Phill Battersby

Phill Battersby

Chief Marketing Officer

Microsoft Enterprise Businesses, Western Europe

Phill is driven by an undeniable passion for growth through innovation, yet much of his success can be attributed to a well-founded balance of leadership and teamwork. 

Phill leads Microsoft’s Enterprise Marketing Group throughout Western Europe, and in so doing, markets all relevant Microsoft products, services and solutions to both major and mid-market account segments – which demands working in close partnership with sales and other strategic channel partners. 

Phill’s goal is for his regional and subsidiary marketing teams to bring accelerated growth through innovation. His team utilize all cross-audience marketing approaches that build awareness and influence, launch new product, enhance community, drive significant demand and, optimize the Microsoft experience for each Enterprise customer – whilst ensuring exceptional MROI (Marketing Return on Investment).  That’s a tall order.

“My particular business is a multi-billion dollar, high growth, fast-paced business – I encourage my teams to drive for growth at full speed, but also understand and respect that to accelerate growth you have to leverage the subtle differences between countries and cultures. For me that means giving the field teams the ability to quickly and easily execute marketing with local flourish, tone and temper, but within a controlled framework and scope”.  That approach has fostered a multi-geographic marketing team built on both trust and positive team spirit. Phill is a big believer in cross-group collaboration, networking and giving visibility to success.

With that, Phill has set in motion a growing revolution in Microsoft’s marketing content supply-chain.  “Everything produced centrally by our WW counterparts needs to be adopted and executed locally. We’ve found the best results will always come when central campaigns can be locally adapted / customized to suit the local market and our local customer needs. However, in multi-brand, multi-audience, global organization like Microsoft, this needs to be managed in a controlled way, ensuring consistent brand, message and experience integrity across geographies.”

Speed and cost are the two other critical points. “With the right combination of technology, agency and centralized marketing services, our supply chain has become faster and output is delivered and executed at a fraction of previous costs through our engines. In turn this allows us to invest marketing dollars in high-growth areas, furthering marketing’s impact on the business.”

“The hardest part of this job, is not cooking up new marketing ideas – it is all about getting your growth priorities right, your marketing supply-chain and engines running smoothly and consistently, having your team behind your vision and then the business trusting your leadership – especially on transformational marketing journeys, when moving from vision to reality”.  He adds, “Whilst I may be the originator of an idea, I would say the effort and outcome in this case is certainly not down to one person, but many. Our teams span many geographies, suppliers and contributors – so my thanks to all these folk.”

Phill has been at Microsoft since 2008.  Earlier in his career, he served in international marketing leadership roles at SAP, XKO Software and MRO Software.  Interestingly, after all of his years of marketing in the technology field, his education was at the Drumtech Institute of Percussion.  To which he simply replies: “Yes, music – it’s my first love.”