Since SAP introduces its rebranded Sales Cloud, there have been many discussions on which Sales Cloud is better; The Salesforce sales cloud or the SAP Sales Cloud.
We understand that because of the many features in both Clouds, it is hard for you to make that decision. That is why we have decided to help you.
In this article, we will make a comparison of the main features between the SAP Sales Cloud and the Salesforce Sales Cloud. In the end, we will even tell you which one is best.
Let’s start with a clear overview of the key capabilities of both Clouds.
Advantages and Disadvantages of SAP and Salesforce CRMs
The Sales Clouds from Salesforce and SAP are both very impressive and are both able to increase efficiency and improve sales processes. As shown in the overview above, SAP and Salesforce have integrated multiple features in their Sales cloud that will help with all of the day-to-day tasks of a salesperson.
However, before we go into details, let’s have a quick look at who or what Salesforce and SAP are.
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| Salesforce is an American software company and is known for being the CRM giant. With a 19,5% market share in 2018, which is over double its nearest rival SAP, it is easy to see how they got this nickname. Salesforce its CRM solutions focusses on bringing companies and customers together. Its CRM platform includes solutions for Sales, Service, Marketing, and Commerce. The Salesforce Sales Cloud allows you to centralize sales data, automate workflows, connect team members, and use data to power more deals.
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| SAP is another big player in the business software industry and is widely known for its ERP and CRM solutions. In 2018, SAP rebranded its CRM and changed the name from SAP Hybris to SAP C/4HANA. With the integration of newly acquired acquisitions, SAP developed a next-generation CRM that is ready to improve the customer experience. SAP C/4HANA is a solution platform that includes solutions for Sales, Marketing, Service, Commerce, and Customer Data. The SAP Sales Cloud allows you to turn valuable insights into effective action, nurture your customer relationships to give you the best chance of converting your leads, and will help you fully engage with your customers in real-time. |
Contact Management
Salesforce
The Salesforce sales cloud allows you to quickly and easily access customer data. This includes access to key contacts, communication history, and more. It provides you with a complete overview of your customer. Social insights, campaign history, the deals your customers are involved in, you will have all the data available to you. Moreover, Salesforce allows you to uncover valuable insights into social media reviews and usage of your customers, and Salesforce enables you to collaborate with people company-wide.
SAP
The SAP Sales Cloud provides you and your sales reps with a 360 view of the customer and key contacts as well as gives a comprehensive view on engagement history, service history, and transaction history. Moreover, the SAP Sales Cloud includes a graphical view of your customers that shows you where and who the key influencer and decision-maker are. This way, your sales reps know who to target and where to invest their efforts.
Another advantage of the SAP Sales Cloud is that it has standard integration to both front and back-office which provides a complete view of your customer.
Both SAP and Salesforce provide options for contact management in their Sales Cloud. Both provide a complete overview of your customer and give you the ability to engage with the customer. Therefore, neither Salesforce nor SAP has an advantage over the other.
Opportunity and Lead Management
Salesforce
Salesforce has automated lead scoring and routing which is a great help for your sales reps when following up on leads. Salesforce also allows you to manage and track campaigns across every channel including social media. With this feature, you and your sales reps are now able to see the impact of marketing activities on the sales pipeline, and it will help you to make important decisions on where to invest your time and money.
Furthermore, the Salesforce Sales Cloud allows you to see and analyze your customer’s activity timeline. It provides you with insights into the competitive environment, it shows you in which stage your deal is, and it shows you what your next steps should be to close the deal.
SAP
The SAP Sales Cloud provides you with multiple lead and opportunity management capabilities. With the intelligent scoring and routing capabilities, The SAP Sales Cloud helps you to appoint the best leads to the best sales representatives. Moreover, it enables you to convert more opportunities, and with the help of the flexibility and opportunity and activity management tools, you are able to implement the best-practiced sales methodologies.
The integrated Activity advisor tool guides you towards the shortest path of securing new businesses. Moreover, it provides you with an opportunity scoring tool that indicates the likelihood of conversion based on historical data.
Both Salesforce and SAP offer you a great opportunity and lead management capabilities within their Sales Cloud. They both have automatic lead scoring, they both offer capabilities to increase sales, and they offer you the ability to see where to focus your sales efforts. Therefore, neither Salesforce nor SAP has an advantage over the other.
Reports and Dashboards
Salesforce
Salesforce allows you to easily customize sales forecasting reports with the use of their CRM analytics. It provides you with a real-time view of your activities and you can easily drag and drop filters, groupings, charts, and fields.
Moreover, within the Salesforce Sales Cloud, you can track the performances of your team with their dashboards and other sales reporting tools. You can quickly get the most important information by changing components.
SAP
The SAP Sales Cloud offers you multiple reporting and analytics tools. This includes real-time insights to ease and improve the data collection of your sales teams. The SAP Sales Cloud is able to provide real-time analysis and reporting with embedded reports from both internal and external data sources. The easy-to-use tools within the SAP Sales Cloud also allow you to create custom reports specially designed for every line of business.
The SAP Sales Cloud offers interactive dashboards and KPI’s. From the easy to use dashboard, the sales overview gives you a year-to-date view of your overall sales performance.
The Sales Clouds from Salesforce and SAP provides you with a clear, customizable, and easy to use dashboard and with the ability to analyze and report in real-time. Therefore, neither Salesforce nor SAP has an advantage over the other.
Sales forecasting
Salesforce
The Salesforce Sales Forecasting tool provides you with a real-time view of your entire team’s forecast. It offers you a complete view of your pipelines and your business. It enables you to act quickly where necessary. The sales forecasting tool of Salesforce eases management’s decision making. It also allows you to quickly view details about previous adjustments made by you or your sales reps.
Even in more complex sales organizations, salesforce can help out. For example, Salesforce allows you to accurately credit amounts to sales overlays. This can be done by contract, value, revenue, and more. You are then able to view these forecasts by overlay and see their contribution to the deals they are involved with. Salesforce even enables you to make adjustments in real-time.
SAP
SAP Analytics and the Sap Sales Cloud provide you with predictive forecasting. By understanding past data trends, you will be able to predict any metric in the future. With predictive forecasting, you are even able to understand your business’s key influencers. The predictive analytics of SAP can be used for multiple purposes including:
- Create predictive forecasts bases on historical data, to predict your future results.
- Explore interactive and automatically created charts and graphs bases on your criteria.
- Discover and understand the key influencers of your business
Both Salesforce and SAP provide you with extensive forecasting capabilities. Therefore, neither Salesforce or SAP has an advantage over the other.
Configure, Price, Quote
Salesforce
Another helpful tool within the Salesforce Sales Cloud is CPQ. This tool provides you, your sales managers, and the rest of your sales team with more control and visibility. With Salesforce CPQ you will no longer face problems such as sales reps accidentally sending out unapproved pricings or promising products that do not exist anymore. The Salesforce CPQ organizes data and gives you and your sales teams a clear overview of what they can offer to your customers.
Another great addition offered by Salesforce CPQ is the option to launch new revenue models. Nowadays, customers request flexibility in their buying options, and with Salesforce CPQ, you can give your customers what they want.
Moreover, with Salesforce CPQ you are able to streamline sales order acceptance and easily pass quote details downstream. Automatically consolidate billable charges into one invoice per customer, and it enables you to spread revenue transactions over different financial periods.
SAP
SAP is well known for its strong auto management and therefore, it is no surprise that the SAP Sales Cloud has multiple CPQ capabilities such as a fully functioning offline mode.
The integration of the SAP Sales Cloud with SAP ERP or SAP S/4HANA enables you to access pricing and inventory management in real-time. SAP CPQ also has multiple capabilities for product configuration, bundling, intelligent products, margin guidance, and compelling proposing generation.
Moreover, it is possible to integrate sales performances so that your sales reps are always aware of their commissions with each deal.
Both Salesforce and SAP offer multiple-high end CPQ capabilities within their Sales Cloud. Both Sales Cloud’s offer more control and visibility for your sales teams and therefore, neither Salesforce or SAP have an advantage over the other.
Contract terms
Before committing yourself and your company to a long-term contract with a company or software, it is important to know what you can expect. You do not want to end up facing all sorts of unpleasant surprises that could possibly have a huge impact on your business. This is especially the case when it involves a costly investment.
Although Salesforce’s license fee per month/per user is lower than that of SAP, the contract terms of SAP are more favorable. Although not every customer experiences problems with Salesforce in matters of contract terms, it is a possible threat. Therefore, SAP is favored over Salesforce when it comes to contract terms.
Offline Mode
Think of sales representatives that are visiting a client, they will need access to the software. However, not every location offers access to the internet. Being able to access the Sales Cloud without having an internet connection could make a huge difference for your sales reps.
When looking at the offline availability of the different functions in the Sales Cloud at both SAP and Salesforce we see a huge gap between the two.
Salesforce
The offline-mode of the Salesforce Sales Cloud is very limited. Although it displays almost every feature within their Sales Cloud, it does not allow you to edit most of them. A few examples:
- It allows you to edit notes but not to delete them
- It allows you to edit and delete task but only limited
- It does not allow you to edit or delete files
- It does not allow you to give approvals
More offline functions that are and aren’t available within Salesforce can be found here.
SAP
The SAP Sales Cloud supports most activities on- and offline. The offline mode even provides sales representatives with full support in their field service tools. A few examples:
- Offline price calculations
- Offline field service tool
- Offline retail execution tool
- Offline promotion creation
Both Salesforce and SAP provide their users with an online and offline mode of their Sales Cloud however, the functions offered offline within Salesforce’s Sales Cloud are limited. SAP, on the other hand, does provide full access in offline mode to most of the features within the Sales cloud. Moreover, when back online, SAP will sync the data so that the changes made are automatically transferred into the cloud. Therefore, SAP is favored over Salesforce when it comes to offline-mode capabilities.
If you would like to read an overall comparison between Salesforce and SAP, click here
Who won?
Now that we have handled and compared all these different capabilities and features within both Sales Cloud’s, it’s time to come to a conclusion.
Although Salesforce has better AI and Machine learning capabilities, SAP has better offline functionalities, more favorable contract terms, and native integration with your ERP system. In the end, both Sales Clouds are great and are able to help you increase productivity and drive more sales.
It is up to you to decide which functionalities matter the most in your company and this will eventually decide which of the Sales Cloud’s suits best with your business.
