By itself, a chore like writing down client requests or sending a thank-you note after signing a contract doesn’t require too much effort from salespeople. But over the course of a workday, such menial tasks end up consuming a lot of time that could otherwise be used to generate new business. The problem returned to the fore this morning after a Redwood City-based startup called Pattern Inc. exited stealth mode with $2.5 million in funding and a cloud application for speeding up deal-making efforts.

The service consists of several integrated tools that span most of the administrative drudgery involved in the average salesperson’s day-to-day work. The first is a note-taking console that makes it possible to have key data from memos quickly inputted into a company’s customer relationship management system. If the text describes, say, the amount a lead agreed to pay for a given product over the phone, then the value is automatically inserted into the appropriate field.

From there, Planner’s machine learning algorithms will periodically remind the user to follow up with the client if they’re unresponsive and surface new information that might help hurry along the deal. The process can potentially be streamlined even further using the templating tool that is paired with the feature, which makes it possible to create pre-prepared messages that take only a few seconds to send. Seeing how some salespeople sends upwards of dozens of identical messages every day, that in itself has the potential to save a great of deal of time.

Paper’s value proposition is apparently already starting to gain traction: Zendesk Inc., AppDog Inc. and a number of other fellow technology startups are listed as customers on its website. The funding from today’s round will enable the outfit to expand its client roster even further and keeping fleshing out the capabilities of its service in the background.

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