Salesforce and SAP CRMs offer carefully developed and customized services to fulfil business requirements and ensure that the required results are obtained. Both companies offer distinct CRM capabilities; for example, SaaS or cloud access, omni-channel marketing and support, pipeline management and process automation. They offer integrated services through which the efficiency of all departments can be increased; the sales process can be enhanced and better customer experiences can be offered. However, there are a few differences in their capabilities which will be discussed subsequently.

Automation

Similar automation capabilities are offered by SAP and Salesforce. SAP is incorporated with the robust ERP system; it offers a competitive advantage to its customers when they are already using SAP products for ERP. However, Salesforce would have to develop adapters to achieve integration with SAP ERP.

Lately, SAP has made various innovations to all areas including marketing, sales, service and delivery. At present, Salesforce has an edge due to its cloud integration, app customization and third-party extensions; nevertheless, SAP is catching up because of the enhancements it has made. SAP’s ability to integrate with on-premise and its significant growth in the cloud has offered it a better position in comparison to Salesforce for those companies that are utilizing hybrid (on-premise and cloud) environment.

Business Intelligence

Extensive integrate analytics competencies are offered by both the CRM systems through real-time data analysis. If additional analytics capabilities are required throughout the entire value chain, an additional BI solution is required to obtain comprehensive solution. The ‘QlikView’ offered by Salesforce is more user-friendly and helps customers measure trends in their pipelines. Hence, Salesforce has an edge over SAP in this regard.

Omni-Channel Experience

A simple cloud-based platform is provided by Salesforce Commerce Cloud that offers multiple features to retailers within a single platform such as order management, marketing, operations, etc. On the other hand, all physical and digital aspects of customers are seamlessly integrated by SAP into a single platform. This ensures that a consistent experience is offered to the customers. Good omni-channel experiences are offered by both SAP and Salesforce over all the devices and so, neither can be considered better than the other in this regard.

Offline Capabilities

Both SAP and Salesforce offer an online and an offline mode to their users. Salesforce offers limited functionalities in its offline mode. On the other hand, full access is offered by SAP in the offline mode to majority of the features in the cloud. In addition, SAP syncs data when one goes back to online mode so that the changes can be automatically made in the cloud. Thus, in terms of offline capabilities, SAP has an edge over Salesforce.

AI and Machine Learning

Though AI and machine learning are used by both CRMs for different tasks; Salesforce has a greater experience and thus has an advantage in this domain.

Conclusion

It is hard to determine which CRM software is better among the two because both of the systems are able to provide intricate and comprehensive solutions for businesses. Companies choose SAP CRM when they are already using SAP ERP applications as its CRM platform functions effectively within a SAP ecosystem because of its powerful CRM integration with SAP. On the other hand, Salesforce exhibits better performance in a cloud-based ecosystem in terms of software customization, cloud integration and third-party extensibility. Therefore, the different requirements and the digital ecosystem determine which system would be more effective for a business.