Salesforce Sales Cloud V/S Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Salesforce Sales Cloud and Salesforce Marketing Cloud are two different cloud computing platforms, both developed by Salesforce and each with its unique features. But what exactly does that mean? This article will help you better understand the differences between these two robust sales and marketing tools to choose the one that best fits your needs. Let’s start with the meaning of what is sales cloud and what is marketing cloud.
Sales Cloud vs Marketing Cloud: the short answer
Sales Cloud is where your sales team works. Marketing Cloud is where your marketing team works. They sit either side of the same customer, and the confusion usually starts because both of them touch leads and both of them send email.
| Salesforce Sales Cloud | Salesforce Marketing Cloud | |
|---|---|---|
| Who lives in it | Sales reps, sales managers, sales ops | Marketers, campaign and lifecycle teams |
| Core job | Move a known opportunity through a pipeline to a close | Reach an audience at scale and bring qualified demand in |
| Main records | Leads, Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities, Cases via Service Cloud | Contacts and Subscribers held in Data Extensions |
| How it talks to people | One to one: a rep sends the email or makes the call | One to many: journeys, segments, scheduled and triggered sends |
| Email built for | A handful of personal emails a day per rep | Millions of sends, deliverability tooling, preference management |
| Reporting answers | What is in the pipeline and will we hit the number | Which campaign and channel produced the demand |
| Bought when | Your sales process lives in spreadsheets and inboxes | Your marketing has outgrown a basic email tool |
If you only need one of them, the honest test is which side of the funnel is actually leaking. A sales team losing track of open deals needs Sales Cloud. A marketing team that cannot segment, schedule or measure needs Marketing Cloud. Most companies buy Sales Cloud first, because pipeline visibility is easier to justify.
What Is Salesforce Sales Cloud?
Salesforce Sales Cloud was designed to interact with prospective and potential customers via sales forecasting as well as contact and management of opportunities. It is a compelling instrument to track and create revenue throughout the sales cycle, allowing customers to manage their customer relationships efficiently. Sales Cloud primarily focuses on the sales aspects of customer relationship management (CRM) and how users manage Leads, Contacts, Accounts, and Opportunities instead of providing customer support. Sales Cloud cuts down on time spent on administrative tasks by offering automated features so that Sales teams can concentrate on closing Opportunities!
What Is Salesforce Marketing Cloud
It is a single marketing platform that can understand consumers, connect with them, and tailor their experience. Marketing automation via email connects customers across any device or channel and integrates customer information and their behavior to send timely, relevant messages.
Marketing Cloud offers exciting services suitable for customers who are B2B (when customers are a different business) and B2C companies (when your product/service is direct to the finalcustomer or consumer). The real benefits are the unification of data sources and the ability to customize every channel, as well as the capability to engage with customers at any point in the customer-to-customer relationship and the measurement of the campaign’s results.
Which Salesforce Cloud Product Is Best For My Business?
Salesforce Cloud CRM Solution for Your Company’s Needs
Salesforce Sales Cloud: The primary goal is to increase the speed and quality of the funnel sales to make more sales and earn more revenue.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud: The primary goal is to reach the correct audience by delivering the correct message to the appropriate channels to identify trustworthy leads.
Salesforce Sales Cloud + Salesforce Marketing Cloud: Most importantly, they seek integrated software that provides greater control over the process of generating leads and negotiating deals.
Difference Between Salesforce Sales Cloud V/S Salesforce Marketing Cloud
General Differences:
The cloud sales force is focused on sales reps, while Marketing Cloud is focused on marketers.
It is built to manage and execute deals, while Marketing Cloud is built to build and nurture leads.
The core of the Sales Cloud is about CRM (Customer Relationship Management), while that of the Marketing Cloud is about marketing automation and analytics.
The Sales Cloud is a software-as-service (SaaS) solution, while the Marketing Cloud is an on-premises solution.
It is used to sell any product or service, while the marketing cloud is only for marketing campaigns and lead nurturing.
Difference in Features:
Salesforce Sales Cloud –
Salesforce Marketing Cloud –
Campaign Management
Journey Builder
Leads Management
Email Studio
Accounts Management
Data Studio
Contacts Management
Social Studio
Opportunities Management
Advertising Studio
Cases Management
Mobile Studio
Reports and Dashboards
Interaction Studio
Difference In Benefits Offered By These Two Salesforce Cloud Services
Benefits of Salesforce Sales Cloud
Sales Forecasting: The sales team can now easily forecast and predict how many deals they will close over a given time, which helps them plan their activities accordingly.
Increase your leads: The sales team can now track their lead sources and quickly identify new opportunities to increase their pipeline of deals.
Boost your productivity with AI: Artificial Intelligence (AI) can now be used to help sales reps find new opportunities, save time, and close more deals faster than ever before.
Increase your revenue by connecting to other cloud apps: The sales team can now connect their CRM data to other cloud apps they use, like Marketo or ServiceMax, to better understand their customers and prospects and increase their revenues.
Benefits of Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Create a customized and targeted customer journey: The marketing team can now create and manage personalized campaigns for each prospect, which will help them convert more leads into customers.
Deliver cross-channel and cross-functional marketing campaigns: The marketing team can now create multi-channel, multi-touchpoint campaigns orchestrated across all of their marketing channels, from email to social media to direct mail.
Impact analysis: The marketing team can now measure and analyze how their campaigns are performing and make changes to improve them over time.
Gain real-time insights into your customers: The marketing team can now gain real-time insight into their prospects and customers, including who they are, what they are interested in, and how to best engage with them.
Conclusion
The key takeaway to notice here is that there’s no hard and fast rule on which cloud to use in every situation. But if you follow and consider these guidelines, you should be able to figure out which tool is best for each scenario. The Sales Cloud is most useful when talking with prospective clients and during pipeline-building activities (i.e., prospecting and lead generation). At the same time, Marketing Cloud products are great for building relationships and generating buzz about your product with existing customers.Contact us at [email protected] to discover how we can help you maximize the potential of Salesforce for your business success.
Data Cloud vs Marketing Cloud: a different question entirely
This one comes up constantly and the two are not alternatives. Salesforce Data Cloud, now branded Salesforce Data 360, is not a marketing tool. It is the layer underneath that unifies customer data from every system you run, resolves it into a single profile per person, and then makes those profiles available to the tools that act on them, Marketing Cloud included.
| Salesforce Data Cloud (Data 360) | Salesforce Marketing Cloud | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A customer data platform that unifies and resolves records | An engagement platform that sends and orchestrates |
| What it holds | Data from CRM, web, commerce, support, warehouses and files | Subscribers, content, journeys and send history |
| What it produces | One unified profile per person, plus calculated insights and segments | Emails, SMS, push, ads and multi step journeys |
| Who uses it | Data and RevOps teams, plus anyone building segments | Marketers running campaigns |
| Without the other | Great profiles that nobody acts on | Campaigns built on whatever data happens to be in the platform |
So do you need Data Cloud as well?
Not always, and it is worth being blunt about that. Data Cloud earns its cost when customer data genuinely lives in several places at once, for example a CRM, an e-commerce platform, a support desk and a warehouse, and you cannot answer a simple question like how many distinct customers you have without exporting three files and matching them by hand. If everything already sits in one Salesforce org and the data is clean, Marketing Cloud alone will do the job.
How the three fit together
Data Cloud unifies the record. Marketing Cloud engages the person. Sales Cloud closes the deal and writes back what happened. Activity flows in both directions, so a purchase recorded in Sales Cloud can suppress someone from an acquisition journey in Marketing Cloud, and an engagement score built in Data Cloud can tell a rep which account to call first.
Frequently asked questions
Can I use Marketing Cloud without Sales Cloud?
Yes. Marketing Cloud is a separate platform with its own data model and runs perfectly well on its own. What you lose is the closed loop, because without a CRM behind it you can see who engaged but not which of them turned into revenue.
Is Marketing Cloud Account Engagement the same as Marketing Cloud?
No, and this trips people up regularly. Marketing Cloud Account Engagement is the product formerly called Pardot, built for B2B lead nurture and tightly coupled to Sales Cloud. Marketing Cloud Engagement is the larger B2C platform for high volume multi channel journeys. B2B companies are usually pointed at Account Engagement.
Does Sales Cloud send marketing emails?
It can send email, but it is not a marketing email platform. There is no journey builder, no serious deliverability tooling and no subscription management. Using it for campaigns is how sending domains get reputations they cannot recover from.
Which costs more, Sales Cloud or Marketing Cloud?
Sales Cloud is priced per user per month, so its cost tracks headcount. Marketing Cloud is priced on contacts, sends and the components you switch on, so its cost tracks audience size. A twenty person sales team with a two million contact database will find Marketing Cloud the larger line item, and a hundred person sales team with a small list will find the opposite.
What is Salesforce Data 360?
It is the current name for Salesforce Data Cloud. The product is the same customer data platform, and older documentation and job posts still use the Data Cloud name, so you will see both in circulation.
Conclusion
Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud are not competitors, they are two halves of the same customer relationship, and the real decision is which half is costing you more right now. Data Cloud is a third question that only becomes urgent once your customer data is spread across systems that disagree with each other.
Ashapura Softech Inc. is a certified Salesforce implementation partner based in Irving, Texas. If you are weighing these platforms against each other, a scoping conversation before the licences are bought is worth more than any comparison table, this one included.
