Episode 11 | How a CMO Uses Blended Workforces to Catapult Market Dominance with Donna Parent

 Donna Parent  00:00

I have very high expectations, very, very high expectations. Some people rise to it, and some people don’t. And the partners I work with, I could tell initially, that they enjoy a challenge that they take tremendous pride in the output of what they’re delivering, and that they don’t view me as a client. And that’s really important because I don’t view them as a vendor, I view them truly an absolutely, as an extension of my team, that without them, our team could not function.

Karan Rhodes  00:03

Blended workforces are one of the hottest talent strategies today, where employers are using a mix of traditional employees with external resources like independent contractors, coaches, consultants, vendors, and technology solutions, all in order to enhance competitiveness, ensure cost flexibility, and expedite business goals. But how are the successful companies infusing blended workforces into their business strategy? And what are the critical success factors and pitfalls to avoid during implementation? And on the flip side, what does it really take for suppliers to improve their chances of finding and landing contract opportunities? The devil is in the details, my friends! I’m your host, Karan Ferrell Rhodes, and it’s time to get smarter about Blended Workforces at Work! Hey there, my superstars out there. This is Karen and welcome to another episode of the blended workforces at work podcast. We are super thrilled to have on today’s show, Donna Parent. And Donna is the Chief Marketing Officer at Dynamo Software, which is a leading high growth multi tenant cloud software platform built for the alternative investment sector. And if you’re saying Huh, well, Miss Donna is going to tell us exactly what that is. It is a fantastic niche that they have hard their thought leadership and presence and we’re going to, you’re going to learn about the sector as well as learn about how she uses blended workforces to help augment her team’s great work. Now, I cannot wait to dig in to all of her knowledge. But first, we got to welcome Miss Donna to the podcast. So welcome, Donna.

Donna Parent  01:49

Thank you, Karan. Hello, everyone.

Karan Rhodes  01:52

We are super thrilled to have you on this episode. Such a lot of things to talk about in such a little time. But before we dive in deep, we’d love to learn just a little bit more about you. So just for as much as you feel comfortable. Would you mind giving us a sneak peek into your life outside of work?

Donna Parent  02:14

Absolutely, absolutely. So, I’m a very much a high energy person at work and in my personal life. So there’s not much of a change there. I have two beautiful boys, ages 14 and 11. And they keep me very busy. And my husband is well and we are recently well I’d say now we’re about two and a half years into being parents. We had a golden doodle join our family. His name is dusty. And he’s amazing too. But you know, I love to do all kinds of things. I try to do some stress relief through working out long walks with my husband and with my boys cooking baking interior design as well. I do enjoy also antiquing and shopping in general but you know all those fun things that probably a lot of folks like to engage in. And even going to the theater too.

03:11

All right, then I think we’re sisters from another mother because 90% of that I love to do as well. Great people great minds think alike.

Donna Parent  03:23

That’s right. I agree.

Karan Rhodes  03:24

And our our listeners know about our pups here, Poppy and Bodes because they frequently join the podcast as the Amazon driver comes outside, but we just keep it rocking and rolling here.

Donna Parent  03:37

I can totally relate to that.

03:39

Oh, That sounds great. Well, let’s get started by you first sharing a little bit about how you started in your career and what you are doing at Dynamo.

Donna Parent  03:50

Yeah. So, you know, I always thought I would become a lawyer initially. But then I started to intern in college at a newspaper. And I fell in love with storytelling and writing and the fast paced excitement. That’s what I really love to. And so I interned for two summers as a newspaper reporter. And then, after college, I actually didn’t go into marketing. I was in financial services and I worked at a small consulting firm traveled across the country and documented workflows and procedures when big migrations were happening with their software implementations and quickly realized that was not for me a little too boring and not enough excitement. And I needed to to do something different. And I actually got into Event Management very quickly and fell in love with marketing and I haven’t left since then. And so I started Event Manager went into PR and communications then on the mark comm side product marketing and then can continue to move into all areas of marketing and just loved everything. And as I learned, and as I grew, eventually became a head of marketing and a VP of marketing, and now a CMO for my last few companies, so it’s been an amazing ride. It’s been terrific. It’s absolutely 100% the right fit for me. And what I love doing and love working with people still get to do a ton of storytelling, still get to interview a lot of people too, and still get to do all those amazing things that I loved 20 plus years ago, and still are loving them today.

Karan Rhodes  05:40

Wow. And you’ve done all of this and yours only 27.

Donna Parent  05:44

Ummm…26. Yes.

Karan Rhodes  05:52

Wow, what a fantastic career. Thus far, I will say is, and because you’re doing some amazing work that I’m sure you’ll continue to do for the near future. So congratulations on that. So tell us a little bit more about Dynamo software. No, I didn’t do it justice in the intro.

Donna Parent  06:13

Yeah. I mean, listen, it’s a very interesting niche environment for what we do strictly specialized as well, alternative investments. So essentially, we’re a software provider, enterprise software provider. And we help hedge funds, private equity, limited partners, essentially optimize their investment workflows. So we have different modules of our platform, like you mentioned, multi tenant, cloud based platform, we have different modules that include CRM and deal management, portfolio monitoring, portfolio management, ESG, as well, we have mobile capabilities, it runs the gamut, really. And what I love about it is because we are a platform, we’re unique in our industry, because we serve two main audiences, general partners, and limited partners. And that’s very unique in our industry. So I also love that we’re backed by Blackstone and Francisco partners too. So we have a lot of credibility behind us, and a lot of credibility for the past 20 years of what we’ve been developing and pushing to market, we have amazing clients, we just wrapped up Karen, our annual Dynamo University user conference in Boston just last week. And so it’s so invigorating to come out of something like that, after engaging with our clients and hearing their stories. And just the excitement is so infectious. And so we had an amazing user conference, we’ll do the same user conference again in the fall, but in London. So I love our user centric focus. We do a lot of events with our users, I get to talk to our users and our clients regularly, which I absolutely love doing, to hear stories from the front line and then be able to tell those stories in a compelling way. It’s a dream for me.

Karan Rhodes  08:12

Oh, that is awesome. Well, you know, London is one of my favorite cities to visit, though, if you all need some help over there. We’ll travel and coming right off the conference. I just curious, what are some of the trends that you’re seeing in the industry right now? What did you hear people talking about?

Donna Parent  08:32

You know, some some big things, right? I mean, people want to introduce more automation, they want to remove those manual tasks, they want to make sure that they’re sitting on the right side of the talent war, that they’re able to attract and retain the talent. And then of course, you hear from the technology side to a lot on AI, and how AI can help to even with removing a lot of those manual tasks, and being able to build more efficiencies, and really supercharge productivity, especially for investors. So it was exciting to get that feedback, exciting to hear what our clients are looking for in the future, and also to hear how pleased they are with what we’re offering to them today.

Karan Rhodes  09:22

Oh, that’s amazing. Absolutely amazing. And I know you all have done some fantastic research, as you know, I’m a researcher to so I’m always fascinated with others research what they found. I’m an ongoing learner. So can you share with us this fantastic research project you did? And maybe one or two tidbits of what you learned?

Donna Parent  09:44

Yeah. So, I think this comes a little bit from my reporter days and journalism, because I love to dig in and I love to be able to find out new things. So engaging in primary research is something that when I first came to dynamo, I joined in April of 2022, as the first CMO of the company, and when I joined, there’s so much happening in this industry. And I was looking for research. And I couldn’t find a lot that targeted specific audiences or so for example, hedge funds or emerging managers, or limited partners. And that was really timely. So I set forth and put a plan together to build into our culture, a culture of primary research, where we would go out to our clients and to prospects or other kinds of stakeholders in the industry, and be able to survey them, and have them complete the surveys, collect all of the data, and then streamline that data and present it in a very graphical, intuitive and exciting way, in published reports that would come out quarterly. We’ve been doing this basically since I joined and we just pushed out our seventh version of this report this week. So actually, today in one happened today that we published our first version of this focused on hedge funds. So it’s exciting to bring forth that primary research, but I couldn’t do this by myself. And when I joined, I had a very small team. And I really needed additional expertise to weigh in and to be able to engage and become our research team. So one of the ways that I did that was by working through our strategic PR and communications agency, I brought in the agency that I’ve worked with previously. And a lot of the folks that I bring in for marketing partners are people that I’ve worked with for years and years. And so I brought them in as a additional extension of the research team to evaluate data and give feedback and also to do some copy editing on my writing. So every great writer needs a great copy editor. So brought them in for that. And in addition, brought in a graphic designer who I’ve worked with for since the very beginning of my marketing career, who I brought her into every organization brought her in to be able to help me with coming up with a design and imagery, and really being able to kind of take what’s in my mind and transpose it into meaningful graphics. And so with this extended team, and everyone was is remote, so they’re not, you know, not physically to gather, everyone being remote working together. And every quarter we get this done, we publish these reports, they go out on time, it’s a total team effort. And we’re able to get it done.

12:55

Well, first of all, kudos, and congratulations on getting their reports out your research, number one and then getting your reports out quarterly. Because I know that is some heavy lifting, because of the level of excellence you probably want to portray, right. And so in order to do that, you have to have top notch support, along with your own thought leadership to make it happen. And one of the questions I always ask is, you know, well, how did you find you know, your partners, but to share with us that these were some folks that you had worked with or known in the past? So but let me ask you this question. In general, what characteristics made you instantly remember or think of them? Like, what did they bring to the table that differentiated them from others that you said, Hey, I’ve got to have, you know, Joe and Jane on this team?

Donna Parent  13:50

Well, I have…you hit the nail on the head, Karen, I have very high expectations, very, very high expectations. Some people rise to it, and some people don’t. And the partners I work with, I could tell initially, that they enjoy a challenge that they take tremendous pride in the output of what they’re delivering, and that they don’t view me as a client. And that’s really important because I don’t view them as a vendor, I view them truly an absolutely, as an extension of my team, that without them, our team could not function. I have internal folks two who are phenomenal. But I also have these external folks who are also phenomenal. I treat them no different. I am transparent with them. I am communicative. And I am direct and honest. It’s the only way to make this work that I feel. And so when I find a partner like this, and I just brought on a new external writer recently, and I could tell when I spoke with him initially he got it. He got okay But we’re gonna do this, but it’s got to be at this level. And we’re going to do it until it’s right. Not until we think it’s good enough. And there are some things as a CMO that you have to let go of and say, You know what, this is good enough, we got to move to the next big thing. But you also have to make sure that you don’t use that mentality on the things that matter most. And that’s what I always tried to make sure I focus on personally, is honing in on what’s really going to matter most, what is going to make an impact what’s going to drive results? And what can I let go of that’s, you know what? It’s good. That’s good. But I got to focus my time, energy and effort over here. So that’s how I think about my team in general. And I think about the extended partners that we have as truly being part of the entire team. And operating at that high level of urgency, production, excellence, and having that great pride in what you do.

Karan Rhodes  16:04

Okay, we could just drop the mic right now. Pure gold, because you know, a lot of companies struggle and leaders struggle when they bring external talent. And because it does take a mindset to onboard them and integrate them appropriately. And in a way that your internal team members don’t feel threatened in any kind of way. So it leadership comes from the top reign, and it’s up to the leader to make sure that communication flow workflow is very agile and integrated. So I absolutely love you saying that. And I’m just curious of how your team members think of them do they think of them as the same way as kind of equal partners, we’re trying to get the work done.

Donna Parent  16:50

100%. 100%. And you’re in, it’s gotta be led by the top because that’s how I think of them. And also, I’ve created an atmosphere where there is not a lot of overlap. So there’s functional areas, but no one has to worry that oh, you know, that’s my job isn’t I’m supposed to be doing that. But there’s also so much fluidity, and there has to be within small marketing teams, I know bigger organizations, you can be much more siloed. Can’t be like that on a small team. There’s fluidity everyone’s contributing, everyone’s excited, everyone wants everything to be successful. That’s, I always say to my team, you know, I’d rather get it right than be right, have that same mentality, let’s get it right, because then it helps everyone. Don’t worry about being right. Everybody likes to be right. Nobody wants to, you know, yeah, I was wrong. But it’s okay to be wrong. It’s okay. But you have to accept help. And you have to understand that other people have different talents. And that’s where you rely on their expertise. So there’s no tension between the well that’s, you know, an external part now, everyone is part of this team, everyone is contributing, everyone’s opinion is important, and valued. But at the end of the day, we got to move fast. I have to make the final decision. And I am ultimately accountable.

Karan Rhodes  18:17

I can imagine. So definitely. Now, I’m curious, did you have to, I want to say the word fight, but it’s not fight? Did you have to convince your higher ups to be able to give you the budget to hire your external talent? Or did you find a way just to squeeze it in in your your normal P&L?

Donna Parent  18:36

So I have to say, I am a CMO who is so fortunate to have a very supportive CEO, Hank Bonner, when I came into the company, trusted me immediately to make the right decisions, to build the right resources, and to rely on my experience and 20 plus years now in marketing, to know what we need to do and how we need to do it. And which is so fortunate, because I know, that’s not an experience everyone has. And I’m extremely lucky that he understood who I was coming into the company, and had amazing conversations prior to me joining and again, transparency, openness, a lot of communication, I don’t hide who I am. If you bring me in, it’s because you want things to be shaken up and you want change, and you want a different type of presence in the market. And that’s what I deliver. And that’s what Hank knew he was getting with me. So super supportive, always supportive of new ideas. You know, we have to be trying different things. It’s okay to fail because of we’re failing, at least we’re trying so, you know, we have that mentality. We have a high growth mentality. We want to keep pushing without breaking things. You know, it’s a balance there, right? Because I have a lot of energy. I’m excited about all The things that we’re doing I love marketing, I truly do. I’m a marketer at heart. And I love what I do. So I am very, very fortunate because I know not everyone finds, you know, their career that they love out of the gate. I it took me a year and a half out of college to find it, and I’ve not left it and I never won’t leave.

Karan Rhodes  20:20

Well, yes, you are very fortunate. And and I can already tell you’re an expert. You found your what is a square peg in a square hole, kind of the right fit for you? Yeah, absolutely. Unit, I’m going to take this a little bit higher and the 50,000 foot view. And we’d really love to get your stance on just in general. What are the, in your opinion, what is the power of using a blended workforce to get work done? And then on the flip side, what are one or two cautions or watch out that organizations need to think about as they think through their blended Workforce Strategy.

Donna Parent  20:59

Absolutely. So expertise, flexibility, and timeliness, I think are three big major benefits for blending the workforce, I think things that you need to work, make sure that you’re cautious about is the communication gap. Because if you don’t view them as part of your team, as you do any other member, you’re gonna run into issues where there will not be alignment messaging could start to unravel, priorities change, things shift very, very quickly in such dynamic markets. So if you’re not communicating regularly, or if you’re not clear with your objectives and key results, I think that’s also another flag, but it comes down at the end of the day, it’s leadership. So if you’re not leading the team, cohesively, you’re going to have issues, things are going to unravel. But you can’t blame the blended workforce for that. You have to improve your communication, how you’re delivering what needs to happen, when it needs to happen, how the priorities are outlined, I have not had a negative experience with a blended workforce, because I’ve taken all the things I do normally and just keep doing them, but do them as a universal team.

Karan Rhodes  22:27

And that’s exactly what you need to do. And you know, I always talk to when I do, you know, some speaking engagements, and we talk about when it works versus strategy. I always say, you know, this was not a course or a chapter that we learned in business school, how to make it work. And it’s not usually a segment that we train managers or leaders in either once they get into a corporation and have their leadership training.

Donna Parent  22:52

Absolutely. Yeah, I was just gonna say, Karen, I want to give a quick call out because the woman who taught me about blended workforces she back in 1998, founded one of the first completely virtual remote PR agencies, her name is Christine Ferket when I worked with her very early on in my career, and throughout the middle of my career as well. And hopefully one day we’ll get to work together again. But she was she brought a team together completely virtual, and I worked with them, they were my PR agency. And that’s where I saw the power of blending. Wow, this is an external agency with internal people. And the power that came from that because we were getting all this expertise, specialized expertise that we did not have in house. And that was so important and meaningful, especially for the industry we were in at the time and what we were trying to accomplish.

Karan Rhodes  23:54

Well, that’s sometimes what it takes us, you just made my point. It’s I’m trying to through the podcasts and some of the things the speaking engagement, getting people to think more strategically about them. But in lieu of that those who have demonstrated leadership and brought fantastic teams together, following their example is a fantastic way of getting insights on how you’d want to lead your own, you know, as well. And speaking of leadership, you know, it takes a great leader to pull all this together. And as you know, as you know, I’m a fellow researcher, and I wrote of a book about my findings on some of the top leaders and what they do. And one of the things we love to always ask our guest is out of the tactics that we write about in our book, which one really popped for you. And so you were so kind to share that leading with the driver results really resonated with you. And for my new listeners out there leading with a drive for results is just like it sounds. It’s all about being very persistent and tenacious and ensuring your final goals are achieved. Even if you have to pivot along the way, absolutely no, in quirements wants to know Ms. Donna, why the drive for results, pique your interest?

Donna Parent  25:09

Well, first of all, I wouldn’t dedicate so much of my time, my energy and my resources to something if I couldn’t show results. Nobody wants to not show results, I don’t think I mean, the end of the day, I mean, I put my heart and soul into what I do. And so it’s really important, not only for me personally, but when you have teams, no matter if they’re blended or not, everyone wants to feel that their work matters. And I just want to also do another this is a book that I rely on measure what matters. I manage all of my teams through objectives and key results OKRs. And so that’s the best way to get results oriented action to happen, and to hold accountability to in a way, though, that people get excited about and that they understand, and that they see the roll up to the bigger picture. And that’s really important too. But everything from marketing campaigns to content generation, to video and digital production, social media, anything that we touch in marketing, we always look at it to say, how are we going to define success? And what are those results going to look like? Because we’d never want to be that marketing team that’s viewed within the organization as well wait, what do they do what’s going on over there, we want to show the entire company the value that marketing brings, and can truly be at the fulcrum of the organization to be able to drive the strategic objectives. And if you want to be in a team like that, where you really matter, and your work matters. And the results happen, because we’re all working toward the same initiatives, than that’s the kind of team that I run. And that’s the kind of team that I want to be part of. So I’m always looking for like minded employees to join, who are ready for that next big challenge, who don’t want to be wallflowers who want to really contribute, come up with new ideas and be able to show results. Because like I said, you never want to be that marketing team that people are scratching their head about don’t quite know what you do, don’t really know what marketing is, it’s really important to me. And as I’ve grown my career, to always talk about results to always focus on, this is what we delivered. And this is what it was able to impact within the business.

Karan Rhodes  27:56

I love these you said that because I always talk and remind folks that functions like ours, like in HR, or marketing or accounting or what have you. Sometimes they’re not looked at as important or strategic. But I remind the C suite that HR strategy, or people strategy is business strategy, right? Marketing Strategy is business strategy, counting strategy, finance is business strategy, it all factors in to the ultimate success of the company and the business and the people. And to have that focus and to your point, a results that matter is providing what I call differentiating value to the organization to the people and to your customers and clients.

Donna Parent  28:43

Absolutely. There’s a great quote that I always tell my teams that marketing takes a second to learn but a lifetime to master. And I think part of when other folks are looking at marketing thinking, Oh, I can do that. Oh, yeah, that’s just marketing. It’s always interesting to me. And so I’m always working to help educate and inform and, and make people understand that, you know, marketing is a lot more than just the look and feel and what that means and how I like to build teams that are revenue generating marketers, because that’s the ultimate result, right, Karen, but if marketing team you got to impact revenue, that’s when it gets serious. That’s when people kind of eyebrows start to raise like, oh, marketing is contributing into the revenue that’s when people really start to pay attention to so that’s another big area.

Karan Rhodes  29:38

That is huge airing. Well, I believe unfortunately, that’s all the time we have for today was done event. Before I let you go I always will have information about your bio about Dynamo everything in the show notes, but I always love to give a little airspace for our guests to share where our listeners can find you and the company to learn more. So could you please share where we can find you?

Donna Parent  30:03

Absolutely. So you can go to Dynamosoftware.com to learn more about all the exciting things that Dynamo is offering into the alternative investment space. You can find me on LinkedIn. So don’t hesitate to reach out. And if you have any questions, don’t hesitate. Like I said to shoot me a message either. I love to talk to other marketers or other like minded business people.

Karan Rhodes  30:28

That’s awesome. Well, thanks again, Donna, for the gift of your time. You were absolutely fantastic today.

Donna Parent  30:35

Thanks, Karan. I so appreciate it. It was a lot of fun. Thanks for having me on.

Karan Rhodes  30:39

Oh, you’re so welcome. And thank you to listeners for joining another episode of the blend of workforces at work podcast. We know there are a ton of podcasts out there that you could be listening to. But we do appreciate you supporting ours and spending time with us. And all we ask is that you like and follow us and share with just one friend so that we all together can get smarter about blended workforces at work. Thanks a ton and see you next week. Bye. Well, that’s our show for today. Thank you again for listening to the Blended Workforces at Work podcast. You can check out the show notes, additional episodes, bonus resources, and also submit guest recommendations on our website at blendedworkforces@work.com. You can also follow me on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram or YouTube by searching for the name Karan Rhodes with Karan being spelled K a r a n. And if you like the show, the greatest gift you can give would be to subscribe and leave a rating on your favorite podcast platform of choice. This podcast has been a production of Shockingly Different Leadership, a global consultancy which helps organizations execute their people, talent development, and organizational effectiveness initiatives on an on-demand, contract, fractional, or project basis. Huge thanks to the SDL production and editing team for a job well done. Bye for now.