Ahead of Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco next week, Bluewolf has released its fifth annual The State of Salesforce report, which highlights the investments companies are making to improve how they use Salesforce.

The report says that the best companies are focused on intelligent applications, improving ease of use, and using data within Salesforce more effectively.

The findings are based on responses from 1,700 Salesforce users – the majority of which (63 percent) are expecting to increase their Salesforce budgets in 2017, with 13 percent increasing budgets more than 50 percent. 

“When cognitive becomes the standard, our core business systems will be self-learning, have the ability to mine data, and recognize patterns and natural language in a way that mimics the human brain,” Bluewolf CEO Eric Berridge said in the report. “Salesforce has laid the foundation for this through investments and acquisitions in analytics and artificial intelligence.”

The following are some of the key findings from the report.

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1. Intelligent Applications = Business Success

“Increasing investments in making analytics actionable and accessible is the best way to move applications from smart to intelligent,” according to the report.

Sixty-five percent of companies are increasing their investments in making analytics actionable. The report says that the best companies are focused on analytics projects that reduce the effort of every employee’s most frequent decisions.

Companies that have increased investments in analytics over the past 12 months are 3x more likely to see their data as a competitive advantage than companies who haven’t increased investments.

2. Integrating Salesforce Clouds Supports Adoption

More than half of companies (55 percent) plan to integrate Salesforce clouds – one of the first steps to mitigating employees’ data challenges, according to the report. Thirty-nine percent of companies that have integrated clouds cite their data as a competitive advantage or strategic asset.

“Companies that have integrated or plan to integrate clouds are more likely to think Salesforce’s overall value has increased in the past 12 months than those that haven’t integrated,” the report says.

3. Automation Helps Sales Reach Goals

Intelligent core applications help companies improve forecasting accuracy; 66 percent of respondents whose core applications are intelligent say that their forecasting accuracy has improved in the past 12 months. Companies are more than twice as likely to believe they’ll exceed goals when forecasting accuracy has improved.

Nearly one-third of salespeople believe that their core applications anticipate which opportunities to focus on. Still, 31 percent of sales cite poor access to different types of data as the biggest barrier to deriving insights from Salesforce.