Australia’s “Mid-Market” – Fertile Ground for Salesforce-Based Innovation
Yesterday's The Australian included a 4 page wrap-around special on Australia's 'mid-market'. (Yep - real print newspapers still exist particularly in coffee-shops. You can pick up your copy on-line - forgive me if it disappears behind a paywall). It was well worth a read - particularly to us here at ProQuest.
We love the mid-market, and we deliver outstanding outcomes that meet the needs of this sector. We target the need for mid-market business agility and robust system platforms. We show mid-market players how Salesforce facilitates the opportunity to compete with major enterprise players.
Is this what the mid-market needs? It would seem so. Take this from Christopher Jackson at the University of NSW's School of Management. "It is very important for mid-market companies to have strategies, products, services, processes and business models which are innovative"
And this from Tim Kastelle, senior lecturer at the University of Queensland's Business School on Reinvention. "Reinvention is actually business model innovation. It's basically saying, can we repackage the entire company, and the way we deliver value to people? It's a really important skill for companies to build.
This is exactly what ProQuest can help with. Delivering agility to growing mid-market companies with well-governed Salesforce implementations.
So what is the mid-market? We've been grappling with this at ProQuest because if we want to give the mid-market further love in 2014 - then we really need to know what exactly it is and where to find it!
The Australian suggests the mid-market contains those companies who have turnover between $10m and $250m. Whilst this represents only 1.4% of companies in Australia, they create 25% of the jobs.
Elsewhere in the feature The Australian focusses on publicly listed mid-market companies. They quote Small-caps investment newsletter editor Richard Hemming who explains there are 2185 ASX-listed companies, the 200 biggest of which have a median market cap of $1.8 billion. Almost 90 per cent of ASX stocks have a market cap below $300m. So plenty of opportunities here. But then of course there are many great mid-market companies that remain private, such as those recorded in the BRW Top 500. And then we shouldn't forget subsidiaries of multinationals who won't show up on either of these lists, but may still be creators of their own destiny when it comes to system design.
Salesforce is making huge inroads into Australian Enterprise all the way from the majors such as Commonwealth Bank to the tiniest start-up companies. But the mid-market - this is where ProQuest loves to work magic with Salesforce. We'll be regularly publishing on the subject of how we do it over the coming weeks.
