Smooth Scaling: Revenue Leader Interviews from Insight Partners

Founders and revenue leaders get never-before-heard best tips from interviews with leaders at the fastest-growing software businesses today. Hosted by…

Mar 14th, 2023 | 18:24

Revenue operational effectiveness with Alana Ballon at Wiz

Jeremey continues his conversation with Alana Ballon, VP Revenue Development and Operations at Wiz.

Learn more about Wiz: wiz.io/

For more growth strategies, visit insightpartners.com/ideas.

The content here is for informational purposes only. It should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any Insight Partners fund. For more details, please see insightpartners.com/legal-disclaimer.

Podcast: Smooth Scaling

Episode: Revenue operational effectiveness with Alana Ballon at Wiz

Welcome to Smooth Scaling, the podcast from Inside Partners that helps revenue leaders scale their softwares at every stage of growth. Today, host Jeremy Donovan speaks with guest Allana Ballon. Allanna is VP of Revenue Development and Operations at Wiz, a company on a mission to help organizations create secure Cloud environments.

To kick off part two of the conversation, Jeremy asks Allana to identify another critical initiative she was involved with which had a major impact on revenue performance. Often when a revenue operations team takes on a large project, they notify the rest of the company to expert service levels to decline. Wiz, she shares, has inverted in the resources needed to keep staffing up. Additionally, the team was so small 18 months ago which helped them get things in the place early. From the top down, they started the year by making sure everyone knew what their plan was and the things they did not want to do.

Alanna was part of a resegmentation at multiple companies. Wiz started off with two segments and has seen their revenue distribution align with more neutral segments. Having been both on the sales and ops side, she knows this process can be very jarring. The first thing to look at is how revenue is distributed globally and where the natural humps are. She has found that Wiz has some customers with such enormous Cloud environments that to utilize a tool like Wiz takes a huge amount of resources across the organizations. The true value of Saas, she shares, is having a really smooth curve of revenue. This means making sure you are not disrupting deals that are happening in the traditional, mid and small enterprises.

For anyone listening who may also be resegmenting their companies, Allana offers her best advice. When doing this, she shares, you have to be practical both at the rep level and the leader level. When looking at where things are in the sales cycle, if it’s far enough along, you are advised to keep it there. At the same time, you don’t want to punish people who are coming in as new hires. In closing, she predicts the impact AI will have on future operations. While she loves AI, she acknowledges that you can’t actually have it without people doing their jobs. Finally, she shares advice for scale up CEOs building up rev ops for the first time.