General Salesforce Interview Questions

Question 1

Describe how Salesforce CRM is used by organizations?

Answer 1

Used to record customer details and all the ways the organization can interact with them.

The 2 main products are SALES CLOUD and SERVICE CLOUD, however, over the years Salesforce supports all king of internal teams within an organization.

Question 2

What are the main benefits of a cloud solution like Salesforce?

Answer 2

Is a Software-as-a-Service platform, so you can access it any time and you don’t require a huge amount of server to run.
You are outsourcing the infrastructure, so it costs less
You don’t have to manage any upgrades, Salesforce will automatically upgrade 3 times a year.

Question 3

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

Answer 3

SALES Cloud: Supports business and all their sales cycle

SERVICE Cloud: Helps with Customer Support

Question 4

Apart from CRM, what other products do Salesforce have in their offering?

Answer 4

Over the years, Salesforce has built a huge portfolio of other products, such as:

Marketing Cloud
Commerce Cloud
Experience Cloud
Health Cloud
Mulesoft  (a Vendor that provides an integration platform to help business connect data, applications and devices)
Slack

Question 5

What is the Salesforce Platform (Force.com), and how does it help organizations?

Answer 5

Force.com is the biggest selling points for Salesforce.
It allows you to create powerful customizations on top of the Salesforce products, so you can tailor the app to your exact needs.
You can create custom fields and objects, store unique information related to the organization, pretty much everything a complete CRM should do, Salesforce does.

Question 6

Can you provide an example of a custom App you could build on the Salesforce platform?

Answer 6

• An HR application
• A finance system
• A non-profit application

Question 7

Can you describe the differences between declarative and programmatic customizations?

Answer 7

There are two ways to customize a Salesforce application:

• DECLARATIVE
  It provides a Point-and-click solution for non-developers.
• PROGRAMMATIC
  To build customizations with programming code

Although most of the customizations can be done using the Declarative way, if the requirement is particular complex, you need to use programmatic the approach.

Question 8

Can you explain how Salesforce releases work?

Answer 8

Major Salesforce releases happen 3 times a year: Spring, Summer and Winter

Every time there is a new release, Salesforce names the release with the fiscal year.

Example:
Salesforce Winter ‘22 Release

Question 9

What is the Salesforce Lightning Experience, and how does it help organizations?

Answer 9

Lighting was released back in 2015 as a new User Interface and replaced the old UI, which was unchanged since 1999

Salesforce Lightning is easy to navigate, customize, and it provides more features, which results in greater productivity.

Question 10

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

Answer 10

First is the lead stage, which has a potential customer. Then it moves to the Opportunity stage, which means the customer is interested in moving forward.
From the Opportunity, it moves to the Analysis, Proposal, Negotiation, and finally won or lost opportunity.

Question 11

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

Answer 11

Unlike a Sales process, which is split across the Lead and the Opportunity, the Service process is contained on the Case object.

It goes from a new Case, to Working on it, to Waiting on the Customer, Escalated the case, and closed the case.

Question 12

What are objects in Salesforce and how are they used?

Answer 12

Salesforce objects are same as tables in a database. There are two types, Standard objects, which come out of the box, and Custom objects, that are created by the user.

Question 13

Salesforce has an App Store similar to an iPhone. What is this called? Can you name some Apps you have used in the past?

Answer 13

AppExchange. It has near the same functionality on the iPhone store, or the Google play.

You can install pre-built applications directly into Salesforce. There are free and paid applications.

Although most of the time we used out of the box tools, we did go over the AppExchange, we used a Adobe Sign.

On the AppExchange we also downloaded manage packages, such as Oministudio and a few components to implement in our system

Question 14

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

Answer 14

Since we should never make any changes directly in production, Salesforce offers a Sandbox to test our changes, which is the exact replica of the production configuration.
There also is the Full Copy Sandboxes, that contain all the configuration and all the data.

Question 15

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

Answer 15

Salesforce has 4 editions: Essential, Professional, Enterprise, and unlimited

The 3 main differences are:

FUNCTIONALITY: Altought most Salesforce editions include the main components, such as Account and Contact fields, Some lower editions do not have automation, API availability,

LIMITS: All Salesforce editions have some king of limits. The higher the edition the more limits you have

COST: The more advanced the verison, the more expensive it gets.

Question 16

How do you move changes between Salesforce environments?

Answer 16

Once changes have been implemented and tested in a Salesforce Sandbox, they move to another sandbox, and then to production.
The most common way to do that is with change sets, which are packaged set of components that can be created in one environment and then moved to another.
If is a large organization, with multiple developers working across multiple Sandboxes, you would probably want DevOps tools.

Question 17

What is the difference between Data and Metadata?

Answer 17

DATA: It relates to the actual records, such as Accounts and Contacts

METADATA: A set of data that describes and gives information about other data

Question 18

What is a Queue in Salesforce?

Answer 18

Most of the objects in Salesforce have a specific owner, however, certain objects are placed in a holding area, which is called the Queue.

Queues have the same characteristics are the record owner, so to add add records to a queue you just need to update the record owner.

Question 19

What is Salesforce Customer 360?

Answer 19

It means that with Salesforce, the users can see every interaction with the customer. From the 1st inquiry through the website, the purchase, and any issues they might have.
It allows businesses to serve their customer better, since they know everything about the user and the transaction

Question 20

Where can you view Salesforce system status & scheduled maintenance?

Answer 20

Salesforce has 3 releases every year, and occasionally they schedule maintenance, such as Org migrations to different servers.

All the information regarding schedule maintenance and downtime is at http://trust.salesforce.com. One can even sign up for notifications to be up to date.

Question 21

What did you do at Revolent?

Answer 21

We use testing sandboxes and training environments to implement solutions to real problems.
Although we did it in a smaller scale, we had a variety of scenarios and projects to build out the solutions to those problems.
Kind of like a superbadge but with no instructions.
For example, while we learned OmniStudio, we built a console for external users that would allow them to book and reserve skiing equipment for a mock company. We built a home page that displayed flex cards for account billing and other info to give the user that 360 view with a set of branding standards. We also built several omniscripts to manipulate data in a variety of ways, we used dataraptors, IPs and expression sets to get, save, transform and calculate the live data to specifications with messaging and error handling.

More recently we worked on a task to solve a business problem with classes and triggers. We created new custom objects, relationships, fields, and couple triggers to make sure the user would only view picklist values related to their job, and another one to automate the increment and decrement the amount of products depending on whether a customer purchased or return an item.

Question 22

Name the different type of Sandboxes

Answer 22

• Full Sandbox
• Partial Copy Sandbox
• Developer Pro Sandbox
• Developer Sandbox

Question 23

Can you explain what is meant by bulkifying code in Salesforce, and why it’s important?

Answer 23

Bulkifying code refers to the practice of designing Apex code to handle large volumes of data in a single operation, rather than processing records one at a time. The primary goal of bulkifying code is to minimize the number of database operations and API calls needed to complete a task, which can improve performance and avoid hitting governor limits.
For example, if a developer needs to update a large number of records in Salesforce, writing a loop that updates each record individually could quickly hit governor limits or cause performance issues. A bulkified version of this code would instead operate on a collection of records and use a single DML statement to update all records at once.
In summary, bulkifying code can improve the efficiency, scalability, and maintainability of Apex code by reducing the number of database operations and API calls needed to process large volumes of data. It’s an important best practice for Salesforce developers to follow to ensure that their code works efficiently within the limits of the platform.