This week, we kicked off the survey process for Bluewolf’s third annual State of Salesforce Survey — an endeavor that, with your help, will result in the only data-based guide on how companies use Salesforce. The State of Salesforce report helps many organizations cut through the hype, and what feels like infinite possibilities with Salesforce. Now in its third year (State of Salesforce 2012, State of Salesforce 2013) the survey has evolved as much as the technology it features.

This evolution is the product of hundreds of conversations with salesforce.com customers. Instead of closing the 2013 survey, we continued to add data through our benchmarking tool. While the additional data did not change any of our findings, it altered our survey approach. Here’s how we're changing this year's survey based on what we’ve learned from years previous:

The type of end user matters.

As Salesforce moves quickly across the enterprise, we want to understand the value, priorities, and investments by function. Sales, Marketing, Service, and IT all have their own sets of questions. Not only are the primary clouds for each function at different stages of maturity, but the ways in which each function uses their cloud are distinct. We suspect that there will be insights to share around how various functions are collaborating across clouds.

Trends vary by region.

We are also investing in increasing the number of global participants and plan to produce US, UK, France, and Australia specific versions of the report. While we did see indications of differences between each region in last year’s survey, we did not achieve statistical significance.

Everyone agrees that customer engagement is important.

But what are companies actually doing about it? A section on predictive analytics and questions about engagement specific to functions have been added to the survey. We anticipate that the recent trend of companies enabling employees with a combination of data and mobility will be proven by the survey results.

Different industries, different insights.

As an added bonus, we are planning to release insights specific to the financial services industry.

We're outlined our goals to make this year's State of Salesforce report the most comprehesive to date. We need your help; every survey response matters. With questions specific to function, and aspirations to break down the data by region as well as industry, the statistical significance bar is higher than ever before. Please take fifteen minutes to contribute, and you will receive a personalized report, comparing your responses to the aggregate survey results.