She had spent fifteen years building something real. Senior roles across the UK, Europe, and the United States. Rooms full of people who knew her name, trusted her judgment, and picked up when she called. Then she moved back to Spain, and none of it transferred. No warm introductions. No senior contacts in her industry. No network to fall back on. Just a track record that existed somewhere else, and a market that had no reason to care.
Most people in that position do what feels logical. They send applications. They attend events. They collect contacts and hope something sticks. Lorena Alonso did none of that.
The Person Who Stopped Asking and Started Building
Lorena Alonso is the Global Lead for Data and Analytics Strategy at Suntory Global Spirits, where she connects the technical and commercial sides of the business across international markets. She is also the founder of Your Network Is Your Edge, a methodology for building the kind of senior relationships that move careers forward, and the architect of Inside the Data Room, a private biannual series bringing together CEOs and senior data leaders across Europe. She operates at the intersection of two worlds that rarely speak the same language, and she has built a career by making them.
From Madrid to London and the Education Nobody Puts on a Resume
Lorena’s professional formation began not in a boardroom but in the field. Her early years at Lyreco Group, where she moved from sales executive to international key account manager across nearly seven years, gave her something that would quietly shape everything that followed: an understanding of how commercial relationships are actually built, not theorized, but built, one conversation at a time, with real stakes attached.
She moved into brand marketing at Babcock International Group, where she led a £108 million brand redesign across eleven business units in six countries, coordinating thirteen cross-functional teams and delivering on time, within budget, and across an organization that had every reason to fragment. That project was not a marketing exercise. It was a lesson in what it takes to hold a complex system together when the people involved have competing priorities and no shared reporting line.
From there, she moved into data. First at Research Now SSI, then into nearly nine years at Circana, the analytics company whose Liquid Data platform delivers real-time consumer intelligence to retailers and CPG brands. She rose from senior business development specialist to Director of Strategic Partnerships, and the numbers from that period are worth pausing on. She secured £14 million in annual revenue growth for Boots. She led teams of up to twenty people. She identified the white space in the electronics sector, pursued it, and turned that single bet on Currys into approximately £6 million in growth opportunities, a market Circana had not previously touched.
‘It Was Never Really About the Data’
The work Lorena does now at Suntory Global Spirits sits at a problem that most organizations have not fully solved. Data teams build things that impress. Business teams make decisions that matter. The two rarely connect as cleanly as the org chart suggests they should.
Her framework for closing that gap is deliberately unglamorous. “I start from the decision, not the data,” she explains. “For any use-case, I ask three things: which specific commercial decision does this change, can our data actually support that decision today, and what’s the cost of getting it slightly wrong?” The use-cases that score high on all three get built first. Everything else waits. It is a framework that keeps technical capability tethered to commercial impact rather than to what looks impressive in a presentation.
The same instinct shaped her approach at Circana. When asked how she identified the highest-leverage partnership opportunities, her answer cut straight to the point. “It was never really about the data,” she says. “It was about who I built the data around.” She did not chase every account. She looked for the white space. She sat with commercial and category teams early, framed the data around the decision they were already trying to make, and by the time the analysis reached the room, it was no longer her recommendation. It was a shared conclusion. “Decision-makers don’t act on charts,” she says. “They act on a story with a number attached.”
That ability to translate between technical and commercial, to make data feel like a decision rather than a report, is what has defined her corporate career. It is also what she now teaches.
The Table She Built When She Had No Seat
When Lorena returned to Spain, she understood something that most people in her position do not. The instinct to ask for help, to request introductions, to reach out and explain what you are looking for, is exactly the wrong instinct when you have no credibility in a new market. Cold requests from someone unknown produce cold results.
So she went in the opposite direction. She identified senior data and technology leaders she admired, people who had no reason to take a meeting with someone they had never heard of, and she offered them something before she asked for anything. A curated table. A small, invite-only breakfast with peers at the same level from other industries. A real conversation about something they actually cared about.
“I didn’t lead with ‘can you help me,'” she says. “I led with ‘I’m bringing a small group of leaders together for breakfast to talk about X. I’d love you in the room.'” The shift was immediate and structural. By hosting, she stopped being someone looking for a seat and became the person who built the table. That reframing changed how people perceived her, and more importantly, it changed who thought of her first when opportunities appeared.
Within months, she was in rooms with CEOs across Europe. Three leadership offers arrived in sixty days, none of them the result of an application. Inside the Data Room, the private biannual series she built from those early breakfasts now brings together some of the most senior data leaders on the continent.
The methodology behind all of it is not networking advice. “You don’t have a performance problem,” she tells the executives she works with. “You have a visibility problem.” The fix, she argues, is structural. Five warm, intentional relationships built on genuine generosity outperform a hundred and fifty connection requests every time. And when that approach becomes how a team operates rather than a skill one talented individual happens to have, trust stops being luck and starts being something an organization can rely on.
The Question She Came Back to Answer
Lorena Alonso returned to Spain with a track record and no audience for it. What she built in the months that followed was not just a network. It was proof that the system she now teaches works, because she ran the experiment on herself first, in the hardest possible conditions, with no safety net and no head start.
The three offers that arrived without a single application were not luck. They were the result of a deliberate, repeatable approach to becoming the person decision-makers think of first. That is the work she does now, in the data rooms at Suntory, on keynote stages across Europe and the United States, and at the private tables she continues to build.
She did not wait to be noticed. She built the room where the right people would find her.
Lorena Alonso is the Global Lead for Data and Analytics Strategy at Suntory Global Spirits and the founder of Your Network Is Your Edge, based in Madrid, Spain. She works with senior leaders and organizations across Europe and the United States on building the relationships and visibility that shape careers and commercial outcomes. To connect with Lorena or learn more, visit linkedin.com/in/lorena-alonso-ai or yournetworkedge.com.
