Salesforce Sales Cloud vs Service Cloud: which is a better fit for you?  

You're getting your bearings on Salesforce and wondering what the differences are between Sales Cloud and Service Cloud. The clouds share important functionality, but they're also both unique. In this article, we'll take you through the differences between the two clouds and find out which one is a better fit for your organization.  

First things first... 

To explain the differences between Salesforce Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, it is important to know that both clouds are built on Salesforce CRM. Therefore, they have overlapping functionalities, such as centralizing customer information. These include company data, contacts, interaction and services and products purchased. 

Centralizing this information is necessary to best serve (potential) customers. The difference between the clouds lies in the purpose you want to achieve with this information and the functionalities the cloud offers for that purpose. The main distinction is that Sales Cloud focuses on making sales activities more efficient, while Service Cloud is designed to support support employees. 

What is Salesforce Sales Cloud? 

Salesforce Sales cloud helps your sales team execute sales and marketing activities efficiently. Sales Cloud's core functionality is built for lead and opportunity management. It captures prospects as leads and guides them through the sales pipeline with various automations for follow-up. 

The general functionalities of Salesforce CRM Help the sales and marketing department through: 

  • Save activity history;  
  • Display important contacts;  
  • Customer communications to be recorded;  
  • Record internal account discussions;  

On top of that offers Sales Cloud functionalities for:  

  • Managing products and assets; 
  • Preparing quotations; 
  • Sales forecasting, to predict future sales;
  • Area management, to manage and optimize sales activities in geographic areas, to ensure efficient distribution of employees.  
  • Web-to-Lead routing, to capture lead data directly from their website and automatically create new lead records in Salesforce.  

What is Salesforce Service Cloud? 

Salesforce Service Cloud helps customer service professionals handle customer inquiries quickly and in a targeted manner. It provides features such as case tracking and social networking plug-ins for conversion and analytics. Service Cloud not only helps your support team resolve customer issues faster, but also enables customer self-service by providing answers to the most common issues directly in the Service Cloud. 

The general functionalities of Salesforce CRM help customer service by: 

  • Managing customer inquiries; 
  • Automating business processes by setting up workflows and approval processes; 
  • Collaboration tools, allowing team members to work together on a case. 

On top of that offers Service Cloud functionalities for:  

  • Case management: allows teams to efficiently manage and resolve customer inquiries and issues. The system keeps track of all interactions, allowing employees to access a customer's complete history. 
  • Omni-channel routing: support multiple communication channels such as email, phone, chat and social media, and ensures that customer inquiries are automatically routed to the right employee. 
  • Knowledge management: a comprehensive database of articles and manual that customers and employees can access to solve common problems.  
  • Service analytics: provides powerful analytics tools that allow you to gain insight into your customer service performance. 

Sales Cloud and Service Cloud overlap  

In addition to the differences between Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, it is also true that both clouds share certain features. These features are important for managing customer relationships, such as accounts, contacts, which allow you to track interactions with organizations and individuals.  

Like Service Cloud, Sales Cloud also offers a number of case management (basic) capabilities to ensure customer satisfaction and support, which is essential for maintaining and growing customer relationships. There are also a number of features available in both Clouds:  

  • Reports and dashboards for visual representation of data and insight into performance;  
  • Features for tasks, activities and campaign management;  
  • Calendar and schedule of events;  
  • Integration with Chatter, Einstein Analytics and Salesforce Analytics and other Salesforce Clouds (for a fee);  
  • Mobile Salesforce application;  

Making a choice

Both Sales Cloud and Service Cloud help you centralize customer information in one system and thereby improve your services. Are you looking for a way to improve your sales and marketing activities? Then choose Sales Cloud. Do you want to be better able to handle customer queries? Then look into service cloud options. Do you need help with your choice after reading this article? Then our consultants are ready to provide you with advice.