Sales Strategy Meets Practitioner Reality ft. Sean Kennedy and Amanda Wagner | Ep #78

About this episode

What happens when you put the strategic and operational sides of FinOps in the same room?

In this episode of FinOps in Action, host Taylor Houck welcomes two guests for the first time on the show, Sean Kennedy, Senior Cloud FinOps Consultant, and Amanda Wagner, Cloud FinOps Consultant, both from Trace3. Sean focuses on presales strategy and partner enablement across Trace3's FinOps practice, while Amanda works directly with a portfolio of customers on the practitioner side. Together they unpack why FinOps never really finishes, how customer maturity changes the conversation, and what the AI cost landscape looks like right now.

Here’s what we talked about:

• FinOps is a cycle, not a destination. There's no finish line, just an ongoing loop of informing, optimizing, and operating that adapts as engineering, pricing, and business needs change.
• Document your processes before you need them. Repeatable procedures for tagging, showback, and optimization reviews protect your FinOps program from falling apart when key people leave.
• Meet customers at their maturity level. Don't push budgeting and forecasting on a team that's still working on basic visibility; introduce concepts in bite-sized chunks as they're ready.
• The biggest wins often come from on-prem-to-cloud transitions. Companies migrating legacy infrastructure and mindsets tend to have the most untapped savings potential, partly because the human resistance to change is as big a factor as the technical work.
• Clarify what "AI spend" actually means before optimizing it. Seat-based licenses, hyperscaler AI services, GPU infrastructure, and token-based usage are all totally different cost problems that need different strategies.

Chapters:

00:00 Welcome to the Show

00:51 Meet Sean and Amanda

01:51 Sean's Role at Trace3

02:41 Amanda's Practitioner Lens

03:18 Myth of Being Done

04:09 Mindset Shift From IT

05:05 FinOps as Org Adoption

06:15 Repeatable Processes Matter

07:09 Core FinOps Processes

08:12 Enterprise vs Commercial Needs

11:10 When Spend Forces FinOps

12:03 Start Early and Build Habits

14:36 Meeting Customers Where They Are

16:32 Who Gains the Most

23:18 AI Expands FinOps Scope

27:56 Forecasting and Optimizing AI

31:44 Closing and Personal Journeys

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Quote of the Show:

• “"I think the myth is that FinOps is something that you finish, right? You don't ever arrive at FinOps." - Amanda Wagner

Links:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanda--wagner/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sean~kennedy/
• Website: https://www.trace3.com/

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