Having a CRM platform can make all the difference in the success of your company. Thus, if you're already a Salesforce user, you're in a prime position to outperform your competitors with Salesforce Sales Cloud and Salesforce Service Cloud. These core products can give you the edge to take your business to new heights.

It's essential to note that each product has unique features that make it more or less suitable for your business needs. So, how can you choose the perfect solution that fits your requirements? Walk through our guide, which covers everything, from defining each solution to the determining factors for selecting one or another.

What is Salesforce Sales Cloud?

The Sales Cloud in Salesforce is a cloud-based application that enables organizations to manage sales, marketing, and facets of customer support effectively. It serves business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-customer (B2C) companies. Since the cloud centralizes all customer data and automates tasks, salespeople can make more informed decisions faster.

Salesforce Sales Cloud gives you a holistic view of your customers, providing you with their activity history, internal account discussions, key activities, and customer communication. As a result, you know what actions to take to stimulate sales growth and generate the best deals.

What is Salesforce Service Cloud?

Salesforce Service Cloud is an easy-to-use customer relationship management platform. It allows you to automate service processes and streamline workflows, building personalized marketing relationships with customers across multiple devices and channels.

Service Cloud monitors and responds to customer requests on various social media platforms. Moreover, it can automatically route these requests to the appropriate agent. As Service Cloud facilitates personalized customer interactions by providing communications through phone calls, email, live chat and self-service points across any device, it outperforms other alternatives.

Now that you know what both solutions are, explore their features and benefits.

Salesforce Sales Cloud features

The following features are what make Salesforce Sales Cloud unique compared to Salesforce Service Cloud:

Lead Management

The root of the sales funnel is finding potential clients for viable deals! Sales reps capture potential customers as Leads in the Sales Cloud and guide them through the lead generation funnel.

• Lead Assignment Rules. This feature automatically gives leads to sales teams based on geolocation, a product of interest, or other attributes.
• Lead Auto-Response Rules. If a lead fills out an online information request form, Sales Cloud sends them an email thanking them for their interest and informing them that a representative will contact them soon.
• Web-to-Lead. With this feature, you can quickly generate a web form that can be added to any site, even outside a Salesforce page. It can save you time and effort by automatically adding prospects to your database.
• Path. You can create personalized Guidance for Success notes offering customer coaching and advice. These notes are tailored to each lead to guide and help them move forward.
• Lead Conversion. When leads show interest in moving forward, you can identify them as promising potential clients and work towards converting them into full accounts. This way, sales teams can manage all relevant client information using the customer management features described above.

Opportunity Management

Now, let's look at actual potential sales that are considered opportunities.

• Path. You can define different sales processes that align with your company's sales method, just like with leads. To assist your reps in every stage of a sales opportunity, you can add a Salesforce Path to the opportunity pages.
• Forecasting. The Salesforce platform offers built-in forecasting tools that allow sales managers and their reps to see forecasts and performance. For example, you can predict how much each rep will make over a certain period and track performance against quotas.
• Quotes. This tool allows you to add products and specify quantities, prices and discounts. When negotiating a deal, your sales representative may create multiple proposals for a single opportunity. However, you can choose which offer to use for pipeline reporting and forecasting. If you don't need to develop official quotes, you can still add products to the opportunity directly.

To get a holistic view of Salesforce Sales Cloud and make an informed decision, you must also explore its benefits.

Salesforce Sales Cloud benefits

Some of the most prominent advantages that come with Sales Cloud services are as follows:

1. Centralized sales management

Collaboration, customer relationships, and information sharing are greatly simplified with a centralized Sales Cloud platform accessible from any device. As a result, businesses become more attractive to customers and benefit from a streamlined sales process and improved overall efficiency.

2. Improved customer interaction

The platform provides sales representatives with all the tools to manage interactions with current and potential customers, track their preferences, and offer personalized recommendations. Thus, you improve the quality of service, making it tailored to the requirements and wants of the client as much as possible.

3. Refined reporting and analytics

By tracking metrics such as lead conversion rates and sales cycle times using the solution, a sales team can quickly identify weaknesses and areas for improvement. So, over time, a company can optimize processes based on proven data and increase overall sales efficiency.

4. Scalability

No matter how many new clients, users, processes, or data you have, Salesforce Sales Cloud remains suitable and scalable for all your needs. This way, you don't have to look for new solutions as your business grows.

5. Artificial intelligence

Salesforce Sales Cloud uses AI and machine learning technology to help sales teams gain insights from sales channels. It allows them to assess the effectiveness of their sales strategy by analyzing past efforts. In addition, the built-in Einstein AI automates basic operations, prioritizes potential leads, and assists teams in converting or closing them quickly.

Now, let's move on to Service Cloud!

Salesforce Service Cloud features

Here are the features that Service Cloud offers as a customer relationship management platform to improve the efficiency of customer service teams:

Case Management

Automatic processing of incoming cases is one of the most critical functions of Service Cloud, similar to the Lead Auto-Response and Assignment rules of Sales Cloud.

• Auto-Response Emails. Salesforce automatically responds to clients, acknowledging their issues when new tickets are received.
• Assignment Rules. These configured rules route tickets to the appropriate agent or team.
• Email-to-Case. Service Cloud allows you to forward emails directly to Salesforce. Specifically, incoming emails to a specific support email address can automatically sync with the corresponding Salesforce ticket. It means that no one needs to check their inbox manually.
• Entitlements and Milestones. In addition to processing incoming cases, Service Cloud offers ways to track what types of support your customers are eligible for, known as Entitlements. Moreover, you can define the Milestones of this process. This way, the team can determine which cases require immediate attention by specifying appropriate service levels and outlining service process steps.

Customer Support Channels

Service Cloud allows you to please customers regarding customer support being available through multiple channels.

• Omni-Channel. This channel unifies all support channels, allowing agents to work from one consolidated location and providing consistent customer support. In addition, the channel distributes incoming service issues by assessing agents' capabilities and checking their workload.
• Omni-Channel Performance Dashboard. The tool tracks agent performance by looking at average response time and handling time by an agent.
• Live Chat. Users can embed a chat window on any web page (not only Salesforce pages).
• SMS Support. While your agents stay in their Salesforce console, clients can send text messages from their smartphones.
• Service Cloud Voice. This feature is a CTI tool for processing and routing incoming calls via Salesforce.

Self-Service Options

Service Cloud has several helpful capabilities for deflecting cases and providing self-service to customers.

• Lightning Knowledge. You can quickly provide answers and important information to your customers by creating a knowledge base in the Salesforce platform. Salesforce's Case Deflection component offers a type-ahead search feature recommending knowledge articles to customers when they submit a support case. It helps customers find potential solutions to their issues.
• Einstein Bots. Chatbots can handle routine issues, such as frequently asked questions or checking order statuses. If the bot doesn't find an answer, it can create a ticket for a customer or route to an agent, resulting in a seamless customer experience.

As with Sales Cloud, we have prepared a list of Service Cloud benefits for you so that you understand how they reflect your needs.

Salesforce Service Cloud benefits

The most significant Service Cloud benefits include the following:

1. Personalized customer experience

You can instantly assist customers in real-time with all the necessary information at your fingertips. Apart from this, agents can attract clients to different social media platforms and switch them from there to another method of communication. Finally, the platform's detailed record of these interactions gives you a better understanding of your customers and the ability to find better ways to satisfy them.

2. Improved access to customer data

Salesforce Service Cloud provides organized storage, management, and tracking of essential data in one place. Therefore, you don't need any other storage solution, let alone notebooks! Moreover, access to customer data is made easy through integration with legacy systems, case management, queue management and knowledge base.

3. Purposeful cooperation

Smart collaboration is vital for enterprises as it promotes transparency and stimulates creative thinking and innovation. Salesforce Service Cloud enables employees to share experiences, advice, and knowledge, allowing for effective collaboration. Senior staff can guide newer team members while sharing documents through the Service Cloud, which helps agents work together to solve problems. This feature empowers supervisors to monitor individual team members' performance without relying solely on customer feedback.

4. Self-service for customers

The ability to help themselves is an empowering benefit for clients. After all, customers and potential clients can contact your business to search for solutions and implement them at their convenience independently. In addition, the platform includes communities for customers where they communicate and discuss solutions that work for them.

5. Mobile-centricity

There is no need to be in a specific place for a smooth and uninterrupted interaction with your client. As Salesforce is mobile-first, agents can access customer data and stay in touch with clients regardless of location. Therefore, you have problem-solving and customer engagement tools at your disposal everywhere, resulting in accessibility for your customers and increased productivity for you.

The features and benefits of Sales Cloud and Service Cloud are different, but there are still some tools they share. This overlap provides consistency and seamless data integration between sales and service operations.

Sales Cloud and Service Cloud: Shared features

The shared features of Sales Cloud and Service Cloud are core Salesforce concepts needed for all industries. They are as follows:

• Basic Accounts & Contacts tools provide open and secure access to all customer data and interaction history
• Case Management allows you to track questions, customer problems, and feedback to improve service
• Reports and Dashboards visualize data and analyze performance
• Tasks, Activities, and Campaign Management tools
• Calendars and Event scheduling
• Integrated Content Library
• Access to Self-Service Portal
• Integration with Chatter, Einstein Analytics and other clouds (for an additional fee)
• Salesforce mobile app
• More than 4,000 paid and free applications on the AppExchange marketplace

Finally, we switch to a Sales Cloud and Service Cloud comparison to help you understand which solution is better for your business growth.

Sales Cloud vs Service Cloud: Comparison

We have created a chart outlining the differences between Sales Cloud and Service Cloud based on a few critical parameters.

Factor

Salesforce Sales Cloud

Salesforce Service Cloud

Function

Streamlining the sales process and managing key entities like leads, accounts, contacts, customers, quotes, etc.

Optimizing customer support and service with contacts, accounts, cases, public knowledge base, and call center at the core.

Purpose

Helping teams attract customers and improve sales performance.

Handling the client's request efficiently and managing customer service issues following organization processes and service level agreements.

Users

Sales teams, including sales representatives and sales managers.

Support representatives, client service managers, and service agents.

Use cases

• Lead generation
• Lead qualification
• Standard contracting
• Sales processes
• CPQ (OOTB)
• Omnichannel routing
• Case management
• Service SLAs
• Knowledge articles

Limitations

• No Service Cloud-specific features or objects
• Quotes - a basic PDF template/generator tool
• Max 500 Web-to-lead a day
• Only Accounts/Opportunities and implicitly shared records are shared in Enterprise Territory Management
• Only basic Sales Cloud objects and features - not all
• Knowledge articles demand Experience Site to make public

When comparing Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, one of the most important factors for companies is pricing, which is our next stop!

Sales Cloud vs Service Cloud: Pricing сomparison

Service Cloud and Sales Cloud offer the same tariff plans, but features differ. Also, it's important to note that add-ons cost extra money. For example, this can be Salesforce Maps for Sales Cloud or Visual Remote Assistant for Service Cloud.

Edition

Price (user/month)

Sales Cloud key features

Service Cloud key features

Starter

$25

• Account, Contact, Lead, and Opportunity Management
• Email integration with Gmail or Outlook
• Case Management
• Service Console apps
• Knowledge
• Telephony Integration

Professional

$80

Everything in Starter + :

• Forecast Management

Everything in Starter + :

• Service Contracts and Entitlements

Enterprise

$165

Everything in Professional+ :

• Workflow and Process Automation
• Advanced Pipeline Management & Tracking

Everything in Professional+ :

• Web Services API

Unlimited

$330

Everything in Enterprise + :

• Built-in AI
• Premier support and 1-to-1 guidance

Everything in Enterprise + :

• Premier Success Plan

After reviewing the features and benefits of Salesforce Sales Cloud and Salesforce Service Cloud and comparing their main characteristics and pricing, you have something to base your choice on!

Sales Cloud vs Service Cloud: How to make the right choice?

If you need to improve your sales operations, Salesforce Sales Cloud would be the ideal solution for you. It will help your sales team manage leads and opportunities, automate sales processes, track customer interactions, forecast sales, and provide insights into sales performance.

Note: If you already use other Salesforce products, such as Marketing Cloud, integrate Sales Cloud for consistency.

If you seek to put customer service and support at the forefront, Salesforce Service Cloud is better. Being a customer support platform, it helps customer service teams manage and track customer inquiries, cases, and interactions, as well as automate service processes.

Finally, if you want a comprehensive, customer-centric experience throughout your entire client interaction, use Sales Cloud with Service Cloud together. This way, you will combine the power of both tools and won't need other solutions for high customer service performance.

Pro tip: If Sales Cloud vs Service Cloud is a tough choice for you, a Salesforce consulting company can help you determine what you need.

Final thoughts

While Salesforce Service Cloud is a customer service platform that helps businesses become proficient in customer support, Salesforce Sales Cloud is a customer relationship management platform that delivers tools for effective sales operation management. Naturally, they have some critical differences you should consider before choosing a solution. And the better you know what you choose, the higher your chances to enhance the efficiency of customer service or sales, whether with Sales Cloud or Service Cloud!