Blake Cahill

Global Vice President, Digital, Royal Phillips

SuperNova Award Category:

  • Digital Marketing Transformation
The Company: 

Royal Philips is a leading health technology company focused on improving people’s health and enabling better outcomes across the health continuum from healthy living and prevention, to diagnosis, treatment and home care. Philips leverages advanced technology and deep clinical and consumer insights to deliver integrated solutions. The company is a leader in diagnostic imaging, image-guided therapy, patient monitoring and health informatics, as well as in consumer health and home care. Founded by Gerald Philips and his father in 1891, Royal Philips employs over 105,000 people across 60 countries.

The Problem: 

As a company with an international presence and a wide range of healthcare and personal health products, Philips B2B customer base consists of hundreds of thousands of contacts across multiple products and touchpoints.

In order to effectively leverage the complexity and diversity of the buying journey across their audiences, Philips needed to revise and implement many significant and transformational processes for improving the campaign and lead management approach.  In addition, collaboration amongst their sales and marketing teams was less than optimal resulting in challenges around customer targeting and success measurement. 

Customer data was scattered and sporadic, making the maintenance of a central subscription status for their contacts a very manual process. Philips decided that their campaign and lead management process needed to be completely re-designed and formalized to allow greater control of customer data, and improve visibility between sales and marketing functions.

The Solution: 

Recognizing the role that technology could play in bringing together people and data across markets to drive a more efficient way of working, Philips launched Digital @ Scale, an internal strategy to transform B2B digital marketing across global business units and generate better qualified leads. They looked to Oracle Marketing Cloud to assist in the transformation, and to address the specific challenges outlined by the team:

  • Customer data centrally stored: Data in one globally approved, standardized, and secure system increased the validity and reliability of contact data.
  • Framework for lead progression: A new management process to support the global capture, qualification and distribution of sales leads.
  • Double opt-in email subscriptions: Ensuring Philips is operating in a legally compliant manner.
  • New KPI reporting: Increased visibility of the entire end-to-end lead process.
  • Staff training: Ensuring staff are onboarded with training for the new processes.
The Results: 

The new Royal Philips campaign and lead management solution (B2B Campaign) began to yield results after three months of operation, and after nine months, had delivered a pipeline for sales worth € 9M and 600 Marketing Qualified Leads.

Additionally, the new program has given marketing and sales clearer visibility of both new and existing leads, bringing the two departments closer together as they work through opportunities. Further benefits included:

  • Leads that are carefully segmented so that the sales team only receives the most relevant leads for them.
  • Leads for customer services are sent and answered within 48 hours.
  • The leads generated from digital activity are higher quality.
  • Clear visibility of the main KPIs to judge success with industry accessible reports.

With the lead management program firmly in place, welcome/lead nurture and re-engagement campaigns are also being implemented through Oracle Eloqua over the coming months. 

Metrics: 

To date, the Digital @ Scale Campaign initiative has generated impressive results for Royal Philips, receiving recognition both within Royal Philips and across the industry at major events. Highlights include:

  • More than 2 million new consumers acquired and fully engaged through digital.
  • Best-in-class results for consumer acquisition via the .com site – including 4% conversion into opt-ins – and re-engagement rates of 35%; well above industry benchmarks.
  • Improvement of the lead management process and creation of blueprints. In UK & Ireland, a campaign with Digital @ Scale for improved lead management processes has, within five months, generated:
    • Marketing Qualified Leads: 600
    • Pipeline Revenue: € 9M
  • The new process has given both marketing and sales clearer visibility of new leads and the status of existing leads; brining the two departments closer together as they work through opportunities.
  • New Campaign Governance Model uptake, for the first time ever, to secure Royal Philips’ online Brand reputation.
  • New acquisition & welcome and re-engagement campaign blueprints and creation of best practices, available for all markets and business groups to support database growth and engagement:
    • New global direct marketing & privacy guidelines promoted across all markets and businesses.
    • New, mobile first, advanced emails and landing pages templates launched to speed-up digital campaign creation and boost conversion.
The Technology: 

Royal Philips marketing technology of choice was Oracle Eloqua, Oracle Marketing Cloud’s marketing automation technology.

Disruptive Factor: 

Conceived by Royal Philips’ Global Vice President of Digital Blake Cahill, the Digital @ Scale initiative has since been implemented across 17 global markets in 60 countries. Through his unwavering vision and initiative, Blake has led his global team to generate a significant impact on the organization, including increased revenue, pipeline, and efficiencies across all of Royal Philips’ markets and business groups. Today, Blake operates a fully integrated and orchestrated Modern Marketing team.

Shining Moment: 

As an outstanding example of a Modern Marketing leader, Blake has received several accolades within the past year in recognition of the impact he has made for Royal Philips – personally and for campaigns that he has overseen – including the Robert van Geffen ‘Digital Transformer’ Award and the BazaarVoice Inspire UK All Star Award.

About Royal Phillips

Royal Philips is a leading health technology company focused on improving people’s health and enabling better outcomes across the health continuum from healthy living and prevention, to diagnosis, treatment and home care. The company is a leader in diagnostic imaging, image-guided therapy, patient monitoring and health informatics, as well as in consumer health and home care.