SAP CRM vs. Salesforce CRM: Find out the Winner!

Customer relationship management, or CRM, is a technology used for managing and smoothing the company’s relationships and interactions with customers. It helps companies improve their business relationships and keep them connected with their customers, which improves profitability and streamlines the business processes. Using a CRM tool can make a huge difference for your growing business. But the question is how to find the best CRM that efficiently works to ease your overwhelming task. Currently, there are two CRM players competing in the market, which include Salesforce and SAP. Here, in this blog, we are talking about key differences between Salesforce and SAP, so you can make the right decision for the one that works best for you.

Salesforce CRM vs. SAP CRM

Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence (BI) tools are grabbing huge popularity in the market.It helps the users to monitor their KPIs and collect all the information about their daily activities. This data is further used by companies to make long-term, data-driven decisions.

Salesforce
With Salesforce, users get a real-time analytical tool with its paid add-on called QlikView. It is an easy-to-use add-on that requires minimum to no dependence on IT. QlikView allows users to boost their sales effectiveness by evaluating the trends in their pipelines. Also, users can track and develop their marketing campaigns as well as improve them by analyzing their customer and lead data.

SAP
In SAP, users can analyze their real-time data by embedding the SAP analytics cloud into the SAP CX suite. SAP BusinessObjects provides capabilities such as KPI reporting in the SAP analytics cloud. It is directly used in SAP CX without any need of using a different BI system. But it can limit its capacity in some cases.
SAP and Salesforce are both providing outstanding embedded analytics capabilities with their solutions. But, if you are looking for additional analytics abilities for your complete value chain and multiple solutions, then you need to add a BI solution to bring all of them together.

Here, Salesforce scores more than SAP because of its more user-friendly “QlikView”.

Omni-channel Solution

Many companies provide services to all their sales channels, but they won’t be able to deliver the same level of experience. It is impossible for them to streamline the experience without using an efficient tool. Omni-Channel solutions are designed to help companies provide a consistent customer experience.

Salesforce
If we talk about Omni-channels, Salesforce Commerce Cloud is based on a simple cloud-based approach. It comes with various features integrated into a single platform, such as operations, merchandising, order management, and marketing.

SAP
SAP’s Omnichannel is based on a different approach. It fluently integrates all existing customer touchpoints into a single platform. It offers a consistent experience to all your customers, no matter which device they are using to communicate with you.

Both Salesforce and SAP CRMs provide a good Omni-Channel experience on different devices. You can choose any one of them as per your needs.

Offline mode

When it comes to technicians who visit for on-site maintenance or sales representatives who visit clients, they will require access to the CRM from their location. In such a situation, the easy accessibility of your CRM system without having an internet connection can prove highly beneficial for your business. If we talk about the offline functionalities of both SAP and Salesforce, there is a huge difference between them.

Salesforce
Salesforce provides an offline mode, but it is quite limited. It will display all the features available in the CRM software, but you can’t edit most of them. For example,

• You can edit the notes but are not allowed to delete them.
• You can view the files but can’t edit or delete them.
• You are not allowed to give approval.

SAP
SAP provides more support for all of its offline features for both technicians and sales reps. With this, sales reps and technicians can get access to all their service tools. For example, it enables them to:

• Access to price calculations
• Access to retail execution tools and promotion creation
• Automatically sync and update the cloud.

Both CRMs offer online and offline modes, but Salesforce’s CRM has limited access to its offline tool. On the other hand, SAP offers full access to its offline mode features within the cloud. However, when SAP comes back online, it will sync all data to make the changes automatically transfer into the cloud.

In terms of offline-mode capabilities, SAP is a better option than Salesforce.

AI and Machine Learning

AI and Machine Learning are both growing trends with CRM software. Using these technologies in a CRM helps in delivering personalized and predictive customer data for better insights as well as improving the customer experience.

Salesforce
Salesforce provides AI implemented services that include:

• The Einstein prediction builder helps in predicting business outcomes.
• The Einstein bots work well in accelerating business processes, improving customer experience, and empowering your employees by using custom bots. These custom bots are based on your CRM data.
• Einstein Vision is utilized in in-app image recognition for identifying brands, products, and more.
• Einstein Language helps in understanding your customers’ requirements and needs on different channels. It analyzes their key intent, beliefs, and emotions in the text body.
• Einstein Discovery provides AI-powered recommendations and insights for increased productivity. It also helps in finding relevant patterns in your data.

SAP
SAP provides AI implemented services that include:

• Predict customer behavior with SAP Customer Retention.
• SAP Deal Intelligence will score the leads and rank them according to their likelihood of being close to a sale.
• SAP Service Ticket Intelligence will automatically work to categorize the service tickets, prioritize the tasks, and recommend the answers to standard questions.
• SAP CoPilot is a digital chatbot that gives answers to questions for users’ assistance.
• SAP Brand helps companies to measure the influence of their brand based on advertisements and sponsorships.
• When it comes to AI and machine learning, both CRMs use them, but Salesforce has better experience in this context.

It means Salesforce cloud marketing is an apt choice over SAP for AI and Machine Learning.

Marketing functionalities

Effective marketing helps you reach your targeted audience and gives a broader market for you. Such batch emails can be easily customized using sophisticated CRMs.

Salesforce
The Salesforce Marketing Cloud provides multiple features through which brands can do everything, including email marketing and advanced cross-channel campaign management. With this, brands can provide a personalized customer experience to their customers across different channels. It contains a set of tools, including Social Studio, Email Studio, Data Studio, and more.

SAP
With the SAP marketing cloud, you can pull all your customer data from any channel and represent the data in one unified customer view tool. It gives you a 360-degree view of customer data so that you can evaluate how to approach them in a best-personalized way. It enables the launch of automated campaigns via different channels like mobile, email, and social media. The key features of the SAP marketing cloud include customer attribution, dynamic customer profiling, commerce marketing, and more.

The Salesforce marketing cloud functionalities are more extensive as compared to SAP marketing. That’s why Salesforce’s marketing functionalities are considered better than SAP’s.

Wrapping Up

Both Salesforce and SAP are highly powerful and developed by highly reputed companies. Each system has some pros and cons, but you need to choose the one that works best for you. Salesforce offers a complete package and is known for its user-friendly interface. SAP is a cost-effective option for many companies, but it doesn’t have robust tools. Do you want to know which CRM works better for your organization? Are you looking for Salesforce marketing cloud implementation services for your company? If yes, then contact Ksolves experts today.

Frequently Asked Questions –

Which is better: Salesforce or SAP CRM?

Both SAP CRM and Salesforce have close contests, but it has been found that Salesforce’s capabilities perform better than SAP’s. However, Salesforce CRM is not ideal for every company, so you need to choose the CRM according to your business requirements.

SAP or Salesforce: Which CRM has superior marketing capabilities?

Both of them provide outstanding marketing functionality. But in comparison to SAP, Salesforce is a better option to streamline your business’s marketing efforts across different platforms, including email, mobile, social media content, and more. It helps you to get better consumer insight so you can create effective marketing campaigns that increase your sales.

Which one is easier: SAP or Salesforce?

Both of them provide the same features. However, as compared to Salesforce, SAP can integrate better with ERP systems. On the other hand, Salesforce offers a more easy-to-use, effective user interface, better configuration solutions, and easy usability.