Parento’s Multi-Audience Challenge: How They Built a Product That Satisfies Both HR and Finance

When your product requires buy-in from multiple stakeholders with competing priorities, how do you craft a message that resonates with everyone? In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Parento founder Dirk Doebler revealed their strategy for threading this complex needle.

Understanding the Core Challenge

The challenge became clear early in Parento’s journey: HR teams understood the value of paid parental leave, but couldn’t get financial approval. As Dirk explains, “It was really a problem for finance more than HR because HR generally understands why they should offer paid parental leave, but they can’t convince finance.”

The Finance Perspective

Finance teams had two primary concerns. “Finance is oftentimes reluctant based on the fact that one to they don’t know how many people will take leave in any given year. So what is it actually going to cost? But then two, if you’re paying, plan to work for three months, what’s the RoI?”

This uncertainty made budgeting difficult and ROI calculations unclear, creating a significant barrier to adoption.

The HR Perspective

Meanwhile, HR teams faced different challenges. They needed to support employees through major life transitions while ensuring smooth workplace operations. As Dirk notes, “We’re simplifying the paperwork and the administration, we’re helping them file for short term disability if they’re paid, mom being parental leave, or if they have a family policy in a certain state.”

Developing a Dual Messaging Strategy

This insight led Parento to develop distinct but complementary messaging for each audience. “Were generally trying to speak to both of them,” Dirk shares. “For finance, we need to convince you that paid parentally is a worthwhile investment… And then for HR, because it’s insurance, we need to convince them that insurance is the best mechanism.”

Building Trust Through Data

For finance teams, Parento focused on hard numbers. “About a third of women will quit their jobs year they have a kid if they don’t have access to paid parental leave, and many of them will stay out of work for five years or more.” This data helped quantify the cost of inaction.

Creating Emotional Resonance

For HR leaders, they emphasized the human impact. “These are mostly HR leaders, more senior they’re more likely to have kids and bank was autistic. Who then more likely to be moms,” Dirk explains. This allowed them to connect with HR leaders’ personal experiences with parental leave.

The Results

This dual approach has yielded impressive results. “We see over two thirds of parents who are having a kid using our support program,” Dirk shares. “And then when they do they’re using about 13 hours of support on average.”

More importantly, they’ve achieved something rare in B2B: enthusiastic adoption by both technical and non-technical stakeholders, evidenced by their 95 NPS score.

The Broader Learning

For B2B founders navigating multi-stakeholder sales, Parento’s experience offers valuable lessons. Instead of trying to find a one-size-fits-all message, they developed distinct but complementary narratives that addressed each stakeholder’s primary concerns.

Their success shows that selling to multiple stakeholders doesn’t require compromising your message – it requires understanding how your solution creates different kinds of value for different audiences.

As Dirk looks to the future, this dual focus continues to shape their strategy: “We are looking to be the go to provider for companies to support not just working parents, but working families.” It’s an approach that ensures both HR and finance teams see value in their evolution, maintaining alignment across stakeholders as they grow.