Top 24 Salesforce Administrator Interview Questions and Answers to Know

Many factors go into achieving a successful job interview. Smart applicants have done their research on the company they’re applying to, lined up all their references, updated their resume, and even taken steps to make an excellent first impression by making themselves look presentable.

While those measures are a great start, the most successful applicants leave nothing to chance and take steps to be ready for whatever questions the interviewer asks them. To that end, we present two dozen of the best Salesforce administrator questions and answers most likely to appear in your interview.

The following salesforce admin interview questions are grouped according to complexity as basic, intermediate, and advanced salesforce admin interview questions. They cover several Salesforce-related topics, including Salesforce Lightning, and tough questions for experienced Salesforce applicants.

Basic Salesforce Admin Interview Questions and Answers

Here are eight simple salesforce admin interview questions to get us started. These are the softball questions, dealing with the simple fundamental concepts.

1. What is Salesforce?

A: Salesforce is the most popular customer relationship management (CRM) platform available today. It provides cloud-based CRM applications designed for use in sales, service, marketing, and much more. Businesses use Salesforce to manage business relationships and their associated data.

2. What is CRM?

A: CRM is an acronym for Customer Relationship Management, and it describes an application that helps businesses automate and digitize sales and marketing activity to manage (and increase) revenue. Sales and marketing professionals leverage CRM’s features to attract and retain customers and clients, thereby increasing sales.

3. What are the duties of a Salesforce Administrator?

A: The primary responsibilities and duties of a Salesforce Administrator include:

• Handle normal administrator functions and routine tasks, including user account maintenance, dashboards and reports, and workflows.
• Perform routine internal system audits and prepare the system for possible upgrades
• Help train new Salesforce users and help the staff increase their Salesforce skills.
• Oversee Salesforce data feeds
• Function as a liaison between users, vendors, and development teams
• Work with the organization’s management teams to establish appropriate processes that benefit all administrative, change management, and development activities

4. Explain cloud computing, including the different forms available.

A: Cloud computing is a scalable, on-demand networked system of remote servers hosted on the internet that enables users to store, retrieve, manage, and process information remotely, replacing on-site infrastructure.

Cloud computing comes in three primary forms:

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
• Software as a Service (SaaS), which also happens to be what Salesforce is based on
• Platform as a Service (PaaS)

5. Name at least six CRM providers.

A: CRM providers include:

• Microsoft Dynamics CRM
• NetSuite CRM
• Nimble
• Oracle CRM
• Sage CRM
• Salesforce CRM
• SAP CRM
• SugarCRM

6. How many different editions does Salesforce have, and how often do they release updates annually?

A: Salesforce has five different editions. They are:

• Developer, letting developers integrate Salesforce with other applications
• Enterprise, for large businesses
• Essentials, for small businesses that want a quick start in CRM
• Professional, targeted at enterprises that need full-featured CRM functionality
• Unlimited, which includes Enterprise edition functionality, full mobile access, premium support, higher storage limits, unlimited custom apps, and more

Salesforce releases three updates a year (Winter, Spring, Summer).

7. Outline Salesforce’s available portals.

A: Salesforce has three available portals:

• Customer portal
• Partner portal
• Self-service portal

8. What is Database.com?

A: Database.com is a “Data as a Service” offering from Salesforce, designed to improve CRM application performance and efficiency.

Now that we have gone through the basic level of salesforce admin interview questions, let us level up and look at the intermediate level questions.

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Intermediate Salesforce Admin Interview Questions and Answers

Now, let’s ramp up the difficulty somewhat with eight tougher salesforce admin interview questions.

9. What is an object in Salesforce?

A: An object is a database table that lets users store data relevant to the organization in Salesforce. There are two types of objects: Standard and Custom. Salesforce.com provides standard objects, while users create custom objects.

10. What is a profile, and what sorts are there?

A: Profiles control and restrict access to a record according to settings and permissions in Salesforce. There are six types:

• Standard user
• Solution manager
• Marketing user
• Read-only
• System administrator

11. Can you freeze a user on Salesforce? How can you delete them?

A: Admins can freeze or deactivate a user by following these steps: 

Setup=>Administer=>Manage users=>Users=>Click on Freeze. As for the second part, it’s a trick question; users cannot be deleted  

12. What’s the difference between a role and a profile?

A: Roles are a means for controlling access to a record, while a profile controls what a user can do within that accessed record (e.g., edit, view).

13. Which of these is true? Users can have multiple profiles; profiles can have multiple users.

A: The latter is true. Admins can assign a profile to any number of users, so for instance, all the members of a team can have access to a specific profile. However, users can only have one profile assigned.

14. Name the different data access levels in Salesforce and what they cover.

A: There are four data access levels available for Administrators to work with:

• Organization-level security. You can maintain a list of authorized users, limit login access to certain locations and times, and set password policies
• Object-level security. This access level is the simplest to control. Admins can set permissions on any object, controlling which users can create, delete, edit, or even view the records of any given object
• Field-level security. Although you can grant any user the access to a specific object, you can restrict which fields they can access
• Record-level security. Admins can let users view a particular object, but restrict the object records they can see.

15. List the methods of data storage (documents, images, files) available in Salesforce.

A: These are the storage methods used:

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

16. What is Salesforce Lightning?

A: Lightning is a component-based framework designed for business users unfamiliar with programming. The framework makes app development processes easier.

After having completed the intermediate level questions, let us next increase our difficulty level and learn these advanced salesforce interview questions.

Advanced Salesforce Admin Interview Questions and Answers

Finally, here are eight tough salesforce admin interview questions for the people who know Salesforce well.

17. Referring to a previous question, how do you manage record-level access?

A: Salesforce Administrators can manage record-level access in the following four ways:

• Manual sharing
• Organization-wide defaults
• Role hierarchies
• Sharing rules

18. List the different relationships types found in Salesforce.

A: These are the different relationships that Salesforce users can establish for objects.

• External lookup
• Hierarchical
• Indirect lookup
• Lookup
• Many-to-many (junction object)
• Master-detail relationship
• Self-relationship

19. What is a workflow in the context of Salesforce?

A: It is the business logic that evaluates records while creating and updating processes, determining any need for automated action. Workflow lets records perform an action, such as updating data or notifying people or external systems.

20. If you have an action scheduled to execute in a time-based workflow, would the scheduled action be removed from the queue if the workflow is deactivated?

A: The action remains active in the queue, even if the workflow is deactivated.

21. In the context of activities, what are WhoID and WhatID?

A: WhoID is used for people, such as leads or contacts. WhatID refers to objects such as campaigns, accounts, custom objects, or cases.

22. What is a Rollup summary, and what are its functions?

A: The Rollup summary field calculates the values from a group of related records. The functions of the summary field include:

• Count. Calculates the total number of related records
• Sum.  Totals the values of selected fields
• Min. Displays the lowest value
• Max. Displays the highest value

23. When do you use a data loader?

A: When you want to:

• Load more than 50,000 but less than 5,000,000 records
• Load into an object that is not yet supported by web-based importing
• Save multiple mapping files for later use
• Export data for backup purposes
• Prevent duplicates by uploading records

24. What is an Apex transaction?

A: Apex transactions represent a set of operations executed as a single unit. It is alternately called an execution context.

Test yourself on the concepts of sales and service clouds with the Salesforce Admin Practice Test. Try answering now!

Do You Want to Learn About Salesforce Training?

If you would like to learn how to gain Salesforce training, there are plenty of resources online. Fortunately, you can visit Simplilearn and check out several courses without having to bounce all over the internet.

You can check out a Salesforce administrator and developer training course, gain certification in Salesforce platform development, or train as a Salesforce developer. Alternately, you can take several courses and elevate your Salesforce knowledge to new heights!

Benefits of Career in Salesforce Administration

Salesforce is the most popular CRM platform available today, and the demand for Salesforce administrators is on the rise. This increasing demand is expected to create over three million Salesforce ecosystem positions by 2021. According to Glassdoor.com, Salesforce administrators average USD 77,503 annually.

The Salesforce Administrator Certification Training Course helps you master Salesforce’s core administration, empowering you to implement, configure, and manage Sales and Service Clouds. This self-paced learning course provides you with 12 hours of eLearning content, four projects, 20 case studies, four simulation tests, 16 quizzes, and much more. Also, the course is aligned with the official Salesforce Certification Guide, further solidifying your Salesforce credentials.

So don’t delay. Visit Simplilearn and get started on an exciting and profitable career today!