Leaders Profile: Ulrike Eder, CMO, eSynergy

Beyond marketing: Ulrike Eder on leadership, value, and the human side of technology

Meet Ulrike Eder: a senior marketing leader with a multitude of experience under her belt. From a huge leap of faith to Bahrain for a business opportunity to becoming Chief Marketing Officer at eSynergy, Eder reflects on her career and the journey that led her here in this Leaders Profile interview.

When Ulrike Eder appears on the screen at the end of a long day, there is still a quiet energy about her. Behind the glass door of her office, colleagues move through the hallway, the rhythm of a consulting firm winding down. On the call, Eder is focused but relaxed, reflecting on a career that has taken her from Vienna to London, from early marketing roles to founding a start-up in the Middle East, and ultimately to her current role as Chief Marketing Officer at eSynergy.

Her journey into technology leadership was not planned. In fact, she describes it more as a series of opportunities (and occasional missteps) that gradually shaped her approach to leadership and business as a whole.

“I am Austrian and I have been in the UK for 17 years,” she says. After studying international economics in Vienna, she moved to London for what was meant to be a short-term internship: “I thought, you know, I'll have three months to find a job or I go back home. And I did find a job. I found a very badly paid job, but I did find a job.”

That job was in sales, a role she quickly realised did not suit her strengths. On the bright side, it did open the door to marketing, and the many other opportunities that followed in the technology sector.

Finding purpose in technology

Eder’s career accelerated after she joined ThoughtWorks in 2010, initially as a marketing executive:

“ThoughtWorks has always been really big on driving impact with technology and doing good in the world,” she recalls. The environment also gave her unusually early exposure to leadership. Within just a few years, she was running the company’s global marketing function in her late twenties.

“I got lucky to move through the ranks there fairly quickly, fairly early on in my career,” she says. “A lot of decisions you make for the first time every day and just a lot of fast and accelerated learning.”

The experience gave her the global exposure she needed and the chance to work alongside experienced technologists and consultants. Something she credits with shaping her broader business mindset.

After around five years of this, she transitioned into the product world, joining a U.S. travel technology scale-up and helping build its European operations. But the most defining chapter of her career came in 2015, when she co-founded a cloud infrastructure and security start-up.

Eder’s marketing reinvention in the Middle East

The start-up journey began with enthusiasm and investment, but the early stages quickly exposed the challenges of first-time founders.

“We made kind of all the first-time founder mistakes you can make,” Eder admits. One of the biggest missteps was how the team used early funding. “We raised money and there were four of us… but all of us quit our jobs… and paid ourselves a salary to cover rent and everything. We had to wait until the platform was built for me to sell and market it for our other team. It was just a stupid decision.”

There were also issues with the market fit. The company had built a sophisticated platform designed for regulated industries such as government and banking: but potential clients were not ready to buy from a young start-up. “It was too high risk,” she says. “We just thought we had a really good idea. Surely people will use that.”

The turning point came through a partnership with Amazon Web Services. When AWS opened a new data centre in the Middle East, Eder and her co-founders were invited to support cloud integration projects across the region.

Where was this new location you ask — Qatar? Saudi Arabia? UAE? “So we moved to this tiny island called Bahrain.” It was a bold move that changed the trajectory of the business.

“Suddenly the business kind of made sense,” she says. Governments and large organisations across the region were willing to work with smaller, agile technology providers. “The Middle East buys really differently… they buy on value and they have less constraints.”

The experience pushed Eder, leading to an expansion of skills that continues to shape her leadership style today. “I really stepped outside of my kind of knowledge area… and learned a lot about how the technology worked as well.”

A different model for marketing at eSynergy

Today at eSynergy, Eder leads marketing in a way that deliberately breaks from traditional structures.

Rather than treating marketing as a purely internal function focused on campaigns and brand awareness, she positions the team as an outward-facing partner to clients in order to “help them form a closer bond with us as technology partner.”

“Our philosophy is customer delight and driving value to our customers,” she says. “Not just building the right solutions; they need to have an impact and we need to be able to quantify that impact.”

One of the most distinct initiatives she leads is what the company calls its “enablement programme”. It is often mistaken for account-based marketing, but Eder insists the difference lies in where the focus sits.

“I don't believe in a lot of account-based marketing out of the book,” she says. “You put yourself and your services that you want to push at the center.”

Instead, her team spends time directly with client leadership teams to understand broader challenges, from talent attraction to international technology adoption.

The battle for marketing’s place at the top table

Eder is also candid about the structural challenges marketing leaders face, particularly in consulting organisations. “A lot of my peers as CMOs… are not part of executive leadership, which is the first issue,” she says. “And a lot of sales leaders own marketing functions.”

At eSynergy, she ensures that marketing’s role is tied directly to revenue and deliverable outcomes. “The first tier of deliverables has always got to be revenue generated and pipeline generated,” she says. “Everything else is secondary.”

That direct focus has helped build credibility for the function within the leadership team. But aligning marketing and sales remains one of the toughest challenges in business. “We're trying to get two functions to work hand-in-hand that ultimately have completely different time frames,” she explains.

Sales teams work on immediate opportunities while marketing builds long-term relationships and brand awareness. The difference in approach can create friction.

“If anybody tells you they get it to a 10 out of 10,” she says with a laugh, “I'd like to meet them.”

AI, automation, and the human connection

Like many leaders, Eder believes that AI will fundamentally change and reshape how marketing operates.

“For me, AI is completely rewriting how we work,” she says. “There's the naysayers and a lot of skeptics saying, it's just a little hype and it'll go away. I don't believe in that. I think it's here to stay and I think if you don't jump on the bandwagon, you will be left behind.”

Automation and personalisation will dramatically increase efficiency, but she warns that companies risk losing their human connection if they rely too heavily on technology. “The real challenge isn't necessarily about adopting it,” she says. “It's keeping humanity at the centre of it.”

Her response? Double down on real-world relationships: that means more events, dinners, and face-to-face conversations with clients.

A legacy beyond marketing

When asked about her legacy, she pauses.

For her, the most meaningful impact will not be campaign results or revenue figures, even though marketing contributed nearly half of the company’s revenue last year.

Instead, she points to culture and people.

“From a team perspective… really enjoyable environment, she pushed me, she got me to where I am today,” she says, describing what she hopes colleagues might say in the future. “ I really try to push and show up for the team and enable them to be the best version of themselves.”

Ultimately, success for Eder is measured in the organisations she helps build and the people she helps develop.

“Did we smash it? Did we work with the best people in the market? Did I learn a lot? Did I have some fun doing it?” she says.

Those, she suggests, are the questions that matter most. And judging by the pace of her career so far, she is far from finished answering them.

Quick fire questions 🔥

• Dream job growing up? Lawyer.
• What keeps you up at night? How we remain relevant in this as technology has been so front-and-centre in the economic evolution in the last few years.
• What excites you about the next 12 months? The market shifting and the opportunities that come with that shift for us as a business and the extreme growth that we're experiencing.
• What do you do outside of work? Travelling, playing the piano and hiking.
• Best advice you've ever received? Focus on what is important and do not let the urgent matters get on top of our priority list.

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