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 | 11:22

Scaling from one to three cloud platforms with Alana Ballon at Wiz

Jeremey interviews Alana Ballon, VP Revenue Development and Operations at Wiz, about scaling from one cloud platform to three.

Learn more about Wiz: wiz.io

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Podcast: Smooth Scaling

Episode: Scaling from one to three cloud platforms 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 the conversation, Jeremy asks Allana to identify a critical initiative she was involved with which had a major impact on revenue performance. About 18 months ago when Trish Cagliostro, head of global channels, joined Wiz, she said they needed to be in every Cloud marketplace. In settling on their top three channels, they wanted to give both their customers and sales team flexibility. To begin, they were not in any Cloud marketplaces and barely even had a channel business. Although they sell all of their business through private offers, it was helpful that they had public listings on all marketplaces. The first step was to work with their marketing team to identify how they wanted to elevate the brand and position themselves publicly so that companies could find them on their Cloud journeys. The next piece was to enable the sellers on the AWS side. This, Allana shares, is an ongoing effort. One huge benefit they had was that their ASP was relatively high.

Next, Alana shares how they were able to avoid channel conflict during the process. The most exciting part about selling through the Cloud marketplace is that it is not a net sale, but a gross sale. They also receive several different benefits from the Cloud marketplaces. In some situations, customers are also getting these additional benefits from the Cloud marketplace. When working with a customer, the Cloud marketplace has a whole team of experts who serve as trusted advisors. Wiz is a company which attaches their projects to what will drive the most revenue. Each marketplace, the team has found, has their own degree of sophistication. The most difficult part of this transition was finding someone who was in more than one marketplace. In terms of promoting how easy it was to sell through the Cloud marketplace, their sellers were their greatest asset. Issuing credits and figuring out different kinds of payment structures can also be tricky, so it was crucial to stay tight with the finance team. When embarking on the project, Allana didn’t quite realize how much effort would go into it. However, the return on investment has been unbelievably worth it.