Difference Between Sales Cloud and Service Cloud in Salesforce

What’s the difference between sales and service cloud in salesforce was my first question when I first discovered the tool. To understand the difference between sales and service cloud in salesforce it is essential to get your hands on both products. Thankfully, I have already done this. In this article, I will explain the difference between sales and service cloud in salesforce.

Salesforce has two products, which often come hand in hand. Sales Cloud and Service Cloud. A bit of research on Salesforce licensing policy for both products will reveal that they come hand in hand. And there is a good reason for that. While Sales Cloud is designed to close deals. Service Cloud is designed to support customers who have already purchased your product. Simply put, Sales Cloud is for sales, and Service Cloud is for aftersales. But there is more than that. Service Cloud contains tones of comprehensive features to track the performance of your customer service team. Let’s deep dive into this and see what’s the difference between sales cloud and service cloud in salesforce.

Common features

To understand the difference between sales cloud and service cloud in salesforce it is important to discover what features they share. There are lots of features these two products have in common. And before we discover what is the difference, I would like to explain what is shared among them. These products are totally different in terms of their purpose and use. But if you just register a trial and try to play around. You’ll notice menu items seem identical apart from Service Console and some extra objects.

Sales and Service cloud shares Accounts, Contacts, and Cases. The reason for that is obvious. These two products are sharing the same database of customers. That way you don’t have to make integrations with external systems. I will discuss case management later. What you need to know, that both Sales and Service cloud are built around your customers. That way you retain so-called customer 360 overviews and do not lose important data about your customer. Do not expect account and contacts objects to have any difference in the two products.

Case management

A lot of people see Sales Cloud as Opportunity tracking software. Without the ability to service their customers. But that’s not particularly true. Sales Cloud out-of-the-box offers Case management objects. It gives you the ability to track customer inquiries. It also allows you to set up email-to-case functionality. This enables your company to have a separate email inbox for all after-sales-related questions. With permission management, you can even restrict your customer service agent from seeing sales-related stuff. This is especially handy when you hand over your customers to another team after the sale is closed. Thanks to comprehensive automation tools you can create plenty of custom objects in the Sales Cloud. That way you will have a full-pledged customer service system. Without ever subscribing to Service Cloud.

Sales Cloud

As I mentioned before, Sales Cloud is designed to close more deals. As a result, functionality is built around sales. Tracking sales, make them more efficient. Pre-built reports are also built around Opportunities, Leads, and Accounts. Even the default dashboard shows revenue goals for the quarter. So ultimately, Sales Cloud is made for sales. There is a couple of features that are available exclusively in Salesforce’s sales products. Without customizations, this functionality is not anyhow linked to Service Cloud.

Lead management

Lead management enables companies to track leads. Say you have a website where you collect leads. Sales Cloud allows you to integrate your website into your CRM. Moreover, there is pre-built functionality to capture leads over an email. For instance, you can create a dedicated mailbox. If an email lands into that inbox, Salesforce will create a new lead for you.

Opportunity management

In Salesforce opportunities represent any chance to sell something. Some other companies, like Pipedrive, call opportunities as Deals. Anyway, it is your chance to sell something, no matter how you call it. This is Salesforce’s standard object and has plenty of tools Service Cloud is missing. For example, you can build a report on how long an opportunity stayed in a specific stage. This way you will be able to analyze the bottlenecks of your pipeline. Such analysis could give you tons of insights into your sales process.

Quotes

Where Sales Cloud really excels is quoting functionality. Built-in quoting allows you to track products you have offered your customers. For example, if you sell t-shirts of a different kind, quoting functionality allows you to track which products have been offered to your clients. But that’s not everything Sales Cloud has to offer. Quotes allow you to generate PDF, sync them with Opportunities and track their statuses.

Read more: CPQ Explained in Simple Terms. Configure, Price and Quote

Service Cloud

Service Cloud is ultimately cloud software, which enables you to track after-sales. Or, if you are a service company like we are, it allows you to build products on the platform to service your customers. Service Cloud enables you to track cases with more functionality than standard sales cloud does. It allows you to add entitlements (which I’ll discuss later) and enable enhanced tracking of how you serve your customers.

Entitlements

When I first discovered Service Cloud, entitlements were one of the very features that took me a lot of time to understand. As a result, I was forced to ask our internal team to explain the concept. In a few words, entitlements are services connected to some KPIs. For example, if your customer has a contract where you have to serve him within a particular amount of time, entitlements help to track that. Or, if you want to restrict some of your customers from phone support, entitlements will help you to do so. Just do not add phone support entitlement to the customer’s service contract and he won’t be able to get support over the phone.

Milestones

Another feature that is unique to Service Cloud is Milestones. Milestones allow you to add significant steps you need to make to resolve a case. For example, if you have plenty of employees involved in servicing your customers. The first milestone could be assigning a service rep to a case. The second milestone could be sending the first answer to a customer. And so on. Milestones could be time depending on. It enables you to track your promised service levels with your customers. If something goes wrong and your employees do not meet milestones. You could get notified over an email and could take some action to keep a customer happy.

This is something you won’t find in Sales Cloud. Also, this functionality is unique to salesforce and you won’t find anything outside the salesforce ecosystem. Well, it’s not 100% true, because entitlement exists in other service software. But what is unique to salesforce is how they actually work and what functionality they offer.

Support Channels

The difference between sales cloud and service cloud in salesforce lies in the way how customers could be communicated. Service Cloud enables you to add additional communication channels like chat and self-service portal. I will discuss the self-service portal later. In the meanwhile, opposed to Sales Cloud, Service Cloud offers the ability to integrate most, if not of your sources where customers can get in touch with your company. It’s no secret customers nowadays want to get support the way it is comfortable to them. Thankfully Service Cloud enables your company to integrate all of them into one platform. And by the way – Service Cloud allows you to integrate WhatsApp for Business, so you can service your customers via WhatsApp.

Experience cloud

The most interesting part of Service Cloud is its Experience Cloud. Basically, experience cloud is a Salesforce website builder. It allows giving your external users (customers) access to up to 10 of your salesforce objects. For example, if you are a service company, you could create a dashboard for your customers. Just like you would do for your employees. But you are able to share them with your customers.

Experience cloud is worth a separate review and offers plenty of powerful tools. Including logging a case, engaging in an online chat conversation, viewing orders, and many more.

Summary for Difference Between Sales Cloud and Service Cloud in Salesforce

Hopefully, this article has helped you understand the difference between sales cloud and service cloud in salesforce. These are two products that are tied to one another. Sales Cloud helps you sell more. Service Cloud enables your team to provide best-in-class customer support.

Dont’s forget that our team of experts can always help you determine the difference between sales and service cloud in salesforce. We provide advice and expertise.

I wish you have a great day/night whatever it is now when you are reading this.

Cheers.