My professional experience consists entirely of marketing roles (well, and teaching group fitness.) But as I began working to build a new career in FinOps, I noticed many similarities between my marketing experience and the FinOps role. I thought a comparison chart was the best way to present this info, showing the connection between the two disciplines.
| Domain | FinOps Capabilities | Megan’s Marketing Accomplishments |
| Training | Training, skill development, and practical activities that enable teams throughout the org to adopt and deliver the FinOps practice | Train colleagues such as sales on new offerings. Educate prospects on the value of our products and overcome objections. |
| Org-Wide Collaboration | Manage the FinOps practice to enable continuous improvement throughout the entire org | Learn from development & product management, support demand gen with assets to generate leads, provide sales with tools to help overcome objections and close deals. Interview customers for case studies & prospects who didn’t buy to learn why. If I hadn’t persisted and suggested alternate approaches, my clients wouldn’t have so many case studies. |
| Educate & Influence Numerous Personas | Understand goals & challenges of core & allied personas | Understand & message to the various personas involved in the buying process. As a consultant to start-ups, I’ve supported many personas, including CEOs. |
| Build & Implement Best Practices | Central FinOps team encourages, evangelizes, and enables best practices | Establish standard, streamlined processes around events such as tradeshows and webinars. Style guides for consistent messaging. |
| Budget & Focus on ROI | Creates budgets & forecasts. Report on unit metrics. Map monetary and non-monetary cloud costs to budgets. | Create and adhere to budgets. Measure campaign results. Show ROI of marketing spend. Message to prospects that investing in our product will provide them with a positive ROI. |
| Analytics | Understand usage & cost. Quantify business value. | Report on data from various CRM and SFA systems. Present to relevant stakeholders. |
| Empathy | Build and maintain healthy relationships on a foundation of trust. Empathize with core personas including engineering and product | Marketing to tech leaders requires understanding their infrastructure & responsibilities. We create target personas that build a picture of their typical day and focus on common pain points. |
| Tagging & Attribution | Tag resources for chargeback & showback. | Tag inbound leads to attribute opportunities & revenue to campaigns. Measure outcomes resulting from all marketing activities. |
| Standardize Language | Define & consistently use a common lexicon. | Create Message Maps that document all key message points for consistency and streamlined content creation. |