What is the difference between Sales Cloud and Service Cloud? A Guide To Help You Choose

What is the difference between sales cloud and service cloud? Things begin to get confusing when it comes down to choosing a CRM that will work best for you. You only want to go for essential features that will not waste your dollars. On the other hand, some features might be so similar that you do not know whether you pay for the same service more than once. You may also have had prior experience with hidden charges, so this time you want to be prudent. In this article, we do a sales cloud vs. services cloud comparison – two Salesforce cloud solutions that are usually confounding for many people. Also read:

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A Sales Cloud vs. Services Cloud Comparison

Just from their names, it is easy to tell that Sales Cloud is ideal if you are looking for a CRM to help you better manage your leads. On the other hand, Services Cloud helps you better manage your services or products. These two have a lot of similarities, though. By the end of this article, you should be able to what is the difference between sales cloud and service cloud, decide which one you need, or even whether you need both.

What is Sales Cloud?

Built to make sales teams more efficient, Sales Cloud makes it possible to see all your customer information in one place. It also helps you automate daily and mundane tasks, freeing your sales team to focus on core responsibilities that can generate leads. You can also more easily forecast sales.

What is Services Cloud?

This is Salesforce’s customer support solution. It is excellent for customer service, allowing you to manage your customers’ information and communication. You can easily personalize and automate customer service. For example, you can create self-help customer support systems where your customers can instantly get responses from knowledge articles and community members, as well as AI-powered chatbots. You can integrate Services Cloud with all the platforms where your customers are – WhatsApp, Messenger, and SMS, among others. This way, you will not miss any queries, comments, or complaints.

Differences and Similarities

Being able to tell what is the difference between sales cloud and service cloud requires an understanding of the features and then using the features to tell where each is needed. The comparison below is done based on aspects like features, pricing, licenses, and certifications:

Sales Cloud vs. Services Cloud Features

Below is a table that compares the solutions mentioned above based on their features:

Sales Cloud	Services Cloud
Social Accounts and Contacts	Lightning Service Console
Opportunities and Quotes	Workflow and Approvals
Mobile App	Case Management

Sales Cloud Features

• Sales Cloud’s social accounts and contacts – helps you get insights from social media platforms. This helps you better understand your customer, even as you try to convert them to a lead.
• Opportunities and Quotes – You get to see your leads’ status, opportunities that your competition hasn’t taken advantage of, and that you can leverage quotes shared with prospective leads and conversations your sales team have had with leads.
• Mobile App – using the Salesforce mobile app, you can track your leads and access dashboards on the fly.
• Reports and Dashboards – These help you see a summary of your leads’ progress.

Services Cloud Features

• Lightning Console allows you to create a knowledge base that empowers your customer service team to respond promptly to customer requests. With the console, you create an omnichannel experience, where your customers have the same experience no matter what platform they use.
• Workflow and Approvals – you can automate repetitive and mundane tasks and automate task assignments, email responses, and field updates. Create processes to help in your automation efforts with the Process Builder. This way, your customer service teams use the same process for tasks like sending emails, approvals, launching workflows.
• Case Management – assign cases to the right people fast, ensuring fast turnaround times. You can integrate your processes too. You get to see customer interactions and even where they are in the customer service process.

As you can see, both Sales and Services Cloud have similar features like automation and tracking customers or leads through the sales or customer cycles. However, if you are looking for specific features like creating knowledge bases, then go for Services Cloud. However, if you are looking to get customer insights from social platforms, then go for the Sales cloud. It is important to note that the above features are by no means conclusive. Visit the Salesforce Sales Cloud official site for features or the Services Cloud official site for a more in-depth look at features.

Sales Cloud vs. Services Cloud Pricing

Each of these solutions has different pricing packages, based on the number of users and whether it is customized for your business. Each of the packages costs the same for both Sales and Services. The table below summarizes the pricing packages:

Essentials	up to 10 users
Professional	any number of users
Enterprise	customizable for your business
Unlimited	customizable for your business, unlimited CRM power and support

Sales Cloud vs. Services Cloud Licenses

Licenses simply refer to the levels of access that users have with regards to the Salesforce platform. However, this only applies to users with the Enterprise or Unlimited plans. Of importance here, as you seek to understand what is the difference between sales cloud and service cloud, is knowing how many users on your team need access, as it can see your Salesforce costs go through the roof. For Enterprise, the license is $1800 per user annually. The Enterprise licenses give special access to custom apps developed within your organization’s Salesforce instance. On the other hand, for users who can access the entire Sales Cloud or Services Cloud platform, you only need to pay $300 per user annually.

In Conclusion

Knowing what is the difference between sales cloud and service cloud is very critical as it enables you to customize your salesforce experience according to your needs. We have looked at the features each solution offers and how they can help meet your business needs. Both are powerful tools that ought to feature in your Salesforce portfolio in budget allows. Talk to us if you need help with your Salesforce org.