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Beyond Conventional ICP: How Parento’s Founder Discovered That Company Values Trump Traditional Segmentation

Most B2B startups begin their go-to-market journey with rigid ideal customer profile criteria: industry verticals, employee count, annual revenue. But in a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Parento founder Dirk shared how abandoning these traditional metrics led to breakthrough growth in the insurance technology space.

Initially, Parento targeted what seemed like a logical segment: companies with 50 to 250 employees. “We wanted to get companies and clients sign quickly so you can get more information,” Dirk explains. But after diving deep into their customer base, they discovered something unexpected – the conventional wisdom about customer segmentation wasn’t holding up.

“The things that people think about when they like, oh, what kind of companies they run out or size or industry or demographic makeup really aren’t that impactful for us,” Dirk reveals. “There is a certain overlap, but it’s not a strong correlation.”

Instead, Parento found that success hinged on a single critical factor: genuine commitment to employee wellbeing. As Dirk puts it, “What really works for us is not so much what industry this employer in, but what is their genuine concern around their employees? Are they genuinely investing real dollars in their employees?”

This insight fundamentally transformed their go-to-market approach. Rather than filtering prospects by surface-level criteria, Parento developed specific discovery questions to uncover authentic commitment to employee investment. The results were striking – they could successfully sell across industries and company sizes as long as this core value alignment existed.

The company’s messaging evolution reflects this deeper understanding of their market. Initially, they led with their insurance innovation, which Dirk admits “didn’t resonate with them as much.” They shifted to emphasize the broader employee experience, particularly when speaking with HR leaders who often had personal experience with parental leave challenges.

“We shift our focus more to our cocktail of the overall employee experience and lean it back to probably the bad experience that HR leader had when they were welcoming their kids,” Dirk explains. This resonated powerfully with their target audience, leading to remarkable engagement metrics: “We see over two thirds of parents who are having a kid using our support program… they’re using about 13 hours of support on average.”

The company’s category positioning also evolved beyond traditional insurance boundaries. “We view ourselves as sort of the cusp of both insurance and like an Eap type program or an employee experience like program,” Dirk shares. This hybrid approach has yielded impressive results – while most insurance companies struggle with customer satisfaction, Parento maintains a 95 NPS score.

Their success challenges conventional startup wisdom about narrow market focus. While many founders are advised to target specific verticals or company sizes, Parento’s experience suggests that for certain products, especially those tied to company culture and values, psychographic segmentation might be more effective.

For founders navigating their own go-to-market journey, Parento’s story offers valuable lessons about the importance of looking beyond surface-level segmentation to uncover deeper, more meaningful customer characteristics. Sometimes the best customers don’t fit neatly into traditional market segments – they’re united by shared values and genuine commitment to solving specific problems.

The key is remaining flexible enough to recognize these patterns when they emerge, even if they challenge your initial assumptions about your market. As Dirk’s experience shows, being willing to abandon conventional wisdom in favor of actual customer success patterns can unlock unexpected growth opportunities and lead to stronger product-market fit.