68% of Salesforce customers plan to increase investments in analytics: Survey

Nearly 68 percent of companies using Salesforce said they will increase their investments in analytics in the coming year, according to Bluewolf’s fourth annual “The State of Salesforce” report. In the past year, six percent of companies surveyed have adopted the new Analytics Cloud – and 14 percent plan to invest in the coming year. The best companies are moving up the analytics maturity scale by investing in predictive and prescriptive intelligence tools to lead data-driven insights and take the best next action, the report said. [caption id=“attachment_2303210” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Courtesy: Salesforce[/caption] Global business consultancy Bluewolf, which surveyed more than 1,500 Salesforce customers from small to large businesses across IT, marketing, sales, operations, services and other capacities, highlighted that a third of companies cite employee-facing initiatives as one of their top objectives for 2016. According to the report, companies are three times more likely to attribute measureable business outcomes to the use of Salesforce when employees believe that Salesforce makes their jobs easier. The report highlighted 64 percent of Salesforce customers plan to increase their Salesforce budgets in the coming year; 11 percent plan to increase spending by more than 50 percent. Additionally, 49 percent of customers are currently invested in two or more Salesforce clouds, and 22 percent of customers are invested in three or more Salesforce clouds. About 90 percent of companies said improving the user experience of sales apps is key to their sales strategy in the coming year. “Furthermore, employees stated that they are two times more likely to say Salesforce makes it easier to do their jobs when they can access it from a mobile device. Mobile-optimized tools and applications are critical to selling smarter and faster with Sales Cloud, and supporting intelligent, relevant, and streamlined workflows to maximize productivity,” the report added. Fifty-nine percent of service professionals believed it’s easier to use their company’s Salesforce instance today than it was a year ago. Additionally, one in three companies have already invested in agent productivity apps; one in five are planning to invest. The report noted that 60 percent of marketers cited poor or inconsistent data and lack of data access as their biggest challenges overall. With so much different data coming from so many sources, getting useful insights is a constant challenge for marketers.