Salesforce basics Interview Questions And Answers

Salesforce is a popular Customer Relationship Management solution that aligns companies with their customers through sales, marketing, and commerce tools. It is a software tool for support, sales, and marketing teams worldwide, offering instant streamlining and automation of business processes. It helps businesses to go deeper with all their metrics and data, where they could also set up a dashboard to showcase all the data visually.

Salesforce services allow businesses to use cloud technology to connect with their partners and customers better. The software can store all the customer information. For example, it stores customer names, addresses, and phone numbers and keeps track of customer activity like website visits, phone calls, emails and more. 

Before learning all the Salesforce interview questions and answers, you must know all the basics of Salesforce.  

1 . What does Salesforce do?

Salesforce is a platform consisting of various cloud-based CRM applications. For example, apps include Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, and Service Cloud, alongside a suite of enterprise solutions focusing on integration, analytics, and business development.

Customers can opt for a single app like Sales Cloud and Commerce Cloud or combine multiple products with Customer 360. Users can also select multiple apps and tailor a specific solution to their business. 

Salesforce delivers a simple-to-use interface that users can easily integrate with their business. Here is a list of things that Salesforce can do for you:

  • Actively tracks and manages businesses’ customer information.
  • Connects the whole team from any device.
  • Offers intelligent capture of customer’s email
  • Take care to simplify repetitive tasks, allowing you to concentrate on leads.
  • Delivers instant insights/ recommendations.
  • Scales and customises as your business grows.

Why does Salesforce matter?

Salesforce helps businesses to connect to their customers in a better way and helps them build long-lasting and meaningful relationships. 

  • Salesforce helps you with clunky processes and manual tasks. Now, you can get on with business leaving all the hustle and bustle of the management to the best CRM.
  • You have more time to find more leads and close more deals.
  • You can manage more customers and grow your business.
  • To have one place to store all customer information means optimised business. It ensures all your conversations are always personal, relevant, and up to date.
  • It increases customer loyalty and retention by better understanding their needs, identifying new opportunities to help, addressing any problems faster and deploying customer-focused apps lightning fast. 

According to the survey, Salesforce customers report 26% more deals, 26% happier customers, and 32% more leads.

2 . What are the Salesforce subsidiaries?

The following are the major subsidiaries of Salesforce:

  • Tableau 
  • Pardot
  • Heroku
  • Mulesoft
  • Demandware Inc
  • SalesforceIQ

3 . Explain an Object in Salesforce

Objects in Salesforce works as database tables that stores information of an organization. We have two types of objects in salesforce, they are.

Standard Object: These are the objects provided by the salesforce, which include contacts, accounts, opportunities, leads, cases, campaigns, products, contracts, dashboards, etc.

Custom Object: This includes the modifications made to the Salesforce by users. It stores the essential and unique information of an organization. Custom Object includes page layouts, relationship to other objects, custom user interface tab, custom fields, etc.

4 . What is App in Salesforce?

An App in Salesforce.com is a container that holds various things such as a logo, name, and a set of required tabs.  It is also popular a group of tabs that work together to prove the functionality that you are looking for.

In Salesforce, you can customize apps to match your requirements, or you can build new applications by combining custom and standard tabs.

The process to create an app in Salesforce:

Setup —> build—> Create—> App—> Click on new.

By following this procedure, you can build an application. However, you want to.

5 . What type of apps can we create in SF?

We can create two types of Apps in Salesforce

Custom app: This type of app works in every business scenario. It is widely popular in the market.

Console app: This type of app works only in the client service business, where we focus on solving the client’s issues. It is not, comparatively, widely used in the market.

6 . What are Salesforce Standard Fields?

Below mentioned are the Salesforce Standard Fields

  • Owner,
  • Name,
  • Last modified by,
  • Created by.

7 . What are Audit Fields?

Standard fields are nothing but audit fields.

8 . Which is the latest field you have worked in SF?

‘Time’ is the latest field in Salesforce.

9 . What are the default filters in salesforce?

They are “Date filters.”

10 . How to get rid of Date Filter?

By selecting the “All Time” in the “Range” on the page.

11 . What are the issues that you face on joined reports?

We can not export.

12 . What are the types of reports that we have in Salesforce?

There are four types of reports that are available in Salesforce, which are as follows. 

  • The tabular report is those that give us the total in a tabular format.
  • Matrix reports the format where you do the grouping on the basis of columns and rows. 
  • The summary report gives us detailed reports based on columns. 
  • Joined reports which are capable of allowing two or more reports in one report.

13 . What is an Audit trail?

The Audit trail in Salesforce is a unique feature that helps in tracking the changes in the organization by you and other administrators. It would be helpful for the organization with more administrators. This audit trail shows you the information of the twenty most recently made changes in your organization. 

Below are the things that you could come to know: 

  • The date and time. 
  • Username of who made the changes.  
  • What the change was.

14 . What are the benefits of using Salesforce CRM?

We get the following benefits by using Salesforce CRM.   

  • Improved organizational understanding.
  • Enhanced communication.
  • We can understand the customer better and can facilitate better services.
  • Salesforce automates repeated rule-based tasks.
  • Improved analytics and dashboards to analyze the data.
  • Reduction in cost and cycle time.
  • Improves the efficiency of teams.

15 . What is a profile? Can two users have the same profile?

The profile is a collection of rules and procedures a person needs to follow to access particular records. There are multiple profiles available in Salesforce. For example, a sales profile can have access to leads, opportunities, contacts, campaigns, etc.

As far as the second question is considered, the answer would be yes. The people who work in one department have the same profile. So the people who work under a particular department will be have the same profiles.

16 . Explain the difference between role and profile?

Role: In Salesforce Role works to increase the data visibility to a particular user. It is done through sharing rules or by building a role hierarchy. Using roles, you can control the ac

Profile: Unlike the roles profile is mandatory for all, and it stays at the object level. It works as a building pillar of an organization.

17 . How many relationships do we have in Salesforce?

We have three types of relationships in Salesforce, which are:

  • Master-detail relationship
  • Lookup relationship
  • External Lookup

18 . What is the Master-Detail relationship?

This Master-Detail relationship is the same as the relationship between a parent & child. In this aspect, the master is works as a Parent, and the Detail is a child. The master Object takes control of the behavior of the Detail object. The survival of the child is dependent on the parent because if the Master gets deleted the Detail will also automatically get deleted. You can create Roll-up summary fields in master records which helps in calculating the Min, Avg, Sum of the child records.

19 . What is a “Lookup Relationship”?

The relationship between the two objects is a lookup relationship. Lookup relationships connect two object links together so that you can look up from related items to other items. It can be one-to-one or one to many.

20 . What is an External lookup?

The external lookup relationship works to connect the child object to the parent object. The child object may be either a custom, standard, or external object. It helps to identify the correct map of the child object with the parent external object. The external lookup relationship values fields are matched against the External Id values.

21 . What is a self-relationship?

It is a personal look up to the same object. The self-relationship creates a tree diagram of the objects. Let’s take an example as an object “merchandise”. In this, we can create relationship merchandise between two accounts. This is a self-relationship.

22 . What is the workflow in Salesforce?

Workflow is an excellent way to automate specific business processes in Salesforce. To do this, you require to define certain rules and regulations to automate tasks such as sending an email, updating a field, create a task

  • We can have access to workflow across the object.
  • It is not possible to query from the database.

23 . Can you describe the main differences between Sales Cloud & Service Cloud?

Sales & Service Cloud both act as the core CRM platforms for Salesforce and helps the majority of organisations. While both share some similarities, they are distinctly different products that contain different sets of features for their specific function.

  • Sales Cloud – This product works to support businesses with their sales cycle. Taking a potential customer on a journey from qualifying them through the Lead object to converting them into an Opportunity where the main sales cycle takes place. Sales Cloud also has a number of other features to support this process, from quoting to forecasting.
  • Service Cloud – Service Cloud on the other hand helps organisations with their customer support process. Customers initiate a support process by emailing, calling, or submitting an online form. Once this case has been created in Salesforce, agents can use features such as a Knowledge base to help find answers to questions, milestones to ensure SLA (Service Level Agreements) are met, as well as features like live chat to talk to customers in real-time.

24 . Can you describe the differences between declarative and programmatic customisations?

When it comes to Salesforce customisations, there are two main types, declarative and programmatic.

Declarative customisations are point and click. These allow non-developers to build powerful customisations by using a wizard to create custom fields, automation and tables of data. One of the latest developments Salesforce has brought out is Mulesoft Composer, which allows integrations into other systems to take place using only clicks!

Programmatic customisations on the other hand are built with code. Whilst you can do almost anything with declarative customisation, there is a limit to more complex solutions. Apex is Salesforce’s coding language and may be required if the requirement is particularly complex.

Lightning development, on the other hand, is Salesforce’s UI coding language, this works to create completely custom screen layouts. In addition, it’s common that in most integrations, some level of coding experience using API’s that you will need.

25 . Can you explain how Salesforce releases work?

Being a SaaS platform, Salesforce delivers updates to your system automatically. The major releases happen 3 times a year, with some other, much smaller updates being delivered in between.

The major releases are labelled, Spring, Summer & Winter, with the fiscal Salesforce year following the name, e.g. “Salesforce Winter ’22 Release”. Each release will have a huge amount of features and updates included, across most Salesforce products.

It’s important to stay alert around release time. Whilst Salesforce rarely breaks anything whilst updating your Org, it’s important to test everything and ensure that it works as expected.

26 . What is the Salesforce Lightning Experience, and how does it help organisations?

Salesforce Lightning was primarily a new UI that was released in 2015, it took Salesforce’s UI that was mostly unchanged since 1999 and brought it into the 21st century. Salesforce centred the design around a modular experience that allowed Salesforce Admins to easily control the layout of all pages.

This resulted in a rise in user productivity with the help of new features, as well as an easy to navigate UI. Pretty much, every single page of Salesforce Lightning Experience is fully customizable. You can customize the home page, record layouts and create dashboards to suit your specific needs.

27 . Can you describe an example Sales process that a company might implement?

Sales Cloud is Salesforce’s most popular product and it’s more than likely you will need to support this product. This is why it’s more important than ever to be able to recommend and support a company’s Sales process.

When someone refers to a Sales process, they are referring to the process that a salesperson will follow in order to sell a product or service to a potential customer. This is then translated into the “Lead Status” and “Opportunity Stage” fields. At an extremely basic level, that could look like the following. Qualify > Discover > Analysis > Proposal > Negotiation > Closed Won (Or Lost).

Here is an example below that includes a full Sales process, from entering the organization at the Lead stage, all the way through to its closing.

28 . Can you describe an example Service process that a company might implement?

Similar to the above questions, it’s important for Salesforce professionals to understand how a customer support organisation works and the different stages they go through to solve a case.

Unlike a Sales process that is split across the Lead & Opportunity objects, Service processes are contained on the case object. Here is an example of a Service process. New > Working > Waiting on Customer > Escalated > Closed.

29 . How are changes tested in Salesforce before being deployed to Production?

A fundamental concept of any IT system is that changes should never be made in Production. They need to be tested in a safe environment to ensure nothing breaks and user processes are not disrupted.

Salesforce provides a feature known as Sandboxes. These replicate your Production configuration, giving you a safe environment to test changes and implement new features.

Sandboxes come in different flavors, ranging from a developer sandbox that only contains your custom configuration, all the way through to Full Copy Sandboxes, that contain all your configuration and data.

30 . Can you describe some of the main differences between Salesforce editions? (E.g. Professional & Enterprise)

Salesforce has a few different versions of its products including, Essentials, Professional, Enterprise & Unlimited. It’s important to understand some of the differences, at least from a high level. If you join an organisation that has a lower tier than you are used to, it may reduce the functionality you can implement. Here are a few of the main differences…

Functionality – Most Salesforce editions will contain core CRM functionality including Account & Contact fields, email integration and the mobile app. However, some of the lower editions will not include automation, API availability for integration, or some advanced features such as Flow.

Limits – All Salesforce editions have some kind of limits, these can include daily API calls, data storage limits, custom apps, or the number of custom objects of fields. Higher-level editions will have higher limits.

Cost – As you might have guessed, the more advanced versions can cost a lot more. You can expect the Essentials version to cost $25/month per user and the Unlimited one to cost $300/month.

31 . How do you move changes between Salesforce environments?

Once changes have been implemented and tested in a Salesforce sandbox, they need to be moved to another sandbox and ultimately, the production environment.

There are many ways to move changes between environments. However, the most common way is to use change sets. Change sets are a packaged set of components that can be created in one environment and moved across to another.

If you want to really impress your interviewer, learn all about Salesforce DevOps, the next generation of deployment tools.

32 . What is the difference between Data and Metadata?

Metadata relates to the fields, configurations, code, logic and page layouts that go into building the information architecture and look and feel of your Salesforce environment.

Data relates to the records that a business relies on, such as Users, Accounts, Contacts, to name a few. On the other hand, Metadata is the data that describes other data.

33 . What is a Queue in Salesforce?

A lot of objects in Salesforce have to be owned by an individual. For example, Accounts, Opportunities, Contacts & Campaigns must be owned by a user in Salesforce.

However, there are certain objects where it is useful to be owned by a Salesforce Queue. Queues are like holding areas in your CRM, where records wait for a user to pick them up, assign them to an owner and work on processing them.

34 . What is Salesforce Customer 360?

For a few years now, Salesforce has been trying to create a suite of products that allow users of its platform to see a 360-degree view of their customers. This means that users of Salesforce can see every interaction with a customer, from the first enquiry through the website, to which products they have bought and what issues or queries they have with their products.

This helps businesses by allowing them to serve their customers better, by knowing everything about them and ensuring the businesses are working off a single source of truth.

35 . What can cause data loss in Salesforce?

Data loss in Salesforce can be caused by a number of reasons, including:

  • Changing data and date-time.
  • Migrating to percent, number, and currency from other data types.
  • Changing from the multi-select picklist, checkbox, auto number to other types.
  • Altering to multi-select picklist from any type except picklist.
  • Changing to auto-number except for text.
  • Changing from text-area to e-mail, phone, URL, and text.

36 . How is SaaS beneficial to Salesforce?

SaaS is subscription-based, so clients can choose not to renew and discontinue using the program at any time without penalty other than not being able to use Salesforce. Also, SaaS is intended to help users avoid heavy initial startup fees and investments. SaaS applications use a simple Internet interface supported by easy integration.

37 . How does Salesforce track sales?

Salesforce is a tracking program that records a number of helpful basic details, such as:

  • Number of customers served daily
  • Daily sales volume
  • Detailed reports from Sales Manager
  • Sales figures by month or quarter
  • Most importantly, Salesforce tracks and reports repeat customer activity, which is the key to any sales organization.

38 . What is the trigger?

The trigger is the code that is executed before or after the record is updated or inserted.

39 . What is the difference between Trigger and Workflow?

This is one of the most frequently asked Salesforce interview questions. Workflow is an automated process that fires an action based on evaluation criteria and rule criteria. As described above, Trigger is the code that is executed on or after the record is updated or inserted.

40 . What is a static resource in Salesforce?

With Salesforce’s static resource, subscribers can upload zip files, images, jar files, JavaScript, and CSS files that can be referred to in a Visualforce page. The optimum size of static resources in Salesforce is 250 MB.

41 . What is the difference between Force.com and Salesforce.com?

Force.com is  Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), while Salesforce.com is Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

42 . What are the three types of object relations in Salesforce?

The three types of object relations in Salesforce are:

  • One-to-many
  • Many-to-many
  • Master-detail

The relation types are quite logical once the user becomes familiar with the software program.

43 . Is it possible to schedule a dynamic dashboard in Salesforce?

In Salesforce, it is not possible to schedule a dynamic dashboard.

44 . What is the junction object and what purpose does it serve?

Junction objects are used to build many-to-many relationships between objects. For example, the user can take a recruiting application where a position for a job can be linked to many candidates or can link a candidate to many other jobs. In order to connect the data model, a third party object is referred to as a junction object. In the given example, the junction object is “job application.”

45 . What is the difference between SOQL and SOSL?

SOQL is the Salesforce Object Query Language and SOSL is Salesforce Object Search Language. If you are sensing that Salesforce is a culture unto itself, you are correct!

46 . What is a Wrapper Class?

A Wrapper Class is a class whose instances are a collection of other objects and is used to display different objects on a Visualforce page in the same table.

47 . What is the sharing rule?

The sharing rules are applied when a user wishes to allow access to other users.

48 . What do you mean by governor limits?

Governor limits control how much data can be stored on a shared database. They help to ensure that no one monopolizes the shared resources (Storage, CPU, Memory).

Here are some few examples of governor limits in Salesforce:

  • Maximum CPU time on the Salesforce servers – 10,000ms 
  • Total number of sendEmail methods allowed – 10
  • Total number of records retrieved by a SOQL query – 50,000 
  • Total number of callouts in a transaction – 100

49 . What are some things that you can do to prevent governor limits?

Here are some best practices you can follow to ensure that a code does not hit the governor limits.

  • Bulkify your Code
  • Use @future Appropriately
  • Don’t make any SOQL, DML operation inside a loop
  • Queue large datasets 
  • Use batch apex for more than 50,000 records

50 . What is MuleSoft?

Mulesoft is an integration platform that was acquired by Salesforce in 2018 for $6.5B.

Mulesoft’s Anypoint platform, allows you to integrate with other systems easily, with a set of templates that provide out-of-the-box API’s. Salesforce acquired Mulesoft to better serve customers going through their digital transformations and required integration with backend systems such as HR, Finance or ERP.

Salesforce has also recently released MuleSoft Composer, which is designed to give Admin’s a declarative way to integrate with other systems.

60 . What is scope creep?

Any experienced consultant will be familiar with the dreaded term,’ scope creep’. A successful project is one that is kept within the budget, scope and completed on time. However, when in the middle of a project, new requirements often come up, which means that a customer may want the extra scope to be added.

It’s important for every Salesforce professional to understand how to handle scope creep and how to manage customers’ expectations.