Coupa’s ‘Below the Enterprise Level’ Secret Sauce (Part 1: Dissecting What Makes It Attractive for SMB and Middle Market Procurement)

The use of procurement technology in the middle market is heating up. For the purposes of this analysis, we define the middle market as companies between $250 million to $2 billion in revenue. Under that threshold are true SMBs. And above that range are enterprise customers, at least by Spend Matters’ definition.

Granted, this is not a perfect segmentation as the level of needs (and sophistication) in the middle market can vary dramatically by geography, industry and company, all of which can lead to very different technology buying requirements. Some middle firms may end up looking exactly like enterprise-level (Global 2000) customers, whereas others may more closely approximate SMB buyers.

Regardless, within the somewhat flexible bounds of the middle market definition, Coupa, among others, is clearly gaining traction based on a rare combination of ingredients that create a particularly attractive suite within this market segment. These features are also attractive to SMBs too. Coupa has provided information to Spend Matters that its mid-market segment is companies from $250 million to $1 billion in annual revenue and their corporate segment is under $250 million in annual revenue.

This Spend Matters PRO research brief dissects some of the elements that we think contribute to Coupa’s particular attractiveness in this sector (Hint: Very few of these elements are focused on the classic “feature/function” arms race between vendors). In a subsequent brief, we’ll attempt to quantify the importance of the middle market to Coupa in recent wins. And we will explore how some of these elements also apply to other vendors that are succeeding in the middle market as well (with mini case studies featuring Amazon Business, Negotiatus, Procurify, Scout, Tealbook and Tipalti).