#50: REPLAY: Data-driven decision-making in B2B marketing and sales with Kunal Mangal, Verizon Business Group

Making intelligent decisions is critical for all businesses, but relying on good information is becoming more critical than relying on what worked yesterday. Today we’re going to talk about data-driven decision making in B2B marketing and sales. I’d like to welcome Kunal Mangal, Associate Director of MarTech Strategy at Verizon Business Group, who leads the Pega Decisioning platform team within their marketing technology organization.

Resources

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Transcript

Note: this was AI-generated and lightly edited.

Greg Kihlström:
I had the opportunity recently to present at the B2B Marcom Summit in Reston, Virginia, and interview Kunal Mangal from Verizon Business Group, and wanted to share this conversation we had about data-driven decision-making. So I hope you enjoy. So thanks, everybody, for joining us. We’re going to talk about data-driven decision making in B2B marketing and sales. And certainly, we’ve been talking a lot today about a number of things. Certainly, data has come up in several conversations, and its importance, and whether that’s just in doing better marketing and aligning teams and doing AI better. Today we’re going to talk about how data feeds into just making better decisions in the enterprise. And I’m joined by Kunal Mangal, Associate Director of Martech Strategy at Verizon Business Group. He leads the Pega Decisioning Platform team within their marketing technology organization. So Kunal, welcome here. And why don’t you start by talking about your background and your role at Verizon Business Group.

Kunal Mangal: Sure, yeah. Thanks, Craig. And thanks, everybody. I know there are a lot of sessions going on right now. So thanks for joining us. Thanks for choosing ours. Yeah, so I, by background, I started in technology and I was basically a computer programmer, mainly, you know, Java, web technologies were pretty big those days, 20 years ago. So that’s how I started in ERP software industry. Then I went back to grad school, finished my MBA, and since then it’s mostly been you know, recession was just over and all that. So everybody’s trying to squeeze value. That was a time when in financial industry a lot of regulatory changes were happening. Things were getting digitized, centralized. And they said, hey, you know data. You know some numbers and stuff. Why don’t you get into it? So then, since then, I’ve been more into like digital transformation, you know, revenue optimization. other sort of marketing problems like churn prevention and all that using data science automation. So slowly, slowly, you know, learn the ropes and did it in various domains I’ve been into in financials like, you know, online banking and payments and mortgages and all that. And then switched to telecom after moving to here, like, I think Virginia, about four years ago. And there in Verizon, my role is I’m leading what they call so-called data-driven decisioning framework. And we basically, what we try to do is create data-driven, what we call next best actions, looking at you as a customer. What is the text by section for you looking at your whole relationship your current context and all that and how do you operationalize it in various channels