Keeping track of Salesforce products, and their name changes, can feel like trying to remember every character arc in the Marvel franchise. It isn’t just CRM software. Using Salesforce to fill the gaps in your company means implementing the right product. Although we don’t have enough hours in the day to differentiate between every Salesforce product, in this article, we’ll give you the breakdown of Sales Cloud vs. Service Cloud.

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Article Roadmap

• Differences
• Shared Features
• Unique Features
• Choose the Right Salesforce Solution
• Next Steps

What’s the Difference?

Like a hat versus a belt, Sales Cloud and Service Cloud serve different purposes and add a unique dimension to your outfit. We’ll spell out the differences below:

Purpose: For starters, Sales Cloud is a CRM solution. Its main goal is to manage leads and increase sales. Service Cloud is a customer support and help desk solution designed to streamline and improve customer support.

Users: The sales and marketing team, including sales reps and managers, are the target audience for Sales Cloud. Service Cloud would benefit support representatives, service agents, client service managers, and trainers.

Customer Interaction: CRM software focuses on lead generation, including leads from existing customers, so one-way communication is the staple. Customer support solutions help existing or past customers resolve issues necessitating two-way communication.

Key Features: Sales Cloud provides users with contact and account management, lead and opportunity management, sales performance management, product management and workflow automation. Service Cloud offers ticket management, a consumer-focused knowledge base, agent productivity, chatbots and call center management.

KPIs: Lead conversion rates, customer lifetime value, new leads in the pipeline, sales activity and opportunity-to-conversion ratios are key metrics for Sales Cloud. Tracking your CSAT (customer satisfaction score), NPS (net promoter score), customer attrition rates and resolution rates are crucial for Service Cloud.

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Shared Features

If you picture Sales Cloud and Service Cloud as a Venn diagram, this section is the overlap in the center. However, some capabilities are better than others.

Here’s a comprehensive look into which software comes out on top for each shared feature.

Accounts and Contacts

Sales Cloud allows users to create accounts and store information using personal and business fields. Its account hierarchy feature provides organizational charts demonstrating relationships between parent accounts and subsidiaries. Sales reps can access activity history, key contacts, customer communication and internal discussions.

Service Cloud offers basic contact management. Users can create a contact database and store rudimentary information, including first and last names, email addresses and phone numbers. Agents can categorize customers using parameters like subscription plan, location and industry.

Basic Case Management

Sales Cloud users can create cases and assign users to track requests, questions, feedback and issues from customers and vendors using the Cases module.

A robust ticket management system is the pièce de résistance in Service Cloud. Agents can access emails, social media messages, knowledge base tickets and live chat messages via a single interface. Automate agent collusion identification and convert multi-channel communication into tickets and client support responses into knowledge base articles.

Set ticket priorities and create ticket status’. Track and manage stages and progress using the ticket pipeline.

Dashboard and Reports

The API Dashboard in Sales Cloud takes the cake with API event correspondence, usage and performance. Create customizable dashboards with the drag-and-drop builder using data from reports. Users can identify trends in usage and endpoints receiving the most traffic and view information on IP ranges issuing requests.

Generate standard activity reports by selecting the date range and status of activities included or create custom activity reports using the drag-and-drop builder and defining the criteria for the report.

Service Cloud provides a customizable dashboard to monitor ticket resolution, agent performance and KPIs. Users can create custom reports with filters to drill down into data or pre-built reports with pre-defined criteria, for example, ticket volume or response time.

Email Management

Sales Cloud users can access email templates with merge fields to send emails with data from Salesforce records to personalize details individually, as a group or as mass email. Schedule emails in advance and track email status to see if or when contacts open emails.

Respond to client emails using Gmail or Outlook 365 integration and automatically associate those emails with Salesforce leads, contacts and opportunities.

Service Cloud users can create emails using customizable templates and track the delivery of emails to identify if an email is read, sent to spam or undelivered. It also supports email forwarding to create tickets from emails and email scheduling.

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Unique Features

Pitting a linebacker against a quarterback is kind of like trying to compare Sales Cloud and Service Cloud. Both have different functions and unique tools to meet them.

Sales Cloud

Sales Cloud is a CRM solution designed to help sales teams generate and qualify sales and streamline and customize processes. Features unique to Sales Cloud include:

Customer Communication Management: Initiate, schedule and track interactions via call, email and text using templates and merge fields.

Document Management: Access a centralized database of CRM records. Convert paper documents into web-based versions, share files with internal and external recipients and view version and revision histories.

Lead Management: Automate lead distribution using assignment rules on criteria like geography or specialization. Generate leads from your website using web-to-lead and score leads with custom scoring rules.

Opportunity Management: Create opportunities and track deal stages, associated activities, updates and information on leads. View opportunities via Kanban board or sales pipeline, trigger reminders for open tasks and assign probability based on deal stage.

Product Management: Add and customize products with notes for contacts and create a base catalog of all products and services with prices.

Quote, Order and Contract Management: Automate order records from website orders, create contracts, track them through the approval process, view order history and modify orders. Generate sales quotes from opportunities and set up a product supply and payment schedule.

Workflows and Process Automation: Create and automate multiple sales processes with graphical representation, set validation rules so you don’t upload dirty data and establish workflow rules to automate standard procedures.

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Service Cloud

Service Cloud is a customer support and help desk solution used to aid companies with case management, omnichannel routing, service SLAs and customer portal. Key features in Service Cloud include:

Agent Productivity: Manage agent availability and view agent status to assign tickets effectively. Generate performance reports using metrics like resolved tickets and resolution time. Collaborate with internal team members on tickets by mentioning users or adding pinned private notes.

Call Center Management: Analyze call metrics, conference with one or more agents, monitor calls between agents and customers and route calls automatically using predetermined criteria.

Live Chat: Enable a live chat widget or button on your website. Send preset canned responses, view current and past chats, route chats to suitable agents and manually transfer chats to other agents.

Customer Portal: Create a customer portal with custom web forms, a knowledge base and a community forum.

Ticket Management: Convert multi-channel communication into tickets and helpful agent ticket responses into knowledge-base articles. Organize tickets using custom tags and customer segments and link or merge tickets. Notify agents or managers when an SLA violation occurs. View ticket history, create ticket pipelines and set ticket statuses.

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What Salesforce Solution Is Right for Me?

To determine what Salesforce solution you need, you’ll need to ask yourself a few questions:

1. Do you need help with your sales funnel?
2. Are you having difficulty managing leads and opportunities?
3. Are your sales processes outdated?
4. Do you need to boost your sales performance?
5. Is ticket management an issue?
6. Do you want to improve customer support?
7. Are response times a pain point?
8. Would you like to build a knowledge base?

If you answered yes to the first four questions, Sales Cloud might be right for you. Did you say yes to questions five through eight? Service Cloud is calling your name.

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Next Steps

Mixing up Sales Cloud vs. Service Cloud is a mistake you don’t want to make. Unlike running shoes, software isn’t interchangeable. Although there is a bit of overlap in features, Sales Cloud will fulfill your CRM needs, and Service Cloud will help meet your customer support requirements.

Want deeper insights? Check out how both products face off against competitors using our free comparison report for CRM and help desk software.

What software would be a better fit for your company when comparing Service Cloud vs. Sales Cloud? Let us know in the comments!