Every year, Bluewolf, a global business consulting firm, publishes The State of Salesforce, an annual analysis of how the best companies use salesforce.com. Bluewolf, in partnership with the MIT Sloan School of Management, collects data from more than 1,000 salesforce.com customers, with respondents from a variety of roles, company sizes, and industries.

For the third annual State of Salesforce report, Bluewolf focused particularly on the importance of data and the emerging analytics trend, in addition to product and cloud adoption metrics and budget trends.

You can read the full report here, but we’ve picked out a few of the findings that we found most thought-provoking:

1. Are your sales and marketing aligned?

84% of marketers who say they are aligned with sales — compared to only 79% of salespeople who say they are aligned with marketing.

2. Who's running your analytics?

71% of companies say they will increase their investment in analytics in 2015, but 100% of marketers plan to increase their analytics investment

3. Sure, you're going mobile — but do you have a strategy?

Customers surveyed ranked mobile strategy as their top mobile challenge. This year, 89% have adopted the Salesforce1 mobile app, as compared to 42% in 2013, and 45% of companies plan to increase their investments in mobile.

4. Are you fully leveraging Salesforce? 

According to the report, 54% of Salesforce customers use two or more clouds.

5. What kind of customer experience are you delivering?

Improving customer experience was cited three times more frequently than any other business challenge.

What do you think? Does any of the data surprise you? Share your thoughts in the comments section!

To learn more about the Salesforce Advantage, visit our website, or download the free e-book.