How Career Banker Arundhati Bhattacharya 6X’d Salesforce Revenue After Her Unusual Transition

Salesforce India's revenue has been climbing steadily since former SBI chief Arundhati Bhattacharya joined them as the President and CEO of Salesforce South Asia. In fact, the revenue has gone up six times, from about Rs 1,500 crore to over Rs 9,000 crore. Hiring has also spiked since.

In an exclusive intervew to NDTV Profit, Bhattacharya reflected on her journey at Salesforce till now and said that her biggest learning has been prioritising the customer.

"At the end of the day, you know it is really the customer that matters," she says.

Elaborating on this further, Bhattacharya said that every company, no matter what they are doing, need to produce what the customer needs rather producing as per their understanding and then trying to sell it.

"If you look at Steve Jobs, it's it was like that. What he really understood were the pains that the customer had in not having the right kind of products, the right kind of design and what they really desired was something that he could foresee where the customers themselves couldn't," she explained.

Lessons in Public vs. Private Sector Leadership

Bhattacharya believes that the red tape in private multinationals can sometimes surpass the bureaucracy of public sector banks.

Speaking to NDTV Profit, the former SBI chairperson recalled that before she could represent Salesforce in the media, she first had to get "media certified," despite decades of experience as the face of State Bank of India.

"I had already been facing the media for so many years, but they wouldn't let it go. I had to get certified, get feedback. The mere insistence that I do some things before I can do something else, no matter how many times I've done it before, that's a lot of bureaucracy," she said, stating that sometimes "SBI is less bureaucratic than Salesforce."

On her leadership journey, Bhattacharya reflected on the transformation she oversaw from an organisation with an average employee age of 47 at SBI to Salesforce India, where the median age is around 30.

"That's quite a jump," she said, noting the shift in culture and customer focus that came with it.

She emphasised that her biggest learning has been putting the customer at the centre of everything. "At the end of the day, it is the customer that matters. Every company, no matter what they are producing, if you are not looking at customer needs first, then you're going the wrong way about it," she said, adding that even Steve Jobs succeeded because he understood the customer's pain points and unmet desires.

Bhattacharya added that her next book might well be titled "Bursting the Myths of the Public and the Private Sector," in jest or half-seriousness.