Finance & Business Operations Topics
Financial management, budgeting, ROI analysis, and business operations. Covers financial forecasting, valuation, and operational metrics.
Financial Metrics and KPI Development
Encompasses selecting, designing, and operationalizing financial and operational key performance indicators to measure strategy execution and business health. Candidates should demonstrate how to define what to measure, set realistic and time bound targets, establish data sources and calculation rules, account for metric relationships and trade offs, and identify limitations and unintended consequences. Skills include aligning metrics to business objectives, prioritizing leading and lagging indicators, designing dashboards and reporting cadence, driving accountability through ownership and escalation, and using metrics to inform decision making while recognizing when qualitative assessment is needed.
Vendor and Consultant Management
Focuses on managing relationships with external vendors, agencies, and consultants to deliver marketing operations outcomes reliably and cost effectively. Topics include vendor selection and evaluation processes, request for proposal and contracting, service level agreements and deliverables, vendor onboarding and integration with internal teams and systems, negotiation strategies, budget and cost management, performance monitoring and accountability, escalation and governance, and ensuring data security and compliance with third parties.
Vendor Relationships and Partnerships
Covers end to end management of relationships with marketing technology vendors and partners. Candidates should be able to describe vendor selection criteria, negotiation of commercial terms and service level agreements, onboarding and implementation oversight, adoption and change management techniques, vendor performance measurement and scorecards, and escalation and governance processes. Interviewers may probe trade offs such as cost versus capability, decisions about vendor consolidation versus best of breed, and how the candidate coordinated vendor road maps and feature requests with internal stakeholders.
Vendor and Partner Relationship Management
Comprehensive end to end management of external vendors, suppliers, agencies, freelancers, and strategic partners. Candidates should be able to discuss vendor landscape assessment and segmentation, selection criteria, request for proposal processes, and total cost of ownership analysis. The topic covers procurement and contracting skills including contract negotiation, governance models, pricing and terms negotiation, escalation clauses, and establishing service level agreements and performance metrics. It includes operational practices for onboarding and integrating external providers, communication and governance cadences, expectation setting, supplier development and capability improvement, and ongoing performance monitoring, reviews, and dispute resolution. Candidates should also be able to evaluate tradeoffs between insourcing and external partnerships, approaches to consolidation versus diversification, criteria and processes for deepening, replacing, or offboarding vendors, and collaborating with vendors to drive innovation and align vendor relationships to strategic business and technology objectives.