If you’ve worked in revenue operations for more than a minute, chances are you’ve felt the pressure to do it all: firefight, forecast, fix the funnel. But few in the industry manage to do it with the precision and systemic rigor of Alana Kadden Ballon.

Now VP of Revenue Operations at Sprout Social, Alana brings over 15 years of leadership at the helm of high-growth SaaS companies. Her journey—from SDR at Salesforce, to shaping global strategy at Informatica, Duo Security, Wiz, and now Sprout Social—reads like a blueprint for modern RevOps leadership. She’s scaled organizations from $10M to $500M+ in revenue, architected go-to-market transformations, and built teams that unlock serious growth.

In this episode of The Sales Compensation Show, Alana joined our CEO and host Nabeil Alazzam to share how she builds systems that flex without breaking.  

From embedding redundancy into RevOps' DNA, to challenging the fantasy of a silver-bullet sales tool, this episode's a crash course in operational resilience—and a reminder that real scale starts with systems, not quick wins.

Catch the full show, plus our favorite insights below.

Episode resources

• Connect with Alana on LinkedIn  
• Marc Benioff's V2MOM framework for strategic company alignment
• Article from First Round Review: Give away your Legos (and other commandments for scaling)
• Subscribe to (and rate!) The Sales Compensation Show on:
  • Spotify
  • Apple Podcasts

A redundancy mindset as strategic advantage

Ask Alana Kadden Ballon what RevOps is really about, and she doesn't reach for the usual buzzwords—no “revenue acceleration” or “tech stack optimization” here. Instead, she defines the role with sobering clarity:  

"It’s about creating the strategy, structure, programs, and tactics needed to help an organization grow and be successful."

Because the role runs the gamut and often requires leading teams through a tremendous amount of change, Alana's operating philosophy centers on redundancy architecture. It’s a mindset that treats fail-safes not as inefficiencies, but as strategic must-haves:

"You have to have a plan, a backup, and a backup for your backup."

In a world where change is constant, this approach helps turns RevOps from a reactive function into a source of continuity and control.

For Alana, this means more than just contingency planning—it’s about how to consciously build systems that can take a hit and keep running. Whether it’s reducing reliance on individual team members, documenting institutional knowledge, or scaling discounting and approval processes, her goal is to design a lattice of interconnected support. As she shared:

“I look at brittle failure points as being reliant on one human being, right? If this one person is in place for this global organization—in a global economy— we need to make sure we build systems (documentation) and teams that don’t collapse.”

Alana Kadden Ballon

VP of Revenue Operations, Sprout Social

Overall, in today’s RevOps environment—where economic shifts and go-to-market pivots can crash over your funnel like a wave at any moment—resiliency doesn’t come from over-indexing on a single strategy or system—it comes from building layers of contingency. Whether it’s preparing as best as possible for unexpected macroeconomic shifts with modular operations, or mitigating brittle dependencies, Alana advocates designing operations like lattice: interconnected, flexible, and scalable.

On your data strategy: spend less time finding and more time fixing

When your job is to drive alignment across Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success, you need more than instinct—you need clarity. Which starts with data. But as Alana sees it, the value of data isn't in building endless dashboards or running ad hoc analyses—it's in agreeing upfront on what matters and delivering those insights instantly so you can action on them.

At Sprout Social, Alana’s team streamlined reporting to the point where a full QBR analysis can be spun up in under two hours.

The goal? Less time on dashboard builds. More time on solving the real issues at hand.

"When you can [automate] you're spending your time fixing the problem not finding the problem. That has been a huge unlock for us ...being able to create data like that where we can really quickly see like all of the pacing and how things are going all the way through the funnel and even looking back —like— okay where are we ahead or behind even as we're going through the month and being able to do that quickly."

Further, many companies get stuck in analysis paralysis—endlessly debating metrics instead of acting on them as signals. Alana emphasizes the importance of having leadership that trusts the data and is willing to make decisions quickly. At her organization she has the support of a culture where if data points to an action, the team moves—no excessive rehashing or second-guessing needed.

Measuring the immeasurable: Incentivizing long-term outcomes

RevOps is often measured by immediate outcomes—pipeline coverage, conversion rates, forecast accuracy. But as Alana points out, some of the most critical work happens in places that are harder to quantify, especially in post-sales.

In the discussion, Alana admits sales ops naturally gets more attention. But to build truly sustainable growth, RevOps must treat Customer Success with the same strategic weight as new business. That means not just resourcing Success Ops appropriately, but also designing compensation, KPIs, and systems that incentivize long-term outcomes.

Alana emphasizes the need for Sales and Customer Success teams to co-own long-term customer outcomes. She advocates for forward-looking planning with customers—such as ramp deals that map out how the partnership will evolve over multiple years—not just immediate onboarding or renewals. This approach ensures customers see how the vendor will future-proof their business, even as market conditions change.

She also highlights that long-term value often comes from intangible contributions—like referrals, case studies, and thought leadership—not just expansion revenue. For RevOps, the job is to set up milestones, align incentives, and embed this long-view into both Sales and Success motions from day one.

Point being: if you're only optimizing for immediate wins, you're missing the bigger picture. Measuring the for longer-term wins and incorproating these in your GTM strategy starts with redefining what success looks like—and building your operational model around that vision.

Whether it’s guiding comp plan tweaks, supporting global scale, or interrogating the ROI of every new tool, Alana's north star is clear: build infrastructure that doesn’t just survive change, but thrives in it. We found her view of RevOps a powerful departure from the reactive, ticket-based model many teams still operate under.

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