The founder

Alan Edwards.

I'm the founder of Why Marketing, a commercial advisory practice focused on B2B unit economics. I work with CFOs, PE partners, and senior marketing leaders on the measurement and governance of customer acquisition economics.

I've spent thirty years in senior commercial and marketing roles across B2B technology, cloud services, and enterprise software. Why Marketing is what I built when I stopped working around the measurement gap and decided to close it, with a methodology that finance and marketing can both stand behind.

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01 · Why Why Marketing exists

The problem started with the same question.

Three million dollars a year. The wrong customers. Every dashboard green.

A managed-services business, 2014. The origin of the method.

It crystallised on a single engagement. A $300M managed-services business, spending three million dollars a year on paid search with every dashboard reading green, was quietly acquiring customers worth a fraction of what they cost to win. No one had assembled the numbers that would show it. When I did, the methodology behind Why Marketing was born.

Every CFO I worked with asked a version of the same question: what are we actually getting for the marketing budget? In most businesses, the honest answer was that no one knew, not because the data didn't exist, but because it had never been assembled into the right calculation.

Why Marketing exists to answer that question. The Commercial Logic diagnostic is not a marketing tool. It is a capital return calculation, one that connects acquisition cost to lifetime value with a methodology both functions can stand behind.

02 · The experience behind the method

The method didn't come from theory. It came from the work.

Senior marketing leadership across enterprise software, cloud, and industrial technology, in businesses from scale-up to multi-billion-pound enterprise. The Commercial Logic diagnostic is the distillation of what that work kept revealing.

Capital reallocation

$3M redirected to higher-margin segments

A managed-services business was acquiring the wrong customers at scale. Finding it, and rebuilding the targeting, became the origin of the method.

Demand performance

+24% pipeline from an evidence-led strategy

Reactive activity replaced with clear prioritisation and performance tracking across an international marketing function.

Enterprise scale

A 41-person global function, restructured for a £9.5B merger

Due diligence and organisational redesign across two enterprises, readying marketing for integration at scale.

Commercial alignment

A $9.94M record revenue year across EMEA & APAC

Regional marketing aligned to measurable commercial outcomes, contributing to the strongest revenue year on record.

Sectors

Enterprise software · Cloud & managed services · Industrial software · Logistics

Regions

EMEA · APAC · North America

Operated at

CMO · SVP · VP & Director, Global Marketing

Selected organisations

IBM · Sun Microsystems · AVEVA · GreyOrange · Manhattan Associates

The full career history lives on LinkedIn →