The following statistic is of major significance to professionals in B2B sales and marketing: More than 11,500 organizations currently use Workday around the world, and over 65% of them are Fortune 500 companies.
In other words, while this represents the commercial success of one platform, it also constitutes a very large, easily identifiable private market segment made up of high-value companies that have made significant investments in technology, have dedicated decision-makers in HR, finance, and IT, and continually evaluate services, tools, and integrations complementary to their existing infrastructure to increase value.
For B2B companies, one of the strategic issues is not whether or not Workday users should be considered a good potential audience; rather, it is whether or not your team has access to the data needed to effectively communicate with these companies.
What is Workday & Why Global Enterprises Choose It
Initially focusing on Human Capital Management (HCM), Workday’s primary functionality was supporting businesses with managing employee-related processes such as payroll, pay and benefit processing, hiring & onboarding, employee performance evaluations, and tracking time & attendance. Useful, of course, but not exactly the type of conversations happening at boards of directors.
However, Workday has transformed over the last several years with aggressive growth into Financial Management, Enterprise Planning, Procurement, and Artificial Intelligence (AI). The platform now provides an integrated view of workforce management and financial management through a single cloud-based solution, allowing leadership teams to have a single source of truth for accurately tracking people and money in real-time (instead of relying on spreadsheets and outdated data).
The ability to have both Human Resource (HR) and Finance systems communicating with each other (using live data) will eliminate the significant information and decision-making friction that would occur when the HR and Finance systems are not in sync. In addition, this capability becomes even more critical for large synchronously-distributed organizations where the cost and productivity advantages associated with efficient workforce management can create a significant competitive advantage.
Understanding company needs using tech data is one of the best ways for business-to-business software companies to identify when companies are most likely to buy. It helps to add additional context about what we already know about businesses based on their firmographics, such as sector or number of employees.
When we see that a company is on the Workday global customer list, we can reasonably guess a number of things about them:
- They’re generally mid-large companies (generally between 1,000-10,000+ employees, average Workday customer size).
- They have made a commitment to adopting a cloud-based infrastructure to manage their HR and financial functions.
- The company has multiple stakeholders in HR, Finance and IT that will work together on the company’s technology purchases.
- The company is likely to be looking at other products (add-ons, integrations, ancillary services) to optimize their investment with Workday.
For solution providers in HR software, payroll management solutions, compliance solutions, workforce analytics solutions, consulting services for implementing, staffing solutions, and for developing employee skills and training, building a well-curated list of Workday customers is more than just an effective list of prospects; it is the fundamental basis of a go-to-market strategy that is intelligence-/data-driven.
Global Adoption of Workday
To assess where Workday is going with regard to adoption trends, it’s helpful to start with the numbers, which tell a compelling story.
- More than 11,500 enterprises in 175 countries now utilize Workday; the platform is used by approximately 30% of the Forbes Global 2000 organizations.
- Workday’s contractual user base exceeds 75 million globally, and Workday processes more than one trillion transactions annually, the volumes of which rank among the largest and most deeply integrated enterprise platforms in use today.
- For B2B vendors, this degree of integration is critically important; organizations do not typically disengage from Workday quickly because the implementation processes can be lengthy, the cost of switching providers is often prohibitive, and organizations typically increase their utilization of the Workday platform over time, as opposed to decrease.
As such, each company on the Workday customer list represents not a transient sales opportunity but, rather, a long-term, high-lifetime-value account that has sustained purchasing activity.
Across all of these sectors, the strongest trends exist within manufacturing, retail, and professional services, with high customer density also found within Technology & Media, Healthcare, Financial Services, Higher Education, and Government.
New clients added to the global Workday client list in 2021 are United Airlines, Carrefour (France), Banamex (Mexico), and Masan Group (Vietnam), and existing clients expanding their relationships include: Google, Qantas Airways, Decathlon, and Levi Strauss, providing B2B vendors with cross-industry targeting opportunities that are relevant to nearly every enterprise.
Top Global Companies Using Workday
The worldwide list of clients using Workday includes businesses that exist throughout the globe in most of the major industries. Some of the most popular & well-known clients include Amazon, Netflix & Adobe, Coca-Cola, Pfizer, Chipotle, Toyota, and Levi Strauss. But the total number of clients using Workday goes far beyond the well-known clients listed above.
The companies using Workday range from very large global enterprises with greater than 10,000 employees (about 30 percent of Workday’s total customer base) to mid-size companies with 1,000 to 10,000 employees, who make up the largest segment of the total number of users at over 53%; therefore, the mid-size segment represents the largest user segment of the Workday client list.
Geographically, the U.S. is where most of the Workday clients are located. While adoption rates for Workday are highest in the U.S., the rate of Workday adoption continues to grow at a very rapid pace throughout EMEA and APAC, including locations that are benefiting from new infrastructure in the UK and developing new customers throughout the rest of Europe, Asia and Latin America.
Workday’s popularity among such a broad spectrum of entities is based on one basic characteristic: the ability to integrate finance and human resources into one cloud-based solution, thereby giving companies leadership teams one consistent, up-to-date view of both the company’s employees and its financial condition. As global enterprises with many employees in several countries, regulatory environments and time zones operate better when they have one view of both their people and money, the ability to use that as a basis for making decisions materially increases the efficiency of the decision-making process at all levels of the organization.
So for B2B re-sellers, the benefit is just as clear. In the global market, companies using Workday tend to be more strategic about their technology investments, build long-term value into their partnerships with other providers who support their Workday implementation, and continue to invest in additional solutions that extend or enhance the capabilities of Workday.
Workday Adoption Trends by Industry
While there are many customers that currently utilize Workday, some verticals display much higher rates of growth and urgency than others. Knowing these vertical-level adoption trends will help B2B vendors focus their outreach efforts more effectively.
Healthcare Industry:
by 2025, Workday’s Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) from the healthcare vertical reached $1B, demonstrating a concerted effort from organizations across the healthcare industry to modernize their outdated HR and financial systems, as well as effectively manage the complexities of the healthcare regulatory environment. As a result, the costs related to implementing and adding on new Workday solutions outpace initial implementation costs significantly.
As such, vendors providing solutions that address Compliance Management, Credentialing, Clinical Scheduling, and Staffing should consider Workday’s healthcare customers to be one of their top priorities.
Manufacturing
The manufacturing industry also reached Workday’s $1B ARR mark in 2025, largely due to large, multi-site manufacturers managing very complex, diversified, and globally dispersed workforces. Those manufacturers leveraging Workday demonstrate strong demand for Workforce Planning Tools, ERP Integrations, and Operational Analytics as a result of the complexity associated with coordinating production and labor at a large scale.
The Mid Market
The Mid Market is the emerging segment of Workday that is driving adoption at this time. With a strong focus on expanding Workday’s footprint and making it a more attractive option to implement for organizations that have been unable to validate the investment required to implement an enterprise solution, Workday has introduced a new offering called Workday Go.
This has resulted in substantial new Workday customers who will need assistance with their implementation, user training, system integrations, and ongoing consulting. Gaining early access to validated information on this market is a significant competitive advantage.
The Government and Public Sector
This represent another emerging market for Workday, with the recent establishment of a dedicated subsidiary, Workday Government, making this an area where Workday users around the world will now be able to use Workday for the first time. Many vendors in the B2B space have not been targeting the Government and Public Sector market.
Why Workday Adoption Trends Are Accelerating : The AI Imperative
As a result of Workday’s transformation to an AI-native enterprise system, B2B vendors will have new implications to consider when selling to accounts that are based on Workday.
Workday launched Workday Illuminate, which consists of a suite of AI agents that have been natively integrated into workflows of HR, Financial and Industry-specific applications. In just three months since the mid-year 2025 launch of the Agent Partner Network, more than 50 partners have joined the network to develop AI capabilities that have been natively integrated with Workday.
There was a 267% increase over the previous year in monthly traffic on the Workday Marketplace, and over 350 new features were added to the Workday platform in the Spring of 2025.
B2B vendors selling to companies that use Workday will have a significant amount of activity by customers currently in a purchasing cycle when looking for AI-integrated applications, evaluating integration priorities of vendors and making procurement decisions at a much faster pace than what you would typically see with perennial ERP vendors.
This is a time-sensitive opportunity for B2B vendors to reach, globally, Workday users during a large-time window while evaluating AI application vendors before finalizing their technology decisions.
Any organization that has AI-enhanced Human Resource (HR) Solutions, automated workflows, workforce analytics, financial process automation, or any other capability that increases the organization’s ability to develop within the Workday Ecosystem should focus on conducting outreach to all of the global clients of Workday as soon as possible.
A Strategic Framework for Targeting Workday Users Worldwide
If you’re a B2B company that wants to create an organized marketing campaign to focus on organizations that currently use the Workday platform, this framework provides a good operational structure.
1. Prioritize Based On Fit Rather Than Size
Trying to engage all of the 11,500+ Workday customers at once would be inefficient and not strategic. First, identify the two or three verticals or organizational sizes where you demonstrate the strongest product/market fit and where you can establish the best ROI narrative, either by measurement or client testimonials. High-growth verticals such as Healthcare and Manufacturing and the growing Mid-Market represent good opportunities, but your best starting point will likely be a vertical where you’ve already established credibility.
2. Accurately Define Your Buyer Personas
Clearly identify the primary decision-makers within the Fortune 500 global Workday clients, HR, Finance, and IT, and a combination thereof, so that you can effectively identify the best targets for your outbound campaigns. By targeting by role, your outbound marketing will have a much higher chance of success, as will all of the channels you use to deliver your messages, whether they are outbound, pay-per-click ads, or content
3. Always lead with and be relevant to the Workday platform
Make sure to mention Workday as you reach out to your targets. Whether your marketing approach leverages a native integration, addresses a gap in capability or complements an existing Workday module in some way contextualizing your value proposition using a specific Workday reference will be much more successful than a generic marketing approach it will get you through the competition’s clutter quickly and easily.
4. Implement Account-Based Collaboration
Workday enterprises generally involve numerous decision-makers across departments. More successful coordination occurs across multiple departments (e.g., HR, Finance, IT) when there is already an established relationship with the organization (target) than if the outreach was limited to only one department.
5. Coordinate your outreach with triggers that indicate a current desire to Purchase Workday Services
Current Workday implementations and module expansions and executive changes at the Target Company; in addition, Workday will have additional new platforms soon being launched and as such increases the overall number of potential Workday users around the globe are elevating their purchase activity. Intelligence-based uploading of these signals will help facilitate outreach at the optimum time when there is the highest level of receptiveness to the message.
Conclusion
There are many new organizations joining the worldwide signup list of Workday every quarter. There are also many existing worldwide signup users of Workday who are expanding into adjacent modules and capabilities. Currently, the AI-Driven transformation throughout the Workday platform is increasing activity by Purchasers throughout the Workday ecosystem; rather than moderating it.
For B2B organizations selling to HR, Finance, and IT decision-makers within large enterprises, Workday users represent one of the most precise targets available in the marketplace today and have the highest commercial value as well. However, to gain this value, the data must be of sufficient quality, recency, and depth to support intelligent, timely engagement.
