It’s easy to let New Year’s resolutions start to slip once January is underway. But if improving your company’s use of data and analytics was on that list, you definitely won’t want to let it fall through the cracks. Here are three reasons why:

1. The top pain point for business leaders where analytics is concerned is that too much data is left unanalyzed — a problem cited by 53% of those surveyed in the State of Analytics report published by Salesforce Research. If too much data is left unanalyzed now, just imagine how much will pile up if left untended for another year. Between 2015 and 2020, the number of data sources actively analyzed by businesses is expected to rise 83%. The time to get started is now.

2. A staggering 90% of high performers say analytics is absolutely critical or very important to driving the company’s overall business strategy and improving operational outcomes. Businesses that are far outmatching their competition are using analytics to do so. High performers are 4.6x more likely to say they’ve moved beyond using data to keep score and onto using data to drive business decisions. By stark contrast, underperformers are almost 5.7x more likely to rely on their gut instinct instead of data when making strategic business decisions.

3. Analytics is increasingly finding its way into every corner of the business. Driving operational efficiencies and facilitating growth are baseline analytics-driven priorities for businesses today. As companies improve performance, they begin to focus on more advanced use cases such as automating business operations, enabling new business models, and predicting customer behavior. The chart below shows the top 10 use cases for analytics, but a complete list can be found in the full State of Analytics report.

Download the State of Analytics report now to get insights on analytics trends from more than 2,000 business leaders worldwide.