Salesforce Ben 50 Most Popular Salesforce Interview Questions & Answers Flashcards
Describe how Salesforce CRM is used by organisations?
At its core, Salesforce is a customer-facing CRM system. It is used to record customer details and the organisation’s interactions with them. Salesforce’s most popular product is Sales Cloud. This is used by organisations to record initial interest from customers (Leads) and follow through a sales cycle, taking them through the various steps to win their business.
On the other side of the coin, you have Service Cloud, which is designed to support customer service teams from within a business. Service Cloud helps agents deal with customer queries, as well as solve issues.
Sales & Service Cloud are Salesforce’s two main products, but over the years, Salesforce can support all kinds of internal teams within an organisation, including Marketing, Analytics, Portals, Integration and Collaboration (Slack).
What are the main benefits of a cloud solution like Salesforce?
Salesforce is a Cloud SaaS platform (Software-as-a-service), which means you access it through your web browser, as opposed to a desktop application. Cloud systems have major benefits over legacy computer systems that require huge amounts of server power to run. This is why most applications you access today, in your business or personal life, will be cloud-based (Spotify, Gmail, Office365, Dropbox, etc…).
Some of the biggest benefits of cloud computing solutions include…
Cost – Older on-premise solutions required a huge upfront investment of infrastructure. You would need to buy all the servers, install them and maintain them. With Cloud computing, you are essentially outsourcing the maintenance of the infrastructure to the provider, such as Salesforce.
Upgrades – Instead of managing upgrades to your software yourself, Cloud computing providers take care of this for you. 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.
Mobility – Cloud computing tools can be accessed from anywhere. As long as you have a device and an internet connection, you can access any information that is stored in Salesforce. This is particularly handy if you travel frequently for work or meetings.
Can you describe the main differences between Sales Cloud & Service Cloud?
Sales & Service Cloud both act as the core CRM platforms for Salesforce and will be used by 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 is designed 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.
Apart from CRM, what other products do Salesforce have in their offering?
Over the years, Salesforce has built up a huge portfolio of other products to help serve its customers. One of the most attractive selling points is the fact that they can seamlessly integrate with each other, creating a full 360-degree view of their customers.
Some of Salesforce’s other products include Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Experience Cloud, Mulesoft and Slack. For a full overview of Salesforce’s products, check out the link below…
Read More: Ultimate Guide to EVERY Salesforce Product in 2021
What is the Salesforce Platform (Force.com), and how does it help organisations?
One of Salesforce’s biggest selling points is its platform (Previously called Force.com). This enables you to create powerful customisations on top of Salesforce’s products, that allow you to completely tailor the applications to your organisation’s exact needs. This is made even more attractive by the fact that you can create customisations with clicks, not code.
At a basic level, this allows you to create custom fields and objects, to store unique information related to your organisation. One of the most popular customisation possibilities is automation. You can create automation to pretty much do anything in Salesforce, update a field, create a record, send an email, etc…These types of customisations can end up saving users a lot of time.
Read More: Workflow Rules vs. Process Builder (Feat. APEX & Flow)
Can you provide an example of a custom App you could build on the Salesforce platform?
Taking customisations one level further, Salesforce enables you to build custom applications on the platform. Think about how Sales & Service Clouds are set up with their various features designed for a certain purpose, this can be recreated for any team function.
If you are familiar with Trailhead, you may have already created a few custom applications that will give you a good answer to this question. If not, here are a few ideas…
- An HR application to help internal teams manage jobs and job applicants.
- A finance system that can track invoices
- A goal setting App that can help managers set targets and goals for their team.
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 can be used to create completely custom screen layouts. In addition, it’s common that in most integrations, some level of coding experience using API’s will be needed.
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.
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 customise the home page, record layouts and create dashboards to suit your specific needs.
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).
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.
What are objects in Salesforce and how are they used?
In normal database terms, an object in Salesforce is simply a table of data. A table of data will contain various fields and in turn, these fields contain information like email address, phone number, or company name.
There are two types of objects in Salesforce, standard and custom. Standard objects are those that come out of the box with Salesforce products. For example, in most Salesforce products, Accounts & Contacts come as standard. In Sales Cloud, you will get objects such as Lead & Opportunity, whilst in Service Cloud, Cases & Entitlements will be standard.
Custom Objects on the other hand are created by yourself. These are the objects that can be created as your foundation for building custom applications.
Salesforce has an App Store similar to an iPhone. What is this called? Can you name some Apps you have used in the past?
One of Salesforce’s selling points is the AppExchange. This has near enough similar functionality to the iPhone App Store or the Google Play store. You can install pre-built Apps directly into your Salesforce org, to easily add additional functionality. Some of the most popular Apps include e-Signature, Document Generation and Form tools.
There is a near certainty that any Salesforce company you join will be using at least 1 AppExchange App. This is why it’s important to have an understanding of how to use these applications. Check out some of the most popular Apps in the post below and remember that most apps have a free trial, so there is no harm in getting stuck in.
Read More: Best Salesforce Apps in 2021
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 flavours, 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.
Read More: What is a Salesforce Sandbox? A Beginners Guide
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.
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.
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.
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.
Read More: Everything You Need to Know About Salesforce Queues
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 is working off a single source of truth.
