MarTech Interview With Erez Nahom, CEO and Co-founder, Konnecto

Hi Erez, congratulations on the latest funding round. Could you share how you achieved this important milestone? How do you plan to extend the benefits of this funding round to your employees and customers?

Thank you so much! We were very excited to announce that Konnecto secured $21M in Series A financing. We will leverage this funding to expand our data science and engineering teams, as well as invest in expansion of go-to-market infrastructure and headcount. To specify, we plan to be able to provide additional types of digital marketing and digital customer experience recommendations, beyond what we provide today, go beyond the high involvement industries globally (e.g., financial services, insurance, consumer electronics) as well as add product enhancements that will provide our customers with customer journey insights for all levels of the organization.

You come from a very enriching background in technology. Please tell us a little bit about your journey and what inspired you to start a Marketing Technology company?

I started my career in the intelligence forces, working with brilliant engineers on very sophisticated systems, and after five years I moved to work for a great company in the cloud communication space. We were launching a new product into the B2C market. I noticed we, as many other companies, didn’t really know why consumers ended up buying products and services from our competitors and what should be our next best action in order to efficiently increase our market share. A few years later my partners and I decided to start Konnecto to solve this challenge for every marketer that feels the same pain we felt back in the day — to help put a stop to the never-ending guessing games.

Marketing Technology News: Konnecto Raises $21M for Prescriptive Path-to-Purchase Optimization Platform

What is Konnecto and what is the driving force that makes your Martech platform so competitive?

Every customer acquisition team has the same problem we had in my previous company – they need to sift through an ocean of aggregated data, monitoring platforms and other tools in order to understand how to reduce customer acquisition costs and increase the number of conversions while having no visibility into what matters most: real patterns that led consumers to buy from competitors. Our driving force in Konnecto is the fact that we provide marketers with visibility into the full path-to-purchase of consumers that convert with their competitors; and, instead of just providing visibility, we take it one major step further and prescribe daily actions that will help to win consumers in the upper funnel based on a deep understanding of the crucial trigger points along the path-to-purchase. What it actually means is that every marketer can get daily recommendations across the digital marketing pie that are highly personalized to their product, marketing activities and competitors and that drive significant ROI, all without needing technology integrations or data analysis and without being based on cookies.

Big data, AI and Automation capabilities have completely changed the way CMOs use marketing analytics. Could you please tell us a little bit about your initiatives in AI and machine learning domains?

AI and machine learning models can be very useful when used for a specific use case with a very defined output that has business impact. Throughout the years, we have seen many platforms with amazing technology behind the scenes but with very little ability to actually solve the real pain points CMOs have. And so the question becomes, what are the real capabilities CMOs need? Our theory is that the future belongs to platforms that are capable of prescribing specific actions that drive ROI, based on an analysis of internal and external data, with the ability to tailor the recommendations to each business.

Could you please provide us with the most contemporary definition for “Prescriptive Analytics”?

Prescriptive analytics prescribes a next best course of action based on intelligence generated by both descriptive analytics (which provides an account of what has happened in a business) and predictive analytics (which uses current and historical data to forecast activity, behavior, and trends).

What kind of problems does Prescriptive Analytics solve for a marketing team?

Prescriptive analytics enable organizations to stop the customer acquisition guessing game by always knowing why consumers ended up buying products from competitors, and what actions need to be taken in order to win over specific audiences in different stages of the path-to-purchase.

This shifts the marketing team’s focus towards decisions and execution rather than research and endless A/B testing.

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Could you please highlight some of the most exciting features of your product and how it helps brands build a customer-centric relationship?

Konnecto’s platform is:

• Holistic: Provides recommendations across all marketing channels based on an organization’s purchase vulnerabilities, taking into account the budget strategy and growth goals
• Granular: Reverse engineers the path-to-purchase on a product level to get the most specific recommendations
• Comprehensive: Addresses all external structured and unstructured data (social, IoT, etc.) to identify all trigger points that drive conversions with no need for technology integrations

Without the insights generated from Konnecto’s platform, brands would miss out on opportunities to nurture prospective customers early in the funnel. With the complete picture of consumers’ journeys that Konnecto’s platform provides, particularly in relation to competitors, brands can focus their marketing efforts to not only build a customer-centric relationship that increases sales and conversions, but also reduces the cost of acquisitions, identifies untapped segments, and reduces dropouts and abandonments.

Why do you think CMOs must invest more into tools that enable their teams to shift focus from ‘reactive monitoring’ to ‘prescriptive intelligence’?

From a marketing perspective, brands need to be moving from reactive monitoring of competitive and market data to leveraging tools like real-time AI-driven analytics that can proactively predict outcomes and prescribe actions as they are required to demonstrate more efficiency and better results in an ever-increasing competitive environment.

How does Konnecto connect different Marketing data and analytics with its Prescriptive intelligence platform?

While our platform requires zero integrations, marketers can integrate their marketing automation platforms should they choose to make the execution process of the recommendations seamless. For those who decide to integrate their CRM and analytics platforms we provide lead scoring and LTV recommendations in addition to customer acquisition ones.

What kind of IT support do you provide to customers?

Our platform doesn’t require integrations or data transfer – our clients simply get a user name and password to the system where they can set up their specific use case and start getting recommendations. From a support perspective, the majority we provide is value-oriented.

What kind of vulnerabilities do brands face that lead customers to turn to competitors? How can users leverage Konnecto to prevent this from happening?

In recent years, it has become increasingly difficult for marketers to determine which touchpoints influence consumers’ purchase decisions along their path-to-purchase. Is it a specific comparison video on YouTube, a Google search, a Reddit post or a few interactions together that got consumers to end up converting with the competitors? This challenge has escalated significantly with the ever-changing landscape of data privacy and the sunset of third-party cookies. Organizations are looking for a source of truth on what will drive impact and improve results in the online purchase journey for them against their competitors.

Our models surface vulnerabilities across content, search, partnerships, social media, UAC, product and more.

Marketing Technology News: Konnecto Closes $3.5 Million Seed Round and Launches ‘Reveal & Disrupt’

We see so much happening in the marketing and advertising space with new data privacy laws and upcoming cookie policy changes. How is Konnecto gearing up to meet the new-world challenges in data privacy?

The Konnecto platform was built without reliance on cookies and with complete compliance with global privacy regulations.

How do you see Big Data intelligence and AI playing a bigger role in Marketing Analytics in the near future?

Big Data intelligence and AI platforms that can analyze internal and external data and prescribe customized recommendations that drive ROI will continue to grow in importance in the marketing space.

Your take on the future of Martech platforms and how big the industry will become by 2025:

We are heading towards significant consolidation of monitoring platforms; more brands will start moving their growth budgets internally (rather than with agencies) and prescriptive marketing platforms will provide recommendations not only for marketing teams, but across the organization.

Any advice to every CEO or CMO that have yet to invest in a reliable prescriptive analytics tool?

Trusting AI to provide accurate recommendations that drive ROI usually happens after you have already seen results, and so my suggestion is to try working with platforms that require minimal integration/set up and provide tailor made recommendations that can be executed and measured within weeks.

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