Top 25 Salesforce Interview Questions and Answers in 2024

Editorial Team

Salesforce Interview Questions And Answers

Are you a salesforce expert looking for a job? Well, worry no more because our article will look at some of the questions you should expect in your upcoming interview. However, let’s define Salesforce before delving deeper into these questions. So, what is Salesforce? Simple. Salesforce is one of the most popular CRM tools for sales, support, and marketing teams worldwide. It enables businesses to utilize cloud technology and connect with their partners, customers, and potential customers easily.

Here are some of the questions that you should expect in a Salesforce interview to increase your chances of landing your new or dream job:

1. Can You Define A Custom Object And What It Allows A User to Do?

A custom object is a database table in Salesforce that carries data related to an organization. However, it must be first defined, after which one can perform a range of tasks, including creating a custom tab for the custom object, creating dashboards and reports, building page layouts, tracking different events and tasks, creating custom fields, relating the object to various records, analyzing custom object data and lastly, sharing custom tabs, apps, and objects.

2. There Is A Possibility Of Data Loss Occurring In Salesforce. What Are Some Of The Causes?

Even though data loss is not a normal occurrence in Salesforce, it can still happen. Some of the common causes of data loss in Salesforce include changing data and date-time, changing to auto-number save for texts, migrating to number, percent, or currency from other data types, shifting from a multi-select picklist, checkbox, and number to different types and lastly changing from a text area to email, URL, text, and phone. All these can cause data loss, which is often costly.

3. Can You Tell Us How Salesforce Tracks Sales?

One of the main reasons customers and business owners love Salesforce is that it can easily track sales. This tracking program does this by recording several essential details such as the daily sales volume, the number of customers served in a day, monthly or quarterly sales figures, detailed reports obtained from sales managers, and repeat customer activities, which are important to different sales organizations.

4. Salesforce Has Several Reports. Can You Mention The Different Types Of Reports Available On This Platform?

There are four different report types in Salesforce that every expert or user needs to know. These include tabular reports, which often show the total in a form table, summary reports which are pretty detailed with groupings based on columns, joined reports that allow the joining of several reports into a single one, and matrix reports, which normally groups data based on columns and rows.

5. How Would You Convince A Customer To Use Salesforce?

The best way to convince a customer to use Salesforce is by explaining its benefits and contrasting it to other models. Some of the benefits include easy management, extremely high degree of adaptability, quick and seamless reporting, helps determine and understand customers’ needs, offers team members a single communication platform, and is easier to integrate with many apps, which is definitely a plus.

6. What Do You Understand By An Object In Salesforce?

An object in Salesforce refers to a database table that captures different data specific to the organization. Users can obtain two types of objects: custom and standard objects. These are usually created in different ways. A standard object exists by default, while a custom object is generally by users and, therefore, the information it carries is defined by them. All in all, both have columns as fields and rows as records.

7. We Have Governor Limits In Salesforce. What Do They Mean?

Governor limits are control tools that determine the amount of data stored on a given shared database. They ensure that no one enjoys a monopoly on shared resources such as storage, memory and CPU. Common control limits include the maximum time a CPU runs on the Salesforce server, the total number of records retrieved by the SOQL query, and the number of callouts in transactions.

8. How Can One Limit Governor Limits?

Even though governor limits are put in place to prevent the monopoly of shared resources, they can also be easily avoided. Some of the common ways of avoiding these control tools include bulkifying the code, using batch apex if one has more than 500 records, queuing large datasets, using @future appropriately, and avoiding making any DML and S0QL operations inside a loop. All these best practices can be undertaken to prevent a code from reaching a given governor limit.

9. You Must Have Heard Of Sandbox In Salesforce. What Does It Mean?

A sandbox is normally used for testing and development, as it is a replica of given databases. You can easily test fresh ideas using this duplicate without relying on the original database. There are different types of sandboxes, such as the developer sandbox, which has a copy of the production org’s metadata, and therefore comes in handy in isolated environments for testing and development; the full sandbox, which is only usable as a testing environment and therefore has all the production org data such as attachments, metadata, and objects; developer pro sandbox which works similarly to the developer sandbox just that it has larger datasets and lastly, the partial copy sandbox which is also exclusively used as a testing sandbox.

10. What Do You Know About Writing Of Sharing Rules In Salesforce?

Writing of sharing rules in Salesforce gives edit access or public read-only access to select individuals in Salesforce org. It generally allows superiors to access certain records while locking out peers. Therefore, the sharing rules are written to grant access to more records that users do not definitely own. However, they cannot be used to restrict data access but only function to allow greater access to different records.

11. Can You Explain The Different Types Of Object Relations In Salesforce?

There are three main types of relationships in Salesforce. These include master-detail Salesforce, where the master controls the behavior of a dependent child object, meaning that there can only be one parent but several children. The master field is generally occupied and cannot be left empty. The lookup relationship is often used to generate a link between two objects without depending on the parent one. It also has one parent but many children. The last relationship is the junction relationship which only exists when one intends to create two master-detail relationships.

12. What Do You Understand By Master-Detail Relationship In Salesforce?

Master-detail relationship refers to a parent-child relationship where the master stands for the parent while the detail is the child. Therefore, if the master, which is the parent, gets deleted, then the child automatically goes. Master records are the foundation of rollup summary fields and generally calculate the AVG, SUM, and MIN of the child records. A record can have only up to 2 master-detail relationships, and the parent field is often required.

13. In Your Own Experience With Salesforce, Do You Believe That Two Users Can Possess The Same Profile?

Profiles are generally given to users to allow different access levels to a salesforce organization. A profile can be allocated to as many users as possible, and at times the entire crew is often given a profile. Generally, the administrator normally creates one profile, which offers access to leads, campaigns, contacts, opportunities, and an array of objects that are essential to the company. A team leader or manager can also access additional records and objects by designating permission sets only for respective users.

14. Please Tell Us The Different Salesforce Edition?

There are five salesforce editions that potential users should be aware of. The essential edition is normally meant for small-scale businesses and has an easy-to-use user interface. Users also get several customizability tools that meet their business needs. The professional edition is generally meant for businesses with greater CRM functionality needs. It is easy to customize and integrate with other technologies and has administration tools for the deployment of small-scale applications.

The third edition is enterprise, which is generally meant for large-scale businesses. It comes with several advanced customization tools as well as administration tools that come in handy for large-scale usage. One can easily access the Salesforce API features using this edition. The unlimited edition has better and advanced features for better usage. Users can easily and efficiently manage their business resources which are also instantly offered. This version also comes with a higher storage limit, premier support, and several customizable apps.

The last edition is the developer edition which allows users to access APIs and one of the most exclusive Salesforce features, the Salesforce lighting program. 

15. What Is An App In Salesforce?

In Salesforce.com, an app refers to a container that carries a number of things such as name, logo, and a given set of the required tabs. It can also be referred to as a group of tabs that collaborate to show a provided desired functionality. Salesforce allows users to customize apps to match their needs or build new applications by merging custom and standard tabs. Creating an app in Salesforce follows a definite pattern: setup-build-crate-app-click on new. It is a clear procedure that allows you to build and customize applications depending on your needs or preferences and as you deem fit.

16. What Do You Understand By An Audit Trail In Salesforce?

An audit trail is a special feature in Salesforce that allows owners or administrators to track the changes implemented in the organization. It comes in handy for organizations with more than one administrator. One can easily obtain information on 20 recently made changes in a particular organization. The audit trail will clearly show the date and time of making these changes, the person who made the changes, and the details.

17. Can You Differentiate Data Tables And Page Block Table Tags?

There are four main differences between data tables and page block table tags. The data table does not have to be mentioned inside the page block station or page block, which is not the case for page block, which defines inside the page block station. You won’t need a value for the data table while the required attribute is ‘value’ in the page block. Thirdly, the page block table will automatically display column headers, whereas one must specify column headers explicitly in data tables. Lastly, data is often expressed through custom style sheets in data tables, which is not the case for page block tables.

18. What Are Some Of The Ways Of Sharing A Record In Salesforce?

There are three different ways of sharing records in Salesforce. The first is role hierarchy which happens whenever a user is added to a role, granting the user above in the role hierarchy read access. One can also use OWD, which generally defines the baseline setting for a given entity, thus influencing the level of access that a user has to another one’s records. The OWD can either be Public Read Only, Public Read and Write, and Private. You can also resort to manual sharing, where a single record is shared with a user or group.

19. What Is The Importance Of Apex In Salesforce?

Apex is a type of object-oriented programming language used in Salesforce. It has several uses, such as creating email services and custom transaction logic, attaching custom logic to a different operation, creating complex business processes not supported by any workflow, and performing challenging validation over several objects. 

20. Could You Please Explain How Apex Works?

Apex runs on Apex programs which are normally available on-demand on the Force.com platform. The code is first compiled into an abstract set of instructions by the platform application server. The Apex Runtime interpreters often understand these instructions. The collected data is then stored in metadata. All the end-user has to do is trigger the execution of Apex with a click of a button, which will push the application servers to retrieve compiled instructions from the metadata and relay them to the runtime interpreter for results.

21. Can You Tell The Different Methods Of Apex Batch Class?

The batch apex class uses three methods to deploy the database batch. The start method is normally used at the onset of the batch apex job for collecting objects and records before relaying them to the interface for execution. The finish method is generally called at the end of batch processing. It generally sends confirmation emails for post-processing operations execution. On the other hand, the execute method is used for every batch of records sent to the method. It also comes in handy for data processing.

22. Can You Differentiate Trigger And Workflow?

Workflow fires an action automatically depending on rule and evaluation criteria. At the same time, a trigger is merely a piece of code executed before or after the insertion or update of a record. One cannot query from the workflow in the database, which is possible in trigger through 20 SOQL. Also, the workflow cannot perform any DML operation on workflow, whereas it is possible to use 20 DML operations with the trigger.

23. How Many Emails Can Be Created In Salesforce?

One can create up to four email templates in Salesforce. These are the text template that can be accessed, modified, and changed by anyone; custom HTML can only be created by administrators, users, and those with Edit HTML permissions. They do not require a letterhead but HTML knowledge. We also have HTML with letterhead, an email template based on a letterhead. Lastly, the Visualforce Email, whose template can only be generated by administrators and developers through Visual Force. It can easily merge data from several records.

24. Differentiate SOQL And SOSL In Salesforce

SOQL and SOSL are object languages in Salesforce. The former only allows one to search an object at a time, while with SOSL, one can search as many objects at a time as possible. SOQL enables the querying of all datatype fields, while with SOSL, one can only query fields with email, phone, and text datatypes. SOQL can also be used for triggers and classes, whereas SOSL cannot be used for triggers but in classes. Lastly, performing a DML operation on SQL query results is possible, which is not possible for SOSL.

25. Mention The Types Of SOQL Statements In Salesforce

SOQL, fully known as the salesforce object query language, is normally used to query records from a given database. There are two types of statements: static and Dynamic SOQL. The former is generally written in [] and is similar to IINQ, while the latter (dynamic SOQL) refers to creating a SOQL string using the Apex code. It normally happens at run time.

Conclusion

These are some of the common questions you are likely to be asked in a Salesforce interview. Therefore, ensure that you are conversant with the technical aspects of this field to land a job easily. Also, remember to groom well for physical interviews.