The founder

Alan Edwards.

I built Why Marketing to answer the question every CFO asks and few can: is your acquisition engine earning its keep? I work with CFOs, PE partners, and senior marketing leaders on the measurement and governance of customer acquisition economics.

Thirty years in senior commercial and marketing roles across B2B technology, cloud services, and enterprise software taught me where the money leaks. Why Marketing is what I built when I stopped working around the measurement gap and closed it instead, with a methodology finance and marketing can both stand behind.

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01 · Why Why Marketing exists

Every dashboard green. The wrong customers, at scale.

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

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

It crystallised on one engagement. A $300M managed-services business, spending three million dollars a year on paid search with every dashboard green, was buying customers worth a fraction of what they cost to win. The numbers that would prove it had never been assembled. I assembled them, and the methodology behind Why Marketing was born.

Every CFO I worked with asked the same question: what are we actually getting for the marketing budget? The honest answer was almost always that no one knew. Not because the data didn't exist, but because it had never been pulled into the right calculation.

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

02 · The experience behind the method

No theory here. This came from the work.

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

Capital reallocation

$3M redirected to higher-margin segments

A managed-services business was buying the wrong customers at scale. I found it, rebuilt the targeting, and the method was born.

Demand performance

+24% pipeline from an evidence-led strategy

Reactive activity swapped for 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 tied to measurable commercial outcomes, driving 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 →