In recent years, Salesforce has seen exponential growth, and many large organizations have already adopted this platform. As the demand for Salesforce continues to thrive, so does the need for Salesforce Admins who manage the platform, customize it to meet the requirements of businesses, and navigate the intricacies of Salesforce admin interview questions.
As of September 2023, 405 Salesforce Admin jobs have been found on Indeed, which is expected to grow continuously in the future as well. Many companies are looking to hire a certified Salesforce Admin professional to gain efficiencies of the Salesforce Platform.
Whether you’re a fresher or a seasoned professional looking for a change of pace, acing your interview is a crucial gateway to your dream goal.
Here, we have compiled the most frequently asked interview questions for Salesforce Admin. Let’s learn it.
1. What do you think about Salesforce in general and how it benefits businesses?
Salesforce is a cloud-based CRM platform that helps businesses manage their sales, marketing, operations, and customer service more efficiently. It is an industry leader that provides a customizable automotive interface for organizations to streamline their workflows and gain valuable insights for customer interactions.
The platform is known for its versatility, scalability, and ease of use and benefits businesses by offering a variety of features and tools. It lets companies store and track customer data, which can be accessed and updated by different departments and provide a holistic view of each customer.
2. What are the different Salesforce editions?
Essentials
This edition of Salesforce is specially designed for small-scale businesses and has a user-friendly UI that allows users to customize the tools according to their needs.
Professional
This edition is built, which requires CRM functionality the most. It consists of features such as easy customization, integration with other technologies, and administration tools that help in small-scale application deployment.
Enterprise
This edition is built for large enterprises, and it provides customization tools with advanced features. It helps to deploy large-scale applications, and it also allows access to the elements of Salesforce API.
Unlimited
This edition consists of highly advanced features that help in maximum utilization of the edition. It allows efficient management of resources that are required at instant demand of the business and provides premier support, high storage limit, increased number of custom apps, and many more features.
Developer
This edition gives access to Salesforce Lighting APIs and grants permission to the developer to customize the Salesforce platform and allow integration with other technologies and applications. Developer Edition also consists of features that are present in the Enterprise Edition.
3. What is the difference between Force.com and Salesforce.com?
Salesforce.com, known as ‘Salesforce,’ is a cloud-based CRM platform that is developed by the company Salesforce, Inc., which is adopted by businesses globally to manage and automate different business processes like optimizing customer interaction, tracking leads, managing accounts, automating sales and more operations like sales, marketing and customer service.
Force.com is a Paas (Platform As A Service), a development platform that allows developers to extend the functionality of Salesforce by building custom applications. Developers can deploy custom applications quickly without worrying about infrastructure and system maintenance. It offers various resources and tools like Apex (a proprietary programming language), Visualforce (a markup language for building custom user interfaces), and various APIs for integration.
4. What are validation rules, and why are they used in Salesforce?
Validation rules in Salesforce are a set of rules that define the criteria that users are required to meet when they are creating or updating records to maintain data quality and consistency. Validation rules ensure that data in Salesforce complies with specific business needs and validation logic.
5. What do you understand about workflows and triggers?
Workflows and Triggers are automation features in Salesforce but have different purposes and functionality.
Workflows
Workflows are rules and actions that can be performed on a record when certain conditions are met. They are flowcharts that we create to execute a trigger-based action.
Triggers
We use triggers in our workflows to determine how the action will be triggered. Actions like insertions, updations, and deletions. It is an Apex code that is run for performing actions over the values.
Read more:
50 Salesforce Interview Questions That Will Get You Hired in 2023
6. What are the different kinds of Reports in Salesforce?
Salesforce Reports contain data which is in organized form according to a predefined categorization. Different types of reports are:
- Tabular Reports: It is the easiest and quickest way to view data and create reports and is very similar to a Spreadsheet.
- Summary Reports: It is similar to a tabular report, but it allows users to group the data, view subtotals, and create charts.
- Matrix Reports: It is similar to a summary report, but it allows users to group and summarize the data into rows and columns.
- Joined Reports: It allows the users to create multiple report blocks and provides different data views, each of which acts as a subreport.
7. What’s the role of generative AI in Salesforce?
Salesforce has introduced Einstein GPT, a groundbreaking generative AI CRM technology that revolutionizes customer interactions across sales, service, marketing, commerce, and I.T., all on an unprecedented scale. Einstein GPT is set to take customer experiences to the next level using generative AI.
This exciting technology combines Salesforce’s AI models with various partners’ generative A.I. features and taps into real-time data from the Salesforce Data Cloud. This process centralizes and streamlines customer data, making it work seamlessly together.
For instance, Einstein GPT can craft personalized emails for sales teams, provide quick and tailored responses for customer service professionals, generate targeted content to boost marketing campaign effectiveness, and even auto-generate code to assist developers.
To support the growth of the generative A.I. ecosystem, Salesforce Ventures has established a $250 million Generative AI Fund, contributing to the responsible development of generative AI and fostering startup innovation in this domain.
8. What is the difference between Managed and Unmanaged Packages?
Managed package code and data are unchangeable; the provider can upgrade the solution for the same, and there is no limit to the usage of applications, tabs, and objects.
Unmanaged packages’ code and data can be customized and changed if required. To upgrade the data, the previous version must be replaced by a new version, and there is a set limit for using applications, tabs, and objects.
9. What are Dashboards, and name the types of Dashboards?
Dashboards are an integral part of Salesforce’s data visualization platform. They offer a single view of critical business metrics and information in real-time, allowing you to track KPIs, track progress, and make informed data-driven decisions.
There are two types of Dashboards:
- Static Dashboards
- Dynamic Dashboards
10. Define Static Dashboards.
These are dashboards where the components and data are fixed at the time of creation, and they remain the same until manually updated by the dashboard creator. Whenever a user accesses the dashboard, the same data is visible until any change is made manually.
11. Define Dynamic Dashboards.
Dynamic dashboards enable us to visualize a set of metrics within an organization. These dashboards are designed to provide security controls for dashboards on Salesforce. The content on these dashboards is not fixed and refreshes automatically based on intervals and customer interactions. It allows the users to view the most current data available.
12. What is a Custom Metadata Type?
It stores information about an organization and is a custom object that can be customized, deployed, packed, and upgraded. Custom Metadata Type allows you to use data to configure the application without worrying about data migration. Instead of transferring the custom metadata manually, it can be deployed using a Sandbox.
13. What is a Sandbox org? What are the different types of Sandboxes in Salesforce?
Sandbox is a virtual production environment or organization used for testing and development, and they are helpful because they allow you to develop on Apex programming language without disturbing the production environment. It can be used to test a newly developed Force.com application or Visualforce page.
Different types of sandboxes are:
- Developer
- Developer Pro
- Partial Copy
- Full
14. What are the different types of Object Relations in Salesforce? How can you create them?
Object Relations refer to the way in which different objects or relations are related or connected in the Salesforce Data Model, and understanding these objects is crucial for designing and implementing effective data structures and various processes in Salesforce.
There are three different types of Object Relations:
- Lookup Relationships: It is the simplest relationship that creates a child-parent relationship between 2 objects. For instance, an Account object might have a Lookup relationship with a Contact object. That means each Account record might have one or more Contact records in common.
- Master-Detail Relationships: A complex relationship creates a robust parent-child relationship between 2 objects. For instance, a Product object may share a master-detail relation with a Pricebook object, thus requiring each Product record to have a single related Pricebook record.
- Many to Many Relationships: It is the most complex relationship that allows you to create a connection between 2 objects where each object can have multiple related records from another object. A User object and a Group object have a lot in common. That means each User can belong to more than one group, and each group can have more than one User.
15. What is the difference between a Workflow Rule and a Process Builder in Salesforce?
Both the workflow rule and process builder are automation tools that allow businesses to define and automate various business processes and actions; however, they have different functions and capabilities.
Workflow Rules
Unlike Process Builder, Workflow rules are more basic and have fewer features. They’re mainly for automating simple stuff like sending emails, changing fields, and generating tasks based on specific criteria. Workflow rules can update fields, send emails, and create jobs. They’re all about ensuring users are updated or notified when certain conditions are met.
Process Builder
Process Builder has more automation features and is more versatile. It lets you set up complicated processes with many criteria, steps, and decisions. With Process Builder, you can automate processes that create, update, or delete related records and trigger flows. It can do more than just design, update, and delete records. It can also launch flows and call custom Apex code, so it’s better for more complicated business processes with multiple steps and decision points.
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16. What is the difference between a standard and a custom controller?
Standard Controller: A standard controller in Apex inherits all standard objects and standard button features directly. Contains the same features and logic as standard Salesforce pages.
Custom Controller: Custom Controller is a subclass of the Standard Controller class in Apex. It implements all the logic of a page without using standard controllers. Custom controllers are linked to Visualforce pages via the controller attribute.
17. What is Lightning Web Component and its usage in Salesforce?
Lightning Wed Components is a user interface framework that Salesforce developed to build dynamic web applications and custom user interfaces within Salesforce. It is an integral part of the Salesforce Lightning Platform. Its goal is to improve the experience of development and performance optimization and to simplify the creation of modern, responsive, and interactive user interfaces.
Usage of Lighting Web Component:
- It follows a component-based architecture that allows the developers to create reusable components that encapsulate the data, functionality, and styling used in various parts of Salesforce, such as Lighting Pages, Lighting communities, and more.
- It is built using Javascript and standard HTML.
- LWC puts a lot of emphasis on performance. LWC components are optimized to load quickly and easily; this helps to reduce page load at times and deliver a responsive user experience.
- LWC includes anti-virus and anti-malware capabilities to guard against common web security threats, such as XSS (cross-site scripting) attacks and data injection. Salesforce offers built-in anti-malware defences to protect against these threats.
18. What is the difference between Profiles and Roles in Salesforce?
Profiles: It determines what a user can do within Salesforce, and only Object Level and Field level access can be created, like general permissions, tab-level permissions, and more.
Roles: These are mainly used to create Record Level access, which establishes a hierarchical structure to view which users can see and edit other users’ records. We can provide record-level access using roles, like company-wide defaults, role hierarchies, sharing rules, or manual sharing. Record-level access is affected by duties.
19. What are the Multiple ways of importing/exporting data in Salesforce?
Ways to Import Data
Salesforce offers a comprehensive suite of data import services, including:
- Data Import Wizard: A web-based application allows users to quickly and easily import data from external systems using a simple, intuitive interface.
- Data Loader: It is a desktop application with advanced data import capabilities, including importing and updating large volumes of data.
- Data Import Tools in Setup provide specific import tools for standard objects, such as Product, Price Book, Campaign Member, and more, as well as predefined templates and guidance.
- API Integration allows for the programmatic import of data from external systems into Salesforce, allowing users to create custom integrations and synchronize data.
Ways to Export Data
Salesforce offers a comprehensive data export service, allowing users to schedule weekly automated data exports. These exports can include data from various standard objects, reports, and dashboards, which can be exported to various formats such as Excel, CSV, and PDF.
- Salesforce’s Data Loader and API Integration tools can be used to programmatically import and export data from the Salesforce platform.
- Data Extensions in the Marketing Cloud can manage and export marketing data.
- Data Replication Tools and other third-party applications are available to ensure data synchronization and consistency between the Salesforce platform and external systems, such as products, price books, and campaign members.
20. What is the difference between freezing and deactivating a user?
These two actions impact a user’s access and capabilities within a platform.
Freezing is commonly used to temporarily suspend a Salesforce Community or Customer Portal license access.
- It is typically used when users have exceeded their authorized login attempts or when an issue is being investigated.
- The impact of freezing is that the User will not be able to log in to the Community for which they have been frozen, but they will still be able to access other parts of the Salesforce platform if they have the appropriate permissions.
- This process only affects the User’s ability to access standard Salesforce features outside the Community.
- Users who have been frozen may recover their regular access to the Community by unfreezing or reactivating them after the issue has been resolved or after a specified period.
A Deactivation Status is a type of action that can be taken to deactivate a user in Salesforce regardless of the kind of license they hold.
- It is typically used when a user wants to permanently or temporarily restrict their access to the platform or when a user is leaving the organization.
- The primary effect of a Deactivation Status is that the User’s access to the forum is restricted, and they cannot log in. This means they can no longer access all Salesforce features, objects, records, or features.
- This action deactivates the User’s account.
- If the User needs to regain access to the system, they can reactivate the Deactivation Status.
Conclusion
When landing your dream job, answering the questions correctly plays a major role. But how will you do that without knowing the answers? That’s why this blog has covered all the relevant questions one should learn and be aware of before sitting in a room to crack the interview.
Remember, the objective is to give concise yet exceptional answers that demonstrate your knowledge without speaking a lot. Because, in the end, your answers showcase your skillset and impress recruiters to think whether or not you are a good fit for their company.
Mentioning an example you’ve experienced using the feature can be a plus point, helping you impress recruiters. Whereas, your confidence, professionalism, and demeanor help you win the interview.
By the way, if you’re looking to bolster your knowledge and skills further, consider enrolling in a Salesforce admin training program. It can provide you with the in-depth understanding and practical experience needed to excel in your Salesforce admin career.
