Salesforce Sales Cloud vs Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Salesforce Sales Cloud and Salesforce Marketing Cloud operate hand in hand to build and maintain relationships between an organization and its customers. Undoubtedly, these Salesforce CRM solutions have a few features in common but both solutions serve distinguishing purposes for different organizations. This is why the discussion of Salesforce Sales Cloud vs Salesforce Marketing Cloud is of prime importance to acknowledge the distinctive purposes of both CRM solutions. The crucial difference can be recognized from the fact that Salesforce Marketing Cloud comes under the domain of “Marketing Automation” of the tech stack, while Salesforce Sales Cloud can be essentially categorized into “CRM”.

According to sources, every year Salesforce introduces $5.19 billion in fees related to Sales Cloud while it generates $3.13 billion per year in revenue related to the Marketing and Commerce sector. It is worth mentioning that this records an increase of 25.2% in the Marketing and Commerce sector in 2022 over the previous year.

To clearly grasp the complete understanding of Salesforce Sales Cloud vs Salesforce Marketing Cloud, we will first look into the definitions of both CRM solutions.

What is Salesforce Sales Cloud?

Salesforce Sales Cloud is a cloud-based application designed to help in the operations of sales, marketing, and customer relations in both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-customers (B2C) aspects. It is a completely customizable product that enables salespersons to conduct sales operations in a smarter and faster way by unifying customer information, logging their interactions with your organization, and automating some of the valuable tasks for the salespersons they need to carry out every day.

Salesforce Sales Cloud efficiently gathers all the customer information together in a centralized platform that incorporates marketing, lead generation, sales, customer service, and business analytics and ultimately paves the way to thousands of applications through AppExchange. The platform appears as Software as a Service (SaaS) for browser-related access. Also, a mobile app is available for use. Salesforce Sales Cloud is a real-time social feed for collaboration that lets users share information or clear queries of the user community.

What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud?

Just as its name suggests, Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a customer relationship management (CRM) platform designed for marketers that enables them to build and manage marketing relationships and campaigns with customers. It efficiently serves the purposes of marketing professionals who are keen to achieve the highest return from investment by identifying the potential customers and offering them the services they are actually interested into.

The most essential usability of this CRM platform is that businesses irrespective of their sizes can expand with professional-level email marketing or else nowadays it is very difficult to manage marketing strategies using traditional marketing methods. Small businesses can seamlessly use marketing automation that will help to attract new customers and offer extensive services to existing ones without an army of marketers. All of these make the marketing cloud an ideal platform to plan, customize, and optimize the customer journey. This will further help you to know your customers better, and analyze your results so that you can enhance your marketing budget by using email marketing from Marketing Cloud.

From the above discussion, we got to understand the technical rationales of the two and their distinctive purposes in organizations. Now, we will closely analyze the Sales Cloud vs Marketing Cloud discussion.

Salesforce Sales Cloud vs Salesforce Marketing Cloud

In general, we can start analyzing the Sales Cloud vs Marketing Cloud debate by differentiating the key areas between the two. Salesforce Marketing Cloud has been designed to identify leads and guide them in the direction of your product or service, while Salesforce Sales Cloud is used to close deals and bring in revenue in an efficient manner.

Now we will analyze the discussion of Salesforce Sales Cloud vs Salesforce Marketing Cloud in the following ways: –

1. Ethical Differences

Salesforce Sales Cloud handles the entire sales funnel, introducing leads, successfully transforming them into prospects and opportunities, and ultimately converting them to loyal and potential customers. This software is used by sales teams to detect and capture leads and manage contact accounts. There are automatically a few marketing functionalities present within software like Salesforce Sales Cloud, but this software does not sink into the early lead-qualification process. Rather, it takes into account a wide of range of consumer readiness to provide a holistic view of the entire customer journey.

On the other hand, we can consider Salesforce Marketing Cloud as a suite wrapped within a suite. Marketing Cloud does not include four tiers of increasing functionality like Sales Cloud. But instead, organizations tend to pay a flat rate for particular marketing modules. Among these, a few individual modules are available at different tiers, but generally speaking, marketing teams require themselves to select specific modules from Salesforce CDP, Loyalty Management, Pardot, Social Studio, Advertising Studio, etc.

2. Key Features of Salesforce Sales Cloud and Salesforce Marketing Cloud

The key features of Salesforce Sales Cloud are as follows: –

• Content Management– Salesforce Sales Cloud provides complete information about customer contact such as previous communications, discussions, contact ID, emails so on. This feature enables you to understand every contact in customer accounts. By this, you will get a holistic view of the customers and the way they engage with your brand. Besides, the Sales Cloud scrutinizes the social media contents of the contacts to understand customer behavior properly.
• Opportunity Management– This feature is beneficial for building and altering quotes as per sales interaction.
• Salesforce Engage- This feature efficiently enables understanding the status of revenue growth, notifies active leads, and builds personalized campaigns.
• Lead Management– With the help of Lead Management, Salesforce Sales Cloud allows to designate the leads to appropriate people and monitor the campaigns.

On the contrary, Salesforce Marketing Cloud has features such as,

• Data Management- Cloud Data Extensions (tables) are used for data management in marketing. Data Extensions can be used as a relational database supported by Structured Query Language (SQL). This specific feature and the SFMC’s potential to stock various types of data make Marketing cloud stand out from other similar platforms.
• Integration Facilities- Salesforce Marketing Cloud has a vast integration capacity that enables this platform to store various types of data. SFMC supports multiple APIs like REST API and SOAP API to extend the already existing information in SFMC apart from the expected connection with Sales Cloud and Service Cloud powered by Salesforce.
• Third-Party Applications- Salesforce Marketing Cloud consists of multiple third-party applications to enhance the capabilities and customize specific business goals. One classic example of third-party applications powered by SFMC is AppExchange. Besides, several other third-party applications allow SFMC to extend its functionalities.
• Artificial Intelligence- In the Salesforce domain, Artificial Intelligence is packed with “Einstein”, an AI technology developed for the Salesforce Customer Success Platform. Einstein helps businesses anticipate customer engagement, the ideal time to send messages to every customer, and many more. All of these actions are extremely helpful in increasing customer engagement with the brand and successfully eliminating chances of disengagement.

3. Salesforce Sales Cloud Empowers Sales while Marketing Cloud offers superior customer experiences

Sales Cloud expands the power of Sales with the support of innovative apps, options, and products. Sales Cloud is packed with Salesforce CPQ, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, Salesforce Inbox, Revenue Intelligence, Einstein Sales Analytics, Sales Cloud Einstein, Sales Engagement, AppExchange, Net Zero Cloud, and Partner Communities. All of these essentials of Sales Cloud lay the foundation for a highly productive, informed, and agile sales team.

On the other hand, the marketing cloud customizes customer experiences across every channel because it is enabled with Email Studio, Mobile Studio, Social Studio, Advertising Studio, and Web Studio. Besides, Marketing Cloud offers Salesforce CDP, Marketing Cloud Personalization, Journey Builder, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, and Marketing Cloud Intelligence. These digital solutions are of great importance to digital-first marketers.

So, all of these points closely analyze the distinctive purposes of the Salesforce Sales Cloud and Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Now, we can get a clear idea about the utility of the two Salesforce solutions and their respective roles for the organizations.

In this context, a common question may arise if we can use the two unitedly.

Can Salesforce Sales Cloud and Salesforce Marketing Cloud be used together?

To answer this question, we can start by stating that you can definitely make use of Salesforce Sales Cloud and Salesforce Marketing Cloud together since they belong to the same platform and are offered by the same software provider. No matter how much we debate about Sales Cloud vs Marketing Cloud, it is worth mentioning that both the Salesforce platforms integrate seamlessly with one another and other Salesforce solutions. But in most of cases, businesses may require only one solution to streamline their workflow and enhance customer experience.

Salesforce, CircleCI, and Zillow are some of the well-known companies using Salesforce Sales Cloud, whereas Salesforce Marketing Cloud is used by brands such as Segment, Seven Corners, and Digital Pulp. It can be said that Salesforce Sales Cloud has a broader approval since it has been mentioned in 795 company stacks & 951 developer stacks as compared to Salesforce Marketing Cloud, which is listed in only 11 company stacks and 7 developer stacks.

Wrapping Up

You need to consider the fact that your company may require either of the two or both solutions. It is your responsibility to carefully observe and understand which Salesforce CRM application is suitable and applicable to your organization. You have to keep in mind the requirements of your company and choose accordingly. Suppose, if your company wants to improve the quality and boost up the sales funnel process to close more deals quickly and generate revenue then you should go for Salesforce Sales Cloud. On the other hand, if your organization aims to connect to the right audiences with the right message across the right channels to detect reliable leads then you must consider Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Last but not least, there is the possibility of another situation when you may require both the Salesforce CRM solutions. For example, if you seek integrated software that significantly offers more control over the lead generation and deal-making processes, then nothing other than the combination of Salesforce Sales Cloud and Salesforce Marketing Cloud can serve you the best.

So, thinking of implementing the right Salesforce CRM application for your organization? Are you confused about the right choice for your organization? Well, the good news is Webuters has all the answers to your queries.

Our Salesforce experts at Webuters will guide you to choose the best Salesforce CRM solution for your organization and help you to get the advantage of the full ROI of your Salesforce investment.