck is working from what the client actually said rather than a generic new business outline.

That distinction matters most when a strategist who was not on the first call ends up building the pitch deck from someone else's notes, since a secondhand summary tends to flatten the specific worry a prospect raised into a generic bullet point about brand visibility.

Capture these from the first diagnostic call:

• The specific news cycle or reputation problem the client is worried about.
• A competitor who is getting more coverage than the client.
• A leadership visibility goal, such as being better known before a fundraise.
• What has not worked with a previous agency or in-house effort, so the strategy pitch does not repeat it.

Sales and marketing spend for a growth-stage company runs somewhere between 8% and 15% of revenue depending on the function, and for an agency selling its own services, the direct cost equivalent is founder or business development time¹. Every hour spent reconstructing what a prospect said two calls ago, instead of building on it, is time that should have gone into refining the actual pitch. A clean, current record is what lets a founder pitch the fifth prospect of the month with the same sharpness as the first, instead of running out of steam and coasting on a generic version of the pitch by the time the busiest week of the quarter arrives.