Batti: Half of Whatfix leadership is internally promoted, half lateral hires
Khadim Batti · How they built a $600M SaaS Company? Ft. Khadim Batti & Vara Kumar Namburu - Co-founders, Whatfix · Apr 17, 2023 · at 56:38
Khadim Batti, co-founder and CEO of Whatfix, discusses Whatfix's executive makeup and internal promotion track record on The Neon Show.
0:00 / 0:20exact quote · 20.8s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“See, half of my leadership today is people who have grown internally, right? My VP of products or VP of demand gen or VP of sales. They've all been here for seven, eight years and they've grown along. Some places where some of these guys couldn't scale or some people couldn't scale, we had to complement with the leadership from the market, right? So we got several, half of the 50% is almost like we recruited laterally.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Khadim Batti
Batti: Speed to first $1 million in revenue does not matter
“I think it doesn't matter my personal, that's my personal opinion, it doesn't matter how, how fast you get to first million, because you're figuring out the product market, right? You might have to do one pivot, two pivot, you need to find out the right segmen…”
Batti: Whatfix instituted a mandatory five-day in-office policy years ago
“Probably we are one of the very, very few or one of the first SaaS companies to call all people back for five days office. We did like three years, two and a half, three years back, and I've been propagating because we believed it is not going to work. Every l…”
Batti: Whatfix abolished corporate titles to end tenure-based promotion expectations
“We abolished designations. Because what happened, everybody was asking, I have spent two years in my position. I want to get promoted. Now spending two years in your position doesn't mean you need to get promoted. Promotion means you need to take more ownershi…”
Batti: Macro factors barely affect early SaaS growth but dominate at scale
“When you're doing, let's say, one, two, three, three, two, nine, that initial journey, I think generally, 99% of the times, I think your time is not a problem, because I think you have enough headroom, enough room to grow. It doesn't matter how the industry is…”
Batti: Public SaaS sales efficiency magic numbers have fallen to 0.5
“So one simple metric like sales and marketing efficiency, magic number. I think, 20, 20, 21, 22, I think if you guys have track, it was like.73, point, even eight range. That means every dollar you spend on sales and marketing, you get .7 back net. Today, if y…”
Batti: New category creation enables remote, inbound enterprise SaaS sales
“It's a new category, has a potential of landing in, even into large enterprise. In this case, even inbound might work. There's a potential wherever you're sitting globally because you're solving a problem, which is actually people are trying to solve with the …”