Partner Highlight: An Interview with OpsGuru's Christina Florencio
BY AMY KHOKHAR
Image is of Christina Florencio, a young woman wearing a lace black top and a pink skirt with curled black hair. She is standing by a window, smiling, in a room with dark wooden walls. On the wall behind her there are four framed photos of roosters. Image courtesy of Christina.
“Early in my career, I thought that asking for people’s time or to be introduced to others was ‘inconveniencing’ them. Being bold and asking for help is not inconveniencing anyone, especially if they believe in you. Get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Take the time to recognize and stay in touch with those who have helped you along the way.”
In partnership with OpsGuru, a Carbon60 Company, Women in Tech World is honoured to share the success mantra of Christina Florencio - a mantra which helped her through a unique career transformation in the Marketing industry. Christina currently works as an Account Executive with OpsGuru in Vancouver, Canada. Her role is responsible for strategic development, account management, and delivering go-to-market campaigns with tech giants like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google Cloud for clients
A graduate from Theatre school, Christina leveraged her strong skills in presentation, communication and leadership and applied them to sales and marketing. She feels lucky to have worked for various organizations that cultivated her talent and career growth early. Christina spent the next 14 years as a Marketer which she realized was a tumultuous career path as it is often a role that’s the first to be downsized in most organizations. During this experience, she came to understand the vitality of the right sales team members in the Technology sector. Hence, she pivoted her career by enhancing it with a blend of business development skills to enter the recession-proof tech industry.
Career transformations are highly challenging, especially switching from one industry to another completely. Christina managed it successfully by constant learning and knowledge sharing to accelerate business growth for different roles. She used her non-technical background to her advantage by being a meticulous problem solver for business challenges. While speaking about the latest popular trend for professionals to combine Marketing and Technology skills, she mentions “This trend certainly makes sense to me as both roles require a lot of creativity and validation of solutions. The ability to understand deep technical solutions, translate them into ‘straight talk’ and market them to the consumer is key to successful and relatable campaigns. The emergence of the Marketing Technologist role is a game changer in the industry, bridging the gap between the technology and its alignment with the value proposition sold to the consumer.”
When it comes to challenges she has faced in her career, Christina mentioned some of the common barriers women face at the negotiation table which range from increased salaries to career progression. She suggests to those with similar experience, to be purposeful with their career prospects. “Doing the research around salaries (through tools like LinkedIn Insights, Glassdoor) as well as having informational interviews with people in similar professions is a great starting point to successfully negotiate. I recommend having a mentor early in your career to gain that support system needed to be comfortable with those courageous conversations,” she advised.
With the recent acquisition of OpsGuru by Carbon60, Christina is excited to explore and target Canadian market opportunities on a bigger scale. This will enable OpsGuru to reach their customers with a full range of multi-cloud consulting and professional services for a complete cloud experience. Christina wants to utilize her immense knowledge and experience to share OpsGuru’s vision of becoming the best end-to-end Canadian Cloud partner.