Sales Strategy Meets Practitioner Reality ft. Sean Kennedy and Amanda Wagner | Ep #78
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.
"I think the myth is that FinOps is something that you finish, right? You don't ever arrive at FinOps." - Amanda Wagner
Connect with Amanda and Sean:
Amanda’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanda--wagner/
Sean’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sean~kennedy/
In this episode of FinOps in Action, Taylor Houck sits down with Sean Kennedy and Amanda Wagner of Trace3 to make the case that FinOps isn't a project you finish, it's a discipline you repeat. Sean and Amanda break down why the biggest mistake teams make is treating cost optimization like a checklist, how documented, repeatable processes protect a FinOps program when the person who built it moves on, why companies shifting from on-prem to cloud tend to have the most untapped savings on the table, and why the fast-expanding world of AI spend, from seat-based licenses to token usage to GPU infrastructure, demands its own clarity before teams can even start optimizing it.