Choosing CRM software can feel like one of Hercules’ impossible tasks: there are so many, some cost an arm, a leg and a sacrifice to the Gods, and did I hear something about an Oracle? All jokes aside, just like Hercules had Eurystheus to help him out, you’ve got us. While there are many CRMs to explore, we’re going to break down the differences between SAP vs. Salesforce.

Compare Salesforce and SAP Against Your Needs

Analysis Overview

Our analyst team performed an intensive features comparison of these two CRM products and gave them a comprehension score. Every CRM is different, and just because one platform scores higher may not necessarily mean it’s an objectively better system. This article simply measures how these two CRM systems stack up feature-by-feature. That being said, Salesforce emerged as the overall winner, according to our analysis.

Table of Contents;

• Product Overviews
  • Salesforce Sales Cloud
  • SAP Sales Cloud
• Head-To-Head Comparison
  • Accounts and Contacts Management
  • Customer Communication Management
  • Dashboards and Reports
  • Documents Management
  • Leads Management
  • Opportunities/Deals Management
  • Products Management
  • Quotes, Orders and Contracts Management
  • Sales Performance Management
  • Collaboration Tools
• Other Factors
  • Mobile Support
  • Training
• Next Steps

Product Overviews

Salesforce Sales Cloud

Salesforce is an industry giant and single-handedly owned 23.8 percent of the CRM market share in 2021. The platform also ranked as the number one CRM provider for the 10th consecutive year in 2023. There are plenty of reasons beyond its wide-ranging popularity to employ Salesforce for customer relationship management. It offers SaaS deployment that allows you to access the system anytime, anywhere.

As one of Salesforce’s core products, Sales Cloud delivers a 360-degree view of customer information and interactions for optimized engagement. Its notable functionalities include lead management, opportunity management, team collaboration, dashboard and reporting modules.;

Salesforce also has a host of product-specific integrations and extensions like Service Cloud and Marketing Cloud. These connections make it easier to expand your business software usage into other interoperable platforms.

However, it’s not all roses in the world of Salesforce. According to our survey of CRM buyers, 4% of the 500 companies interviewed were downsizing their CRM – most of them from Salesforce to something less over-featured and over-priced. We compared many alternatives to Salesforce to help those users move on to a new solution.

SAP Sales Cloud

SAP is one of the biggest names in business software with solutions for computing, inventory management, ERP, process integration, transportation management, business intelligence and more.;

SAP’s CRM system, Sales Cloud, offers features like automatic monitoring of customer activities, guidance for sales through quotes and contracts, sales force automation, sales collaboration, sales enablement, and predictive analytics.

It provides flexible access to work on desktop or mobile devices, helping sales representatives access customer data and actionable content in real time on the field. You can also integrate the platform with legacy offerings such as SAP S/4HANA.

Because of its diverse experience, some of SAP CRM’s modules have a leg up over Salesforce with its singular focus. In other more CRM-specific categories, it falls short in comparison. SAP’s various suites integrate seamlessly, so it’s an ideal choice for large organizations that already use or want to use other SAP business software.

Compare CRM Pricing & Costs with our Pricing Guide

Head-To-Head Comparison

Now that you have an overview of both products, let’s compare Salesforce Sales Cloud and SAP Sales Cloud head-to-head.

Accounts and Contacts Management

Salesforce offers account fields to enter contact and billing information and descriptions. Associate accounts with contacts and get an overview of activity history, customer communications and internal account discussions. You can also create territories for teams and manage them.

SAP Sales Cloud lets you capture, monitor and store all business information related to prospects and customers. You can create and track phone calls, emails, appointments and social media messages. The system enables you to create territories and assign accounts to them.

Both products rank highly for contact, account and territory management. Salesforce needs additional modules for AI-based sales and contact recommendations, while SAP Sales Cloud doesn’t support either feature. Both lack group appointment scheduling capabilities, but SAP redeems itself by scoring a 100 for individual appointment scheduling.

Winner: Salesforce and SAP Sales Cloud tie for this round due to their excellent account, contact and territory management features.

Customer Communication Management

Both Salesforce and SAP rank highly for their email and call scheduling features. They integrate with popular email clients like Microsoft Outlook and Gmail, allowing sales reps to send personalized mass messages to customers.

With SAP Sales Cloud, you can track and document phone calls, add tasks and surveys, and generate phone call and appointment summaries. The system has better SMS management capabilities. Sales reps can send SMS blasts to a group and analyze campaign results. They can also create SMS templates and directly send SMS messages from the platform.

Salesforce excels at call tagging and email status, which lets you see if and when a customer opens emails sent through the platform. It also provides Einstein Intent API that analyzes text from emails and chats and determines which products prospects are interested in.

Winner: Salesforce emerges victorious in this module thanks to its email, call and AI in communication features.

Dashboards and Reports

Salesforce helps generate reports based on activity status and selected date range. It provides chart types like pie, bar, column, heat map and matrix to identify trends and track progress. Sales reps can customize standard reports or build custom reports that suit the team’s needs from scratch.

SAP Sales Cloud offers out-of-the-box customizable reports to view emails, calls, tasks and appointments associated with team members. You can display data using tables or charts like area, doughnut, bubble and geo map. Create survey reports, edit reports using “Report Wizard” and customize interactive dashboards.

SAP is better at email reporting and allows you to analyze engagement and delivery rates. However, Salesforce has the edge with efficient call analytics, deal reports, embed charts, pre-built dashboards and reports, and report sharing and preview.

Winner: Salesforce outperforms SAP in this module because of its superior customizable email reports and report-sharing capabilities.

Compare Salesforce and SAP Against Your Needs

Documents Management

Out of the seven features in this module, SAP and Salesforce score a perfect 100 for four of them — document repository, document sharing, file attachments and version history. This indicates that either option is a good choice if document management is a priority for your organization.

You can create, upload, edit and manage document records with ease. Share crucial files by building links and sending them through email or chat. The systems also let you attach PDFs, Microsoft Office documents and PNGs.

Salesforce has a slight advantage over SAP due to its document conversion capabilities. It helps convert offline documents into web-optimized online versions for easy viewing. The solution is also better at playbooks and enables companies to create and manage knowledge databases.

Winner: Salesforce takes the cake because of its document repository, conversion and playbooks.

Leads Management

Salesforce lets you automatically distribute leads to sales reps based on predefined criteria like geography. Score incoming leads based on demographics, company size or actions such as visiting your website or filling out a form.

SAP Sales Cloud offers the above-mentioned automatic lead distribution capabilities and more. It enables you to rank leads and identify valuable prospects based on survey, engagement and lead scores. Capture leads from various sources like social media, marketing campaigns and referrals.

The system is better at AI in lead conversion, business card scanning and win-loss analysis. It ranks 100 for LinkedIn prospects capture, while Salesforce ranks 25, indicating SAP’s superiority. With SAP, you can target the right customers and analyze where your company is falling short in generating sales.

Winner: SAP Sales Cloud wins over Salesforce in this round due to better win-loss analysis and AI in lead management.;

Opportunities/Deals Management

Both products rank highly for this module, with Salesforce scoring 90 and SAP scoring a near-perfect 98.;

Salesforce allows you to track activities like tasks, events and meetings and keep up with accounts, contacts, campaigns and leads. You can create multiple sales pipelines with ease. The platform tracks deal stages, assigns probabilities and sends reminders so no deals slip through the cracks.

SAP Sales Cloud helps record activities and identifies and follows up on products for potential customers. You can find out where opportunities are in the pipeline and assign roles to the parties involved. The Kanban Board app provides a personalized overview of sales processes and gives access to real-time information.

SAP also outshines Salesforce at AI in opportunity management. The solution finds patterns and predicts the probability of closing a deal based on historical data.;

Winner: SAP wins this round thanks to its AI in opportunity management, probability and Kanban View.

Compare Salesforce and SAP Against Your Needs

Products Management

Out of the four features in this module, SAP and Salesforce score a perfect 100 for three of them — custom products, product catalogs and product groups.;

You can use either solution to customize products and add details like prices and discounts. Salesforce provides a base catalog of all the services, whereas SAP allows you to create and migrate product lists as well as set up automatic product proposals. Both systems help in categorizing and organizing products into different groups.

The tiebreaker in this SAP CRM vs. Salesforce round comes with custom portals. Salesforce lets you create branded customer portals with its drag-and-drop tools. SAP, however, doesn’t support this capability.

Winner: Salesforce wins over SAP with its custom portals and product catalogs.;

Quotes, Orders and Contracts Management

Salesforce documents contracts and tracks them through the approval process. It sends alerts to remind you about contract renewals and lets you attach photocopies. The system supports automatic order creation with Process and Flow Builder. It also helps generate sales quotes from opportunities and their products.

With SAP, you can use contract templates or create contracts from scratch with details like names, service levels, dates and involved parties and send them to clients for review. Create quotes or copy existing ones offline or online. The solution lets you define the approval process for accepting sales quotes.

Out of the nine features in this module, both Salesforce and SAP rank 100 for six of them — contract creation, contract management, order generation, order history, quote generation, and supply and payments schedule. Both solutions are great for managing contracts and quotes. However, Salesforce performs more efficiently in order management features like automatic order creation and segmentation.

Winner: Salesforce wins over SAP Sales Cloud in this module due to its dynamic order management capabilities.

Sales Performance Management

Salesforce provides excellent goal management tools that enable you to define, track and measure work. You can set up sales campaigns such as advertising, email, telemarketing, banner ads and referral programs. Forecast sales revenue and track sales rep performance with real-time dashboards.

SAP Sales Cloud allows teams to create target plans based on factors such as territory, product group, sales unit, salesperson and account level, enabling you to design goals from the top down. Create mass email and SMS campaigns and track them. You can also forecast sales and estimate future trends to make informed decisions based on data.

SAP is better at gamification, helping you encourage healthy competition and participation among employees. However, Salesforce offers good AI-based coaching actions, something SAP doesn’t support. Both need additional modules for AI-based anomaly detection.

Winner: In this SAP vs. Salesforce round, both solutions tie due to their robust sales campaigns, goals management and forecasting capabilities.

Collaboration Tools

Both solutions rank highly for five of the six features of this module — mention, feeds, user groups, private chat and tags. The solutions enable you to like, comment and mention people in posts. Share documents and attachments with groups or through private chat for internal or cross-team collaboration. You can also add private or public tags for efficient data organization.

The tiebreaker for this Salesforce vs. SAP CRM round is the geotagging feature. SAP supports this out of the box and helps you track accounts and validate addresses, something Salesforce needs integrations for.

Winner: SAP has an edge in this module owing to its robust geotagging capability.

Compare Salesforce and SAP Against Your Needs

Other Factors

Mobile Support

With Salesforce, you can manage leads, collaborate with coworkers and create meetings on the go. You can access the platform with mobile apps for iOS and Android devices. Sales reps can edit and delete records offline and sync changes once they have internet access.;

SAP has mobile apps for iOS and Android as well. Salespeople can interact with customers, access deals and get the latest data at their fingertips. View activities, leads, opportunities, orders and quotes offline. Both SAP and Salesforce have a responsive web-based interface that provides a consistent experience on both browser and mobile.

Winner: SAP and Salesforce score 100 for all the features in this module, according to our data, resulting in another tie.

Training

Salesforce provides certifications, credentials and free online training. The solution offers in-product suggestions that help you navigate through the platform. You can access training materials for advanced customer journeys and territory management.

SAP’s Open SAP portal gives access to various instructor-led online training courses with graded assignments. You can purchase subscription packages to access hands-on, live training sessions and eBooks. The platform also comes with in-product help.

Winner: Both solutions tie as a result of their certifications, free live training and in-product suggestions.

Compare Salesforce and SAP Against Your Needs

Next Steps

The Salesforce vs. SAP contest is a close one, but our analysts found that Salesforce performs better for more individual features and has a higher analyst rating at 87, compared to 84 for SAP. That being said, Salesforce may not be the best CRM for every company, so it’s important to keep your requirements in mind when researching CRMs. And if you want to see which products are better for your budget, grab our free pricing guide to make an informed decision.

What do you think of our analysis of the difference between Salesforce and SAP? Do you have any questions about choosing CRM software? Leave us a question in the comments!

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