SalesTechStar Interview with Brian Stimpfl, CEO at S-Docs

What can make or break a B2B tech brand’s growth journey? Brian Stimpfl, CEO at S-Docs has some thoughts:

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Welcome to this SalesTechStar chat Brian, tell us about your journey in the B2B tech market and more about being CEO at S-Docs?

I began my career in the financial services industry over 30 years ago.  Over that time I’ve held leadership roles at firms including TD Ameritrade, ActiFi, Scottrade, and Prudential Financial. These positions required a balance of business and technical acumen in a “SaaS-like” environment centered around a B2B services model. These roles enabled me to develop a proficiency for harmonizing people, processes, and technology to create robust, enduring businesses. In my most recent role at Prudential, I led the Customer Experience & Digital Product Management team to spearhead innovative digital and hybrid customer experiences, both B2C and B2B, which positioned me well for my new role as S-Docs CEO.

At S-Docs, I saw a unique opportunity to build on a very successful solution set and continue an impressive growth trajectory. As CEO, I’m dedicated to driving innovation to enhance our customer experience and accelerate growth globally and into new markets. I’m delighted to lead an exceptional team of professionals as we continue redefining operational efficiency for our customers and work toward our vision of revolutionizing the way organizations create, manage, and share information.

We’d love to hear more about S-Docs recent enhancements and how it benefits end users?

As a document automation and e-signature solution, S-Docs is committed to increasing our customers’ operational efficiency to improve productivity and accelerate success. Our most recent update transforms a multi-step document generation process into one fluid motion. Our customers can now generate, edit, view, and distribute documents directly from the sidebar of the Salesforce record that they’re viewing, without ever switching screens or requiring multiple clicks. This update vastly simplifies the document lifecycle and customer experience and marks a major shift in how our customers create and manage documents and other communications.

As part of this update, we’re aiming to democratize the template creation process to help our customers build dynamic templates faster and more intuitively. To build on this concept, we’re releasing a best-in-class template editor in early 2024 which consists of a point-and-click interface that allows users across roles, departments, and job levels to build stunning templates in minutes. Templates built with our new editor will allow our customers to generate completely dynamic documents that are always connected to people, processes, and data in their organizations.

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As a platform that is constantly innovating, how do you match product changes to meet customer expectations? In what ways do you market or drive more sales for new features through new selling strategies?

S-Docs is committed to meeting the existing, emerging, and unmet needs of our customers, so we place them at the center of our strategy. The primary way we do that is by empowering our employees to build meaningful relationships with customers and solicit honest feedback.  Our product team is in constant communication with customers so that we can continuously refine our products to deliver the best possible experience. These conversations help us innovate early, accurately, and often to deliver new solutions to our customers’ most pressing challenges.

Additionally, two of our core values at S-Docs are to embrace growth & learning and be passionate. This often manifests itself as a genuine drive for our team to investigate industry trends and new technologies. We encourage our individuals and teams to continuously grow and improve and pursue with passion, powering innovation and positive outcomes. This culture is the bedrock that fuels fast and scalable innovation of our product.

To answer your second question, we market and drive sales for new features by returning to our main focus: our customers. Speaking with our customers and understanding what defines their desired business outcomes is key to learning who will achieve the most success from a new offering. These insights allow us to determine strategies and tactics to reach those organizations that will get the most value from our products.

Can you highlight more about some of the common misconceptions around boosting expansion and growth in B2B tech.

One key misconception I’ve seen is that delivering the latest technologies is a silver bullet for growth.  There never really is a silver bullet.  In reality, it’s the strategic alignment of technology, people, and processes that truly drives success.  Technology is often a facilitator of growth and not a panacea for all that ails.  The plan for success needs to incorporate people and process optimization as well.  And yes, I believe this is true for AI as well!

A few thoughts on the impact of AI on the future of marketing and sales?

There’s no doubt AI is driving a major shift in the way everyone is doing business today. Increased productivity and the ability to simply move faster are already major benefits we’re seeing in marketing and sales. At S-Docs, we’re viewing the arrival of generative AI as a massive opportunity on these fronts.  It will further our mission of increasing productivity, enhancing customer experiences, and accelerating business success. We’re currently developing AI co-pilot tools in our own product suite to help with content generation and document analysis, which will allow our customers to achieve in seconds what used to take hours. Overall we believe AI can help unlock a team’s true potential, turning their attention to what they thrive at and what drives the most impact, and away from tedious, mentally taxing tasks.  But again, this technology is not a panacea and needs to be monitored, managed and deployed in the right settings with the right expectations.

Read More: How AI is Transforming Document Processing

Five tips you’d leave every B2B CEO with before we wrap up.

Sure, there are a few tips I’ve learned throughout my career:

1. Invest in Talent: Your people are your greatest asset. Attract and retain top talent, nurture their skills, and create a culture of trust, collaboration, and innovation.
2. Prioritize Customer-Centricity: Place the customer at the core of your strategy. Deeply understand their needs, listen intently to feedback, and continuously improve your products and services to meet those needs.
3. Embrace Technology Wisely: Leverage technology to streamline operations, enhance customer experiences, and make data-driven decisions. However, ensure that technology aligns with your overall business goals and enhances your people and your processes.
4. Adapt to Change: What worked to get you here may not work to bring you there.  Change is hard for people and the business landscape evolves rapidly. Be agile and open to change, whether it’s in response to market shifts, emerging technologies, or customer preferences.
5. Data-Driven Decision-Making: Harness the power of data analytics to make intelligent, informed decisions. Use data to understand market trends, customer behavior, areas for optimization, and future innovations.