Salesforce Interview Questions and Answers

1. What is CRM? Why do we need a CRM?

CRM, Customer Relationship Management is a model that is used to manage an organization’s interactions with its customers, through any means, be it Phone calls, Emails, Meetings and Social Media, Marketing and Support etc.

We need CRM to -

• Track customer interactions to provide them a better service
• Follow up with Customer
• To measure the impact of all the activities you have done on your sales.
• Provide all customer data at one place
• Save time and effort for better productivity

Video : Salesforce Interview Questions and Answers - For Freshers and Experienced

2. What is Salesforce? What are the advantages of Salesforce?

Salesforce is a cloud based CRM. It is a web-based service so users can access their database from anywhere, if they have an internet connection.

Advantages of Salesforce

• Organize data of all customer at one place
• Measure and improve lead generation activities
• Track, manage and resolve customer issues
• Collect data related to competition and develop business plan
• Develop and manage cloud based applications

3. Explain the type of objects in Salesforce?

Salesforce Objects are database tables that store data.

There are three kinds of Salesforce objects

i.) Standard Objects - The objects provided by salesforce.com are called standard objects, e.g. accounts, contacts, products, contracts, Report etc.

ii.) Custom Object - The object that you create to store data related to your company in Salesforce.com is called Custom Object.

iii.) External Objects - They are like Standard and Custom Objects, only the data isn’t stored in Salesforce. The External objects map to the data stored in an external system like SAP, Oracle etc.

4. What are the types of object relationships available in Salesforce?

There are three main object relationship types available in Salesforce:

i.) Master-detail relationship

A master-detail relationship establishes a relationship between the parent and the child. All child records must have a parent. If the parent is deleted, all associated child records will also be deleted. The Child record inherits record-level security from the parent. Therefore, the security setting of a parent object applies to the child object. You can establish Roll-Up Summary fields on parent object which allow you to summarize data from related child records.

ii.) Lookup Relationship

This is the most basic type of relationship that creates a child-parent relationship between two objects. It is a loosely coupled relationship among Salesforce objects where not every child would necessarily be associated with parent. Here, both the parent and child have their own sharing settings and security controls.

iii.) Many-to-many

A many-to-many relationship allows each record of one object to be linked to multiple records from another object and vice versa.

5. What is SOQL used for?

SOQL stands for Salesforce Object Query Language. It is used to query the Salesforce platform to retrieve data. SOQL is similar to the SQL SELECT statement but it doesn't support all advanced features of the SQL SELECT command. For example, you can't use SOQL to perform arbitrary join operation, use wildcards in field lists, or use calculation expressions.

6. What’s the difference between Salesforce.com and Force.com?

Salesforce.com is SaaS(Software-as-a-Service) product that includes prebuilt applications for customer relationship management.

Force.com is a PaaS product (Platform-as-a-Service) that allows you to build your own applications.

7. How are bucket fields used in Salesforce?

Bucket fields can be used in Salesforce reports to group together field values. They quickly categorize report records without creating a formula or a custom field.  These fields are not created on the Salesforce platform and only exist in the report. Like any other column in your report, you can sort, filter and group by bucket fields.

8. What is the difference between Trigger and Workflow?

Trigger

i.) Trigger is the code that is executed before or after the record is updated or inserted.
ii.) Trigger can be used before and after some action.
iii.) Trigger works across all the objects
iv.) Trigger can cause an action on one object to update another. For e.g. You can create a new record through trigger which is not possible with Workflow.
iv.) We can use 20 DML operations in one trigger.

Workflow

i.) Workflow is an automated process that fires an action based on evaluation criteria and rule criteria.
ii.) Workflow can work only after some action has taken place.
iii.) Workflow works on one object at a time.
iv.) We cannot perform DML operation on workflow

9. What is Static Resource in Salesforce?

The content which cannot be changed based on user responses in a page is known as a Static Resource. For example, Images, Javascript Files, Flash files and CSS files.

With the help of Static Resources, you can upload zip files, images, jar files, JavaScript and CSS files that can be referred in a visual force page. The optimum size of Static Resources for an organization is 250 MB.

10. What are the different types of reports available in Salesforce?

In Salesforce, we can easily generate reports in different styles that helps you organize, view and analyze your data.

Different types of reports available in Salesforce are

i.) Tabular report: It displays simple listing of data without any subtotals. You can use this type of reports to list all accounts, list of contacts etc.

ii.) Summary report: It provides a listing of data with groupings and sub totals. When you want subtotals based on the value of a particular field, use this report

iii.) Matrix report: It allow you to group records both by row and by column. When you want to see data by two different dimensions such as date and sales, use this report

iv.) Joined report: With these two or more reports can be joined into a single report.

11. What is the junction object and what purpose does it serve?

Junction objects are used to build many-to-many relationships between objects. A many-to-many relationship allows each record of one object to be linked to multiple records from another object and vice versa. This is done with the help of another table or a third party object; this object is referred to as a junction object.

For example, a many-to-many relationship exists between jobs and candidates. A job can be linked to many candidates and a candidate can be linked to many other jobs.  

In the given example, the junction object can be "job application."