Salesforce Admin Interview Questions

'Lightning' (Salesforce Lightning) is Salesforce's component-based framework for application development, aimed at simplifying business processes for users with no or little programming experience. The Lightning Component Framework is part of Lightning, and some great tools are available for developers as well. With Lightning, you will be able to easily create responsive applications for any device.

The differences between Salesforce admins and developers are as follows:

A Salesforce administrator is an individual who specializes in the Salesforce CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system and the products that it provides. It is their responsibility to administer Salesforce systems, train staff on Salesforce products, and maintain sales databases. Simply put, the Salesforce admin allows users to leverage the Salesforce platform in the most productive way possible. It is a Salesforce Admin who truly understands how to configure the platform to achieve the company's goals.

As part of the management process, the reports are used to track progress towards the company's various goals, control its expenditures, as well as increase its revenues. Reports play a crucial role in forecasting trends and can therefore increase profits. Reports can be created in Salesforce.com in a variety of ways and can be scheduled as well. You can organize, view, and analyze your data with Salesforce's suite of analytic tools.

Report formats in Salesforce can be classified into four different types as follows:

• Tabular Reports: This is the most basic of all report formats and it simply displays the records in a table without a grand total. Tabular reports are ideal for when you need a simple list or a list of items without a grand total.
• Summary Reports: As the name implies, this type of report displays a listing of data with groupings and subtotals at the bottom.
• Matrix Reports: Unlike other types of reports, this one gives you the option to group records both by row and by column. Furthermore, this report can be used to generate dashboards as well.
• Joined Reports: These types of reports allow us to create different views of the data from the different types of reports. In a joined report, the data are organized into blocks. Each block is a sub-report containing its columns, own fields, sorting, and filtering.

Profiles and roles are both used to maintain security and permissions within the system.

Apex is an object-oriented programming language that enables developers to execute necessary flow and transactional control commands on the Lightning Platform server, along with any API calls. By using syntax that looks and acts just like Java and as if it were a stored procedure, Apex is a business logic extension to Salesforce that lets developers provide logic to many system instances, including record updates, button clicks, and visual force pages. Moreover, it is used to develop SaaS (Software as a Service) applications on top of Salesforce CRM functionality.

Database.com is the primary enterprise database storage platform for Salesforce, and Salesforce data is stored in the cloud via this platform. The database.com product is a vast data storage facility that allows users to safely store millions of records, retrieve them for use in developing apps, and create flawless transactions in a fraction of a second. Database.com provides a powerful cloud infrastructure that provides a means to efficiently store, retrieve, and manipulate information. Listed below are some of the valuable features that Database.com provides:

• It offers storage space for images, videos, and documents.
• Provides relational data capabilities, such as tables, fields, triggers, queries, relationships, and search capabilities.
• Provides user management functionality.
• Improved enterprise search engine services and security rules to ensure that the data remains secure.

• Page Layout: With Page Layouts, Salesforce allows you to control how Salesforce pages are arranged and displayed. You may be able to control the positioning of fields, Buttons, Custom links, S-controls, Visualforce, and related lists on any of the object record pages. Also, page layouts determine which fields on object record pages are marked as read-only, visible, or required.
• Record Types: Records types allow you to display different processes, picklist values, and object layouts to different Salesforce users. The record type offers many benefits, however, if it is not implemented correctly, it can result in added complexity for users and administrators.

Salesforce.com allows us to store files, images, and documents in the following ways:

• Attachments
• Documents
• Google Drive
• Libraries
• Chatter Files

Chatter is a Salesforce application that makes it easy for your users to communicate, collaborate, and share information in real-time. Chatter can be used by individuals of all roles and locations in the organization to connect, engage, and motivate them to work efficiently.

Approval processes are types of workflows that require work to pass through a series of steps to be approved. This process typically involves reviewing the work and approving or rejecting it by various departments with employees from different positions involved in the process. After this, the workflows in both directions, either back to the previous step for editing, or on to the next step for further approval, depending on whether the work has been accepted or rejected by one department. Currently, many companies use computers to automate their approval processes, however, some firms still use manual approval procedures, such as passing paper documents from department to department.

When working on a real-time project, there are some situations where we do not need to execute the task immediately. Time-dependent actions can help in these cases. Time-dependent actions are performed at a specific time, such as 10 hours or 10 days  (time triggers) before the closing date of a record. The workflow rule evaluates the record after that period has passed to ensure that it still meets the rules. If so, the workflow rule performs those actions. In Salesforce, a time trigger indicates after how many hours or days we want this action to be performed.

Limitations

• Minutes and seconds are not supported by time triggers.
• A time trigger cannot be added or removed if:
  • The workflow rule is currently active.
  • The package includes the workflow rule.

Salesforce offers the following workflow actions:

• Task: It is a simple way of assigning a task to an individual user, a team member, or a role. The assignee can be notified via email when a task is automatically assigned.
• Email Alert: It uses an email template to send automated email messages. Salesforce allows users to create an email template that can be used to send emails when they need to.
• Field update: Field updates are used to automatically change the value of a field on a record that was initially triggered by the workflow rule.
• Outbound Message: Outbound messages are those that are sent to a designated endpoint, such as an external service. Listening to these types of messages is possible using a SOAP (Standard Communication Protocol System) API.

A record can be shared in five different ways, as follows: 

• Manual Sharing.
• Apex Sharing.
• Role Hierarchy.
• Criteria Based Sharing Rules.
• Organization-Wide Defaults (OWD).

Permission sets are essentially collections of settings and permissions that allow users access to certain features and tools. In other words, permission sets can extend the functional access of users without modifying their profiles. A Salesforce user can only have one profile, although depending on the Salesforce edition, they may have several permission sets. Permission sets may be assigned to various types of users regardless of their profile.

In Salesforce, it is possible to establish a relationship between objects. It is possible to associate objects with one another. The following are a few types of relationships that can be established between objects:

• Master-detail relationship: Salesforce objects are strongly coupled, so deleting a master record also deletes the child records associated with it. Typically, the parent record controls the visibility and sharing of the child record. The security settings of a parent object apply to its child.
• Lookup relationship: Loosely coupled relationships between Salesforce objects mean that even if the parent object is deleted, the child object will remain in the system. In this case, both the child and the parent have separate sharing settings and security controls.
• Self-relationship: One example of a look-up relationship would be a self-relationship. Salesforce allows us to create self-relationships between objects using lookup relationships; we can have up to 40 self-relationships between Salesforce objects.
• External lookup relationship: It lets us link or connect an external object to a parent external object whose data resides in an external database. In simple words, we connect two external objects.
• Indirect lookup relationship: With an indirect lookup relationship, we can link a standard or custom object to an external object.
• Many-to-many relationship (junction object): Many-to-many relationships in Salesforce allow us to link a child record with multiple parents.

Salesforce portals can be classified into three types as follows:

• Self-Service Portal: Self-Service is a means of providing online support to your customers that enables them to resolve their issues without contacting customer service.
• Partner Portal: The Partner Portal is intended to provide support to your Partners. Partners are Salesforce users with restricted rights. They are tied to a specific partner account and have limited access to your organization's data.
• Customer Portal: In pretty much the same way that a self-service portal does, the Customer Portal provides online support to your customers, allowing them to resolve their problems without having to contact customer service.

Salesforce Reports includes a bucket field capability that enables you to categorize the values of any field in a report quickly and easily without the need to create a formula field at the object level. When multiple values of a field need to be categorized into a single category, Salesforce bucket fields are used.

Conditional highlighting in Salesforce reports provides you with the ability to highlight field values on matrix and summary reports based on the colors and ranges you specify. For conditional highlighting to work, your report must include one or more summary fields or a custom summary formula.

Limitations

• There can be a maximum of three conditions per report.
• Conditional Highlighting is only applicable to the summary and matrix reports.
• Only available for use in numerical analysis.
• First condition < second condition < third condition >=.

Salesforce CRM offers a wide range of services and features, each tailored to address certain business needs. These bundles are called editions, and they share the same look and feel but differ in functionality and price. As business requirements evolve, many customers upgrade from a basic edition to a more feature-rich one. Below is a list of some Salesforce editions:

• Essential Edition: Designed to give small businesses a quick and easy way to get started with a CRM system, this edition will give them everything they need. Its easy-to-use UI, intuitive tutorials, setup assistant, and administration tools will help you customize and scale your deployment over time.
• Professional Edition: The Professional Edition is targeted at businesses that need full-featured CRM functionality to manage their operations. With Salesforce professional edition, businesses can conveniently manage their entire sales cycle from lead generation to close with ease.
• Enterprise Edition: With the Enterprise edition, organizations can automate their complex business processes using workflows and approvals in addition to the features offered by the Professional edition. There are various customization and management tools included in this edition of Symphony to support large-scale deployments.
• Unlimited Edition: A crucial feature of the Unlimited Edition is the ability to extend business success across the whole enterprise using the Lightning Platform so that the company can achieve maximum success. It offers all the features of the Enterprise edition and comes with full premium support.

Salesforce supports an extensive array of objects throughout its entire product lines, such as standard objects, custom objects, platform events, external objects, and BigObjects. Standard objects and custom objects are the two most common types of objects.

• Standard Objects: Standard objects in Salesforce provide a set of business objects. For example, Contact, Account, Opportunity, and Lead are all standard objects.
• Custom objects: A custom object is one that you can create to store data specific to your company or industry.

• Salesforce.com: Salesforce.com is a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) service, based on SaaS (Software as a Service) technology.  Salesforce is a SaaS solution featuring Out of Box (OOB) functionality that allows a CRM system to automate marketing, sales, customer service tasks, etc. For instance, Google Apps, Dropbox, and GoToMeeting are examples of SaaS, and all refer to the process of taking software installed on your computer and transferring it to the cloud.
• Force.com: Force.com is a PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) product that provides a platform for creating applications. In essence, Force.com is a platform that provides developers and business users with the means to develop powerful enterprise applications. The service allows you to customize the application, UI, and business logic.

There are some situations when you may not be able to deactivate an account right away, for example when a user has been selected in a custom hierarchy field. When deactivating users, it is recommended that you freeze their account to prevent them from logging in until you complete the steps to deactivate them. 

As an example, let us say that a user just left your company. Now, you wish to deactivate the account, but the user that you are selecting sits within a custom hierarchy field. It is not possible to deactivate the account immediately, but in the meantime, it can be frozen.

• Click Setup and then enter Users in the Quick Find box.
• Click on the username of the account you wish to freeze.
• Click on the button Freeze to lock down access to the account, or Unfreeze to enable it again, if necessary.

PaaS (Platform as a Service) is a proven model of running applications by leveraging cloud-based services without needing to worry about maintaining on-premises technology infrastructure and hardware. The simplicity, scalability, and reliability of PaaS solutions have been an important attribute for businesses of all sizes. The platform provides a set of cloud-based services that let business users and developers build applications at a pace not possible with on-premise solutions.

The term "Software as a Service (or SaaS)" refers to a way to deliver applications as a service over the Internet. As opposed to installing and maintaining software, you are simply accessing it via the Internet, thereby freeing yourself from the headache of software/hardware management. The SaaS model has since become a widely accepted model where more and more different types of applications are now available via the cloud.

The IaaS acronym stands for Infrastructure as a Service, which provides the basic computing resources (such as hardware, servers, networking components, etc.) for enterprises to deploy systems over the Internet. In addition to providing IT resources faster, such as troubleshooting and software upgrades, this service can also provide users with remote support. Furthermore, IaaS providers provide better security and data recovery than in-house systems do.

In a roll-up summary field, values from related records are calculated, for example, those from a related list.  It summarizes data from related detail records and displays it on the master record. There must be a master-detail relationship between the detail record and the master record.

You might prefer to aggregate child records on a parent record at times, but the Master-Detail capability may not align with your use case due to its security limitations. In such cases, it is best to use Flow Builder or write code to mimic the functionality of Roll-up Summary fields.

The Salesforce Data Loader is a client application that allows you to import or export data in bulk both to and from Salesforce. If you would like to insert, delete, update, or export Salesforce records, you can use this tool. Data Loader reads, extracts, and loads data from a database connection or CSV (Comma Separated Value) files when importing data. It exports data as CSV files.

• Update:
  • Click on the update button and login buttons with your credentials.
  • Next, open the CSV file containing the updated data with the IDs, then select the object and complete the operation.
• Upsert:
  • The upsert function is the same as the update function, but here we can place new records as well.
  • We can insert new records and update existing records using this operation.
• Export:
  • Click on the export button and then log in using your credentials.
  • Select the object you wish to export data from, specify the location in which you want to store this exported file, and then complete the operation.

The term "OWD" stands for Organization-Wide Default, and this refers to the Baseline settings that determine what records can be accessed by which users and by what modes of access. By using sharing rules, you can override Organization-Wide Default settings. Different types of access are available in Organization-Wide Default as follows:

• Read/Write/Transfer
• Public Read/Write
• Public Read Only
• Private
• No Access, View only, Use.

For the users who do not own the records, sharing rules are used to alter the Organization-Wide Default settings in Salesforce to accommodate their needs. Sharing rules should be applied to objects whose OWD (Organization-wide defaults) are set to Public Read-only or Private, as sharing rules can extend the access but cannot inhibit the access provided by OWD. Using sharing rules, we can configure sharing access to be extended to users within public groups, roles, or territory boundaries. Using sharing rules, certain users are given greater access to your data by making automatic exceptions to your OWD.

Types of Sharing Rules

• Account Sharing Rule
• Asset Sharing Rule
• Contact Sharing Rule
• Campaign Sharing Rule
• Data Privacy Sharing Rule
• Opportunity Sharing Rule
• Lead Sharing Rule
• Work Type Sharing Rule, etc.

To streamline and save time across your organization's processes, workflows are a great way to automate routine chores and processes. Workflow rules are used to store and organize sets of workflow instructions in a comprehensible manner. In short, you can always summarize these instructions by putting them in an if/then statement. In the world of workflow rules, two major components can be found.

• Criteria: The "if" part of the "if/then" condition. It consists of conditions that, depending on their findings (true/fALSE), should cause the associated actions to occur.
• Actions: The "then" part of the "if/then" condition. These are the actions that have to be taken if the criteria for workflow rules are met.

Most of today's business people are familiar with the term CRM, which is an acronym for customer relationship management and is a tool for managing a company's relationship with its potential customers. There is a simple goal behind CRM, i.e., to build better relationships with clients. In other words, CRM systems make it possible for everyone to manage the external interactions and relationships that are the backbone of any successful business, including sales, business development, customer service, recruiting, marketing, and any other line of business. The CRM system enhances customer relations, streamlines processes, and improves profitability.

List of CRM Providers

• Salesforce CRM
• SAP CRM
• Sage CRM
• Zoho CRM
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM
• Oracle CRM
• NetSuite CRM
• SugarCRM, etc.

In Salesforce, Custom Metadata Types are a bit like Custom Settings, except they are customizable, deployable, upgradeable, and packageable. They are primarily used for application configuration. The first thing you need to do is create a custom metadata type that specifies the format and content of the application metadata. You can then create reusable functionality that determines behaviour based on the metadata of the type provided.

Conclusion

Job interviews can indeed pose a bit of a challenge, especially when proving your competency in the use of technology (logistics, computer skills, etc.). Salesforce is regarded as the world's best-known and most popular CRM platform, and there is a constant demand for Salesforce administrators in this day and age.

As we have seen in this article, we have covered some likely Interview Questions you might encounter from the most commonly used topics in Salesforce administration. There are a lot of topics covered here like custom metadata type, differences between Salesforce.com and Force.com, ways to store files, images, and documents in Salesforce, different types of portals available in Salesforce, user administration, workflow components, types of reports, what a data loader is, and many more.  

In the end, you should realize that the aim is to provide a concise yet fully explained answer that demonstrates your knowledge of the subject without going on and on. It would be best if you could give an example of a use case you have experienced while using the feature. But, putting all of these aside, what is most important is a Salesforce Admin certification, since it is highly relevant in today's oversaturated market. As mentioned before, they aren't attempting to certify you, but rather gauge the degree of your expertise in the field. Also, be confident, professional, and courteous during the interview.

Useful Resources

• https://www.interviewbit.com/blog/salesforce-developer-salary/
• https://www.interviewbit.com/salesforce-lightning-interview-questions/
• https://www.interviewbit.com/technical-interview-questions/

If you are a Salesforce Administrator, you would be the one who would bridge the gap between business people and technology specialists. You will work closely with key stakeholders to establish requirements, then you will customize Salesforce to meet those needs. The role is extremely varied, it entails both training other users, sharing best practices, and perfecting admin tasks, such as creating reports for clients, and ensuring that best practices are being followed. Salesforce administrators are responsible for all of the daily operations and user management of the CRM system.

Here are some tips to help you prepare for a Salesforce interview:

• Make sure you prepare the basics.
• Do a bit of research and learn what the hiring manager is looking for.
• Keep notes of your achievements that might be of use to the hiring manager.
• Research the company and the interviewer beforehand.
• Don't be afraid to speak your mind.

If you plan on applying for a position as a salesforce administrator, then you ought to look for the following skills. When you answer why you should be hired, highlight how these skills apply to you.

• Be committed to getting the job done.
• Possess additional experience (Sales, Analyst experience, Sales operation, or Marketing) that complements what is required in the position.
• Have experience with other CRM technologies besides Salesforce.
• Look for an internship or job as a fresh graduate to gain some experience in sales or with a CRM tool.
• Certification in Salesforce.

There are a few important components that will enable you to answer the question in the best way. The following information should be included in your answer:

• Give them some insight into your professional background and personality, and explain who you are.
• Make sure to highlight the top three to five points about your career that you would like to convey.
• Do not forget to mention the companies you worked for, your roles, and your achievements.
• You should spell out why you want this job and why you would be a good fit for it.

Mid-career Salesforce Administrators earn an average salary of ₹7.2 Lakhs per year, while senior Salesforce Administrators earn an average salary of ₹10.3 Lakhs per year. In the United States, a SalesForce Administrator earns an average salary of $91202 per year.

Increasingly, employers are looking for Salesforce professionals as they immerse themselves in the digital transformation process.  Salesforce administration is an excellent career to pursue since it is highly in demand. The main reason is that with a 19% share of the CRM market, Salesforce has become the world's leading Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform. It's not only a highly respected and valued role in its own right, but it can also be a stepping stone into other career options within the ecosystem.