Sustaining healthy relations with your customers is one of the essential factors for achieving business success. Today, most businesses, irrespective of their size are well-informed regarding the importance of customer relationships. A well-structured and robust CRM helps in powering up your business from nothing to pinnacle of success. In fact, the benefits of a powerful CRM system go beyond being a consolidated place for data storage to being a communicative, dynamic, and scalable environment for salespeople within an organization.
According to a survey conducted by LinkedIn, more than 91% of sales professionals believe that using such sales technologies has helped shorten sales cycles, close bigger sales deals and grow their revenue. And that is why choosing the best CRM software is of paramount importance. Today, with a plethora of CRM systems available in the market, choosing the right CRM for your business isn’t short of a herculean task. So, how do you decide which CRM to opt for?
Salesforce vs SAP: A Detailed Comparison
Let’s draw a vivid comparison between the two most popular cloud-based and SAAS (software as a service) CRM systems i.e. SAP and Salesforce. While both of these offer astonishing features and functionalities, it’s important to opt for the one that best meets your specific business requirement.
- Industry components: While SAP offers several other industry components apart from the CRM components, Salesforce focuses primarily on CRM-based components. With an integrated SAP ERP system, SAP provides an end to end sales solution and allows easy integration of SAP Cloud for customers. Though it is struggling with the UI, it’s striving to become better day by day. On the other hand, the integration of Salesforce is comparatively taxing and expensive. However, when it comes to social selling and building relationships, it has an edge over SAP because of its excellent UI.
- Business Intelligence: BI (Business intelligence) tools are gaining prominence as an extra module in almost every type of business software. One important attribute of BI is custom reports. Since, the needs of many organizations aren’t fulfilled via pre-built templates, creating specialized reports becomes vital. Business Objects of SAP’s BI system provides business intelligence benefits without the need for a discrete BI system. Apart from this, the user-friendly interface offered by SAP allows users to create and edit reports. However, when it comes to extensiveness, the platform offers limited capabilities. The ‘QlikView’ feature offered by Salesforce besides offering an easy UI doesn’t require any dependency on IT for real-time analysis. The dashboard and reports generated via this CRM presents a clear status of your business. However, one should be aware that this is a paid service.
- Email Marketing: Emails are one of the best ways of marketing. However, monitoring these emails is highly crucial to keep a track of emails opened, links accessed and other related data. The SAP CRM offers numerous capabilities to its users for efficient campaign management and cross-channel marketing besides automatic tracking of email interactions. Salesforce offers a wide array of features when it comes to email marketing. The availability of templates allows users to design their emails. Apart from this, features like ‘email journeys’, FAQ platforms and other resources make Salesforce an ideal platform for bulk email marketing.
- Marketing: While SAP CRM offers end to end marketing solutions, marketing analytics for predictive lead scoring, optimization, etc. it also offers automation capabilities for marketing planning, implementation of campaigns besides integrating important functions such as lead management, customer segmentation and more. Salesforce with its great UI (User interface) and ‘Sales cloud’ feature offers the potential to gain and close more deals, augment productivity and make insightful decisions.
- Device Availability: While the SAP CRM can be accessed on Mac, Windows, and web, the Salesforce CRM can be accessed on multiple webs and mobile platforms including Windows, Mac, Android, iPhone, iPad, etc. When it comes to language capability, SAP supports only English and Dutch whereas Salesforce supports multiple languages such as English, Turkish, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, French, Swedish, and Spanish. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that Salesforce CRM offers a better outreach than SAP.
Who’s the Ultimate Winner?
In the runoff between SAP and Salesforce, there’s no clear frontrunner. In fact, it’s a close one. Both tools gain significant power when associated with AI systems to improve their platform. However, it is the specific needs of your team that decides the ultimate winner. For instance, if your needs are limited to AI capabilities without the need for a full cloud stack, Salesforce should be the right choice for you. You must, however, consider SAP HANA, if you’re seeking a full business stack along with AI capabilities. So, make sure you weigh in all the pros and cons before zeroing in on the right CRM. Businesses willing to leverage Salesforce as their CRM system may get in touch with a reliable Salesforce consulting company.
