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Salesforce Interview Questions & Answers

This comprehensive Salesforce interview questions post will incorporate the most generic topics that you will get at any Salesforce interview. We won’t just be straightforward in answering but will go above and beyond for those other little questions that may come as explanatory.

General Salesforce Interview Questions

1. What is Salesforce CRM and how is it used by organizations?

Salesforce is a customer relationship management (CRM) system. It helps record customer details for the organizations and thereby facilitates interaction. Salesforce has several products in this regard to cater to services like Sales, Service, Marketing, Analytics, Portals, Integration and Collaboration (Slack), etc.
While many might not be finalized products at this point in time, Sales & Service Cloud are Salesforce’s two main products.

Sales Cloud is used to record initial interest from Customers /Leads and follow through a sales cycle.

On the other, Service Cloud is designed to support customer service teams and agents from within the business to deal with customer queries and help resolve them.

2. What are the main benefits of Salesforce?

Cloud computing like Salesforce offers modern businesses advantages like allowing multiple users to view data in real-time, and sharing projects seamlessly. Cloud software and SaaS applications (software as a service platform) make working as a synchronized team easier. You can access it through your web browser, as opposed to a desktop application.

Cloud systems have major benefits over legacy systems that require huge amounts of server power to run. Some of the biggest benefits are:

Flexibility – Cloud-based services are ideal for businesses with growing or fluctuating bandwidth demands.
Cost-effective – Cloud computing cuts out the high cost of hardware.
Upgrades – Salesforce will upgrade your solution to the latest version 3 times a year. This comes with new features and improvements to the system without you lifting a finger, or paying additional fees.
Robust Data Recovery and safety,
Ease of access and collaboration – Cloud computing tools can be accessed from anywhere over a working internet connection and thereby teams can collaborate on work from their preferred locations.

3. Distinguish between Sales Cloud & Service Cloud

Widely speaking these are just two different aspects of running a business. Sales are where you pitch the customer to make a sale for your company, while the service comes afterward to cater to the needs of those customers and not to lose them to rival companies.
While both Sales Cloud & Service Cloud share some similarities, they are distinctly different products that contain different sets of features for their specific function. Sales Cloud is inclined toward sales reps and sales managers, while Service Cloud to service agents and service managers.

Sales Cloud

Sales Cloud is more about leads, opportunities, and sales. Thereby including standard objects like Accounts, Leads, Contacts, Contracts, Opportunities, Products, Pricebooks, Quotes, and Campaigns (limits apply). Included features are Web-to-lead, online lead capture, auto-response rules, Forecasting, etc. It is designed to be a start-to-end set up for the entire sales process and thereby generate revenue.

Service Cloud

Service Cloud on the other includes Accounts, Contacts, Cases, and Solutions. It also encompasses features such as the Public Knowledge Base, Web-to-case, Call Center, Self-Service Portal, Omnichannel Routing, as well as customer service automation like escalation rules, and assignment rules. It is designed to allow you to support past, current, and future clients’ requests for assistance with a product, service, and billing.

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.

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Difference b/w Sales & Service Cloud Functionality

4. What is the Salesforce Platform (Force.com)?

Force.com is now Salesforce Platform

This platform enables you to create customizations on top of Salesforce’s products, to tailor the applications to the organization’s needs. This can be done both by code and/or by configuration. We can create custom fields and objects, to store unique organizational data. We can automate tasks like updating a field, creating a record, sending an email, etc.

5. Distinguish between declarative and programmatic customizations?

Declarative customizations are more like point-and-click tools. Declarative customizations require an understanding of Force.com concepts, but no coding knowledge. They are visually there and are usually easier and faster to configure. They are better upgradable and easy to maintain.

Salesforce brought in Mulesoft Composer, which is another configurative tool to allow integrations into other systems without the need to code. Commonly integrations, do require some level of coding experience.

Programmatic customizations on the other hand are built with code, to extend beyond the declarative scope capabilities. As a best practice, it is advised to use this approach only when there ain’t any declarative solution to the problem. We use languages like Apex, Visualforce, and Lightning Aura or LWC for most of it.

6. Examples of a custom App you could build on the Salesforce platform?

A loan application to help track loan payments, re-payments, and loan applicants.
A finance application to track invoices.
A goal-setting application to help employees set productivity targets and goals for them.

7. How Salesforce releases work?

Salesforce being a SaaS platform delivers updates automatically with the major releases happening 3 times a year labeled as Spring, Summer & Winter. While other, much smaller updates are being delivered in between.

8. What is the Salesforce Lightning Experience? What is the difference between Classic and Lightning Experience?

Salesforce Lightning was primarily a UI released in 2015 aimed to provide a modular experience for the users.

Efficient navigation and the ability to switch between custom-branded apps
Efficient record layouts that focus on what you can do
List views that let you easily filter and visualize your data
Quick access to productivity tools like Notes and Recent Items in the utility bar
Sleek reports and dashboards with components that span both columns and rows and data filters.

The classic UI had multiple pages and we had to navigate from one to another for different functionalities. But in Lightning, we have a single-page application, with multiple components added to it. Thereafter as per the user interaction required components are displayed or stay hidden. Lightning experience is built on the Lightning AURA (open source) framework with LDS for imparting the CSS to it.

For example, when we click on new Contact, we get redirected to the new contact form page in Classic. While in lightning a new form page(component) opens up in the same single view page of the application.

9. Describe the Sales process?

The sales process refers to the process that a salesperson will go through in order to sell a product or service. This is then translated into the “Lead Status” and “Opportunity Stage” to capture the whole process in a meaningful manner to get to prospective leads and convert them to a customer base.

10. Describe the Service process?

Similarly, the Service process is about how a customer support organization works and the different stages they go through to solve a case. This is captured in salesforce under “Case Stage”.

11. What are objects in Salesforce?

Logically, an object in Salesforce is simply a database table. Objects allow us to store organization-specific data in salesforce. There are two types of objects in Salesforce: standard and custom. Standard objects come out of the box with Salesforce products such as Accounts, Contacts, etc. In Sales Cloud, Lead & Opportunity come as standard, while in Service Cloud, Cases & Entitlements. Custom Objects on the other hand are created as per the needs for building custom applications.

12. What are Fields in Salesforce?

Fields in Salesforce logically represent what the columns represent in relational databases. They store data values for a particular object in a record and are of 2 types broadly:

Standard Fields:

These are name, identity, and system fields created automatically at the time of object creation and can not be deleted or edited. There are four standard fields for every custom object that are Created By, Last Modified By, Owner, and Name. If multi-currency is selected it might also have a currency field. For standard objects, the fields which are present by default in them and cannot be deleted from those standard objects are the standard fields.

Custom Fields:

The Custom fields are those which are added to meet the business-specific needs and store data in a meaningful manner. They may or may not be required. They can be customized for a variety of data types like email, location, date/time, picklists, etc.

Read More: How to create salesforce objects?

13. What is AppExchange?

AppExchange is nearly similar in functionality to that of an iStore or Google Play store. We can install pre-built Apps directly into the Salesforce org, to easily extend additional functionality. AppExchange is nearly similar in functionality to that of an iStore or Google Play store. We can install pre-built Apps directly into the Salesforce org, to easily extend additional functionality. Some of the most popular Chat Bots include Qualified, Drift & Leadoo. Some of the most popular Form Apps include FormAssembly & 123FormBuilder, etc.

14. What are Sandboxes?

Sandboxes are test spaces, like a replica of a Production configuration to provide an environment to implement and test changes and features without causing any disruption to the current application. Not all sandboxes are the same but they all include a full copy of your code and configuration and not necessarily the data. There are basically four types of sandboxes in salesforce.

Developer – Does not copy your records but can store up to 200 MB of test records.
Developer Pro – Does not copy your records, but can store up to 1 GB of test records.
Partial – Includes a sampling of your actual data.
Full – Includes all of your actual data.

Partial and Full sandboxes are a premium service and are not included for free.

Read More: Sandboxes in Salesforce detailed know-how.

15. Differences between Salesforce editions? (E.g. Professional & Enterprise)

Salesforce has a few different versions of its products including, Essentials, Professional, Enterprise & Unlimited. The differences lie in the costs, limits like daily API calls, data storage limits, custom apps, or the number of custom objects of fields as well as core CRM functionality including Account & Contact fields, email integration, and the mobile app. Higher-level editions will have higher limits and would relatively cost higher.

16. How to deploy changes between Salesforce environments?

There are several ways to deploy the changes between environments, the most common being change sets. Change sets are a packaged set of components that can be created in one environment and moved across to another. For deploying from sandbox A to B, we go to outbound change sets and add the components, and upload them to the respective sandbox environment B. After the upload is done, we get an email notification. We can thereby go to inbound change sets in sandbox B to validate or deploy the changes. Other ways of deployment can be via ANT migration tool, VisualCode as well as workbench.

17. What is the difference between Data and Metadata?

Metadata is the data that describes other data. For example, when we add a record with contact information to an Account, you are adding metadata and data. Field names, such as first name and last name are metadata while the values like Rakesh and Sharma are data. Metadata, therefore, relates to the fields, configurations, code, logic, and page layouts that go into the data architecture to add to the look and feel of your Salesforce environment.

18. What is a Queue in Salesforce?

Queue in salesforce is a collection of records that do not have an owner. These records remain in a queue until they are assigned to a queue member or any queue member or users higher in the role hierarchy volunteer to own them and work on them.

19. What is Salesforce Customer 360?

Salesforce Customer 360 is a tool that allows companies to connect Salesforce apps and create a unified customer ID to build a single view of the customer. Thus having all the information about their customers aligned ahead of them, helps businesses to serve their customers better.

20. Where can you view Salesforce system status & scheduled maintenance?

We can access all the information pertaining to scheduled maintenance and downtime, at http://trust.salesforce.com. We can also sign up for notifications to be kept up to date with our server status.

Admin Centric Salesforce Interview Questions

21. Differentiate between a Role and a Profile?

Profiles, roles, and permission set together determine what Salesforce users can see and do on the platform.

Roles are used to control what users can see. They are designed to open up access through a hierarchy so that more senior members of the organization can see more records.

For example, someone at the bottom of the hierarchy, like an Account Executive, might be only able to see their own accounts. But the VP of Sales would be able to see all accounts owned by individuals below them.

Profiles control what a user can do on the platform, for example, they control what kind of access rights a user has to a certain object, such as create, read, edit, or delete. They also control individual permissions such as “Export Reports”, “Create Dashboard Folders”, or “Modify All Data”.

Read more briefly here: Sharing model in salesforce

22. What are some automation tools available in Salesforce

Salesforce provides no code, click and point tools to automate repetitive business processes. It can be guided by visual experiences (such as screen flows) as well as behind-the-scenes automation(such as workflows).

Automation tools in Salesforce are designed to enable businesses to automate complex processes and in turn, help enhance users’ productivity, by excluding them from jobs of repetitive nature.

For example, once a Case is closed, you could easily create automation to send an email to the customer to provide their feedback on the same. Examples of automation tools include Approval processes, Process Builders & Flows, Einstein Next Best Action, etc.

23. What are the main types of object relationships we can have in Salesforce?

The most common and frequently used relationships between objects in salesforce are Lookup and Master-detail relationships.

Lookups Relationships are defined as loosely coupled, as in we can relate records easily to other records in can be one-to-one or one-to-many fashion. It links two objects together so that we can “look up” one object from the related items on another object. For example, an Account object can have many contact records, thereby Account to Contact relationship is one-to-many.
Whereas Master-detail relationships on the other hand are tightly coupled, meaning a child record cannot exist without a parent record and if a parent record is deleted, the child also gets deleted with it. In this kind of relationship, one object is the master and another is the detail. We create this relationship using the Relationship fields to connect the records. We can have a max of 2 Master-detail and 40 Lookup fields on one Object.

24. What are Page Layouts and Record Types in salesforce

Page layouts determine the layout and organization of buttons, fields, custom links, related lists, and everything on the object record pages. They can control fields to be visible, read-only, and required. We can use page layouts to customize the content of record pages for our users.

Record Types allows us to create different types of record for a single object. The idea behind being to facilitate different business processes, picklist values, and page layouts to different users. For example, one of the most common use cases of Record Types would be to create different Service Request processes on the Case object. Each with different case stages and Page Layouts as required to meet the needs of the process.This in turn allows us to apply multiple Page Layouts per object, per user profile.

25. What are some ways to import data into Salesforce?

We can use a variety of tools to import data in Salesforce, below are the ones most frequently used.

Data Loader – The Data Loader allows us to import, export, update and delete records in a single operation. The Data Loader has to be downloaded to our desktop for use. It is supported for loads of up to 5 million records.
Data Import Wizard – The Data Import Wizard is a simple tool that allows us to import data into Salesforce. The wizard is accessible from within Salesforce. We can import up to 50,000 records at a time.
Dataloader.io – Dataloader.io is a cloud-based data loader and is accessible via the website. This tool allows us to insert, update, delete, export, or upsert data in Salesforce. Though it is paid product provided by Mulesoft, the free version allows us to import, export, or delete up to 10,000 records per month and is very useful for some complex scenarios.

26. What is a Junction Object?

A junction object in Salesforce is a custom object used to create many-to-many relationships between two other objects, using two master-detail relationships. The first master-detail relationship we create becomes the primary relationship, while the other becomes secondary.

The junction object inherits the ownership from its primary master record. If we delete the primary master-detail relationship or convert it to a lookup relationship, the secondary master object becomes primary.

One example within standard Salesforce objects is between Opportunity and Products. Hereby, to assign Product records to an Opportunity, we use the Opportunity Line items object as a junction object. In another case, we can only associate one product to one opportunity record.

27. Can we convert a lookup relationship into master-detail and vice versa?

Yes, we can convert it provided that our existing data lookups contain data for all records. We can also convert a master-detail relationship to a lookup relationship as long as no roll-up summary fields exist on the master object.

28. What are the different types of Salesforce reports?

Reports are used to display data in an organized format in terms of rows and columns and can be stored in folders with the public, shared, and hidden access. These reports can be filtered, grouped, and displayed graphically as charts.

Standard reports are provided by default in Salesforce. While custom reports provide access to custom objects or a custom view of standard objects.

Tabular – This is the simplest of reports to show data in form of rows and columns. Tabular reports allow filters and only one grand total.

Summary – Summary reports allow us to group rows one-dimensionally with three-level drop zones. It also allows conditional highlights and subtotals.

Matrix – Matrix reports are similar to summary reports but they allow us to group rows as well as columns. We can also summarise both rows and columns in a matrix report. This type of grouping is two-dimensional and has two levels of drop zones.

Joined Reports – Joined reports allow us to create multiple blocks each block being like a sub-report on its own with columns and filters. We can have a maximum of five blocks in a joint report and show data from different objects. A joint report can have a maximum of 20,000 records while other reports can only show 2000 records.

Read More : Reports in Salesforce

29. What are Static and Dynamic Dashboards?

Dashboards are pictorial representations of data generated by reports and VF pages. It helps us identify user trends, analyze the impact of activities on business, and help make informed decisions.

Based on viewing options we have static and dynamic dashboards. The static dashboard can be viewed with the owner view. While dynamic dashboard can be viewed as a specific user i.e. run as a logged-in user. The dynamic dashboard shows us only our own authorized data. Dynamic dashboards cannot be scheduled. There are broadly three ways to make us field read-only in Salesforce.

30. What are the different ways to make a field required in Salesforce?

There are broadly three ways to make a field required in Salesforce.

Custom Field Settings – we can specify the field as read-only while creating. This being a “hard” limit will require the field to have a value, whenever you are creating a new record.
Page Layout – We can also make fields read-only, or required on the page layout in Salesforce. This is a “soft” limit, and will only apply when we are creating a record via that page layout on the Salesforce interface.
Validation Rules – Validation rules can be useful to make a field required conditionally. For example, we can set a validation rule on case status to not be marked as closed until we fill the closed comments on the comment field on a case record. These rules also are a “hard” limit rules.

Developer Centric Salesforce Interview Questions

Here are some of the Salesforce developer interview questions to go through when sitting for a Salesforce interview. It is crucial to note that some of these questions can intersect in both admin and developer interview roles.

Here are our favorite Developer Salesforce interview questions…

31. What is the Salesforce Order of Execution?

The Salesforce Order of Execution is a set of orderly execution of events that happen when we create a record in Salesforce. It is the consistent sequence of which events like validations, approvals, workflow rules, process builders, and triggers are executed in sales Salesforce. It helps us to understand the flow mechanism in salesforce and hereby troubleshoot issues.

Starting from when the record is loaded in the Salesforce UI we have firstly the system validations. Then comes before triggers come to place followed by custom validation, and duplicate rules, and then the records are saved but not committed in the system. Then comes the after triggers followed by assignment rules, auto-response rules, and workflows. If the workflow rule triggers an update record action we again run a sequence of system validation before triggers and after triggers just once more.

Please note that the custom validations are not executed in this sequence. After the workflows and related sets of events, we have process builders and flows. Then comes escalation rules, entitlement rules, parent roll-up summary as well as grandparent roll-up summary. And finally, we have criteria based sharing and then the record is committed to the system. After commit might trigger sending emails, asynchronous processes, Outbound messages, etc.

32. Difference between LWC and Aura Component?

Aura is an open-source UI framework built by Salesforce for developing dynamic web apps for mobile and desktop devices while LWC is built directly on the Web stack using updated web standards-based framework.

An Aura component can contain both LWC and Aura components, but an LWC parent can only contain LWC components. Lightning aura Components were originally released alongside the Lightning Experience and used a standardized Javascript framework.

LWC is a lightweight framework built using custom HTML, CSS, and modern JS. LWC is likely to load and run much faster than Aura components. It provides easier access for those unfamiliar with the Salesforce platform as it utilizes standard technology such as CSS, HTML, and updated Javascript.

33. What are SOQL and SOSL used for?

SOQL stands for Salesforce Object Query Language and is used to retrieve data from a single object, or multiple objects that relate to one another using the “SELECT” keyword. It has its application in List views, Reports, Apex, etc. It is synchronous in nature.

SOSL stands for Salesforce Object Search Language retrieves the records from the database by using the “FIND” keyword. It operates search on multiple objects at a time. It has its application in Global Search, Sidebar Search, etc. It is asynchronous in nature.

34. What are Governor Limits?

Salesforce and Apex run in a multitenant environment, this means that the server resources are shared with other customers. Governor limits thereby allow Salesforce to set certain rules ensuring that any transactions we develop do not monopolize the shared resources we are allocated.

It facilitates efficient processing for all users of the platform without impeding performance. Examples of a Governor Limit are Per-Transaction Apex Limits, Size-Specific Apex Limit, etc.

35. What is an Apex Trigger?

A Trigger is a piece of code/apex script that executes before or after a DML operation like Insert, Update, Delete or Undelete based on the condition provided.
Context Variables in Triggers allow us to access the run-time context, such as isExecuting, isAfter, isInsert, new, old, newMap, oldMap, etc. These are contained in System.Trigger class.

37. What is Apex test coverage?

Before deploying any piece of apex code into production, we must meet a minimum test coverage of 75%, i.e our test classes should account for 75% of our code. This is called Apex Test Coverage. It indicates how many executable lines of code in your classes are exercised by test methods. This ensures that the code is of good quality and will run successfully in production and hereby higher the coverage is generally better.

38. What is Data Skew? How to avoid it?

Data skew occurs when the data is unevenly distributed in a large data set. For example, a condition with more than 10000 child object records being related to a single parent object record. The Solution for data skew in salesforce can be avoiding records being owned by generic system users, Using Round robin logic to distribute records, and regularly removing old records.

39. What is the “with sharing” and “without sharing” keyword in Apex?

The “With sharing” keyword enforces the sharing rules of the current user to be enforced during the execution, while the “Without sharing” keyword does not enforce the sharing rules of the current user and the code runs in the system context. We also have the “inherited sharing” keyword which inherits the sharing mode of the class, that called it.

40. What is a Bound and Unbound expression?

Bound expressions are bidirectional expressions i.e. any change in the value of the attribute in the child component will reflect in the parent component and vice versa. For example : {!v.attribute} is a bound expression.

While Unbound expressions are unidirectional, i.e the changes in the value in one component do not affect the other. For example : {#v.attribute} is an unbound expression. Both these expressions are used in the Lightning aura component.

Summary

We will keep updating this article from time to time so you should keep this handy. We have curated these sets of question answers based on our first-hand experiences in a variety of Interviews we have been through.

Check out the other articles referenced above for more in-depth reading and understanding.