Jonathan Staley, one of the team members behind the State of Salesforce, took the stage at Dreamforce 2014 to share a few of the insights from this year’s report. I joined his session today to learn about the report's key findings.

46% of C-level executives say Salesforce has measurably improved their customer experience.

The keyword here is "measurably." Not only has using Salesforce improved the actual experience of their customers, but these executives can actually measure it. In 2015, look for this number to go up as, companies already measuring customer experience make headway against their improvement goals, while additional companies start to measure its impact.

64% will have 3+ channels integrated with Service Cloud by 2016.

The number of channels is not important, but integration is. Expect individual service team members to have one system that puts everything about the customer they are working with at their fingertips.

64% of marketers value existing customers over new ones.

There has been a shift in marketing’s role; no longer are marketers solely focused on acquisition. In fact, marketers are likely to measured on their ability to increase customer acquisition, retention, and upsell. To achieve this, expect marketers to be leading systems integration projects and working to improve collaboration between themselves, sales, and customer service.

89% of Salesforce users have downloaded the Salesforce1 Mobile app. 

Nearly all salesforce.com customers have been experimenting with the Salesforce1 mobile app. Now they have the data and business cases to justify increasing their mobile budgets. Not only will 45% increase their budgets dedicated to mobile projects, companies that have already rolled out the Salesforce1 Mobile App are are twice as likely to have a completely custom mobile app on the Salesforce1 platform in their plans.

71% of Salesforce customers plan to increase their investment in analytics. 

Well before the announcement of analytics cloud companies decided that they needed more resources to turn their data into actionable insights. Expect companies with mature analytics capabilities to adopt predictive strategies that insert prescriptive actions into the workflows of frontline employees.

Approximately 50% of Salesforce customers will have an ALM solution by 2016.

The complexity and number of integrations combined with the amount of customization and demand for innovation from employees is leading companies to adopt application lifecycle management (ALM) solutions for Salesforce. In 2015, expect IT teams to implement ALM solutions that manage everything from requirements capture to deployment and testing.  

Jonathan’s presentation went through only a few of the stats available in this year’s report. Compiled based on survey responses from more than 1,000 salesforce.com users across the globe, it describes how the best companies use Salesforce today, and their plans for the coming year.

Surprised by any of these stats? Have an opinion about this report? Tweet Jonathan @JonathanStaley.