Interview questions for Sales force

1. What is Salesforce?

Salesforce is the most effective Customer Relationship Management (CRM) product that is delivered to subscribers as a cost-effective software-as-a-service (SaaS).

2. What is a custom object in Salesforce?

In Salesforce, custom objects refer specifically to database tables that store data related to your company in Salesforce.com.

3. What does a custom object permit the user to do?

Once the custom object is defined, the subscriber can perform the following tasks: create custom fields, relate the custom object to other records, track events and tasks, build page layouts, create a custom tab for the custom object, analyze custom object data, create dashboards and reports, and share custom tabs, custom apps, custom objects, and various other related components. None of these tasks can be accomplished until the custom object has a definition.

4. What is Self-Relationship?

A Self-Relationship is a lookup relationship to the same object. It is this premise that allows users to take the object “Merchandise” and create relationships with other objects.

5. What is Object Relationship Overview?

In Salesforce, the object relationship overview links custom object records to standard object records in a related list. This is helpful to track product defects in related customer cases. Salesforce allows users to define different types of relationships by creating custom relationship fields on an object.

6. What can cause data loss in Salesforce?

Data loss in Salesforce can be caused by a number of reasons, including:
• Changing data and date-time.
• Migrating to percent, number, and currency from other data types.
• Changing from the multi-select picklist, checkbox, auto number to other types.
• Altering to multi-select picklist from any type except picklist.
• Changing to auto-number except for text.
• Changing from text-area to e-mail, phone, URL, and text.

7. How is SaaS beneficial to Salesforce?

SaaS is subscription-based, so clients can choose not to renew and discontinue using the program at any time without penalty other than not being able to use Salesforce. SaaS is intended to help users avoid heavy initial startup fees and investments. SaaS applications use a simple Internet interface supported by easy integration.

8. How does Salesforce track sales?

Salesforce is a tracking program that records a number of helpful basic details, such as:
• Number of customers served daily
• Daily sales volume
• Detailed reports from Sales Manager
• Sales figures by month or quarter
• Most importantly, Salesforce tracks and reports repeat customer activity, which is the key to any sales organization.

9. Can two users have the same profile? Can two profiles be assigned to the same user?

Profiles determine the level of access a user can have in a Salesforce org.
As far as the first part of the question is concerned, Yes. One profile can be assigned to any number of users. Take the example of a Sales or Service team in a company. The entire team will be assigned the same profile. The admin can create one profile: Sales Profile, which will have access to the Leads, Opportunities, Campaigns, Contacts and other objects deemed necessary by the company.
In this way, many users can be assigned the same profile. In case the team lead or manager need access to additional records/ objects then it can be done by assigning permission sets only for those users.
Answering the second part of the question, each user can only be assigned 1 profile.

10. What are Governor Limits in Salesforce?

In Salesforce, it is the Governor Limits which controls how much data or how many records you can store in the shared databases. Why? Because Salesforce is based on the concept of multi-tenant architecture. In simpler words, Salesforce uses a single database to store the data of multiple clients/ customers. The below image will help you relate to this concept.

To make sure no single client monopolizes the shared resources, Salesforce introduced the concept of Governor Limits which is strictly enforced by the Apex run-time engine.
Governor Limits are a Salesforce developer’s biggest challenge. That is because if the Apex code ever exceeds the limit, the expected governor issues a run-time exception that cannot be handled. Hence as a Salesforce developer, you have to be very careful while developing your application.
Different Governor Limits in Salesforce are:
• Per-Transaction Apex Limits
• Force.com Platform Apex Limits
• Static Apex Limits
• Size-Specific Apex Limits
• Miscellaneous Apex Limits
• Email Limits
• Push Notification Limits

11. What is a sandbox org? What are the different types of sandboxes in Salesforce?

A sandbox is a copy of the production environment/ org, used for testing and development purposes. It’s useful because it allows development on Apex programming without disturbing the production environment.

12. When can you use it?

You can use it when you want to test a newly developed Force.com application or Visualforce page. You can develop and test it in the Sandbox org instead of doing it directly in production.
This way, you can develop the application without any hassle and then migrate the metadata and data (if applicable) to the production environment. Doing this in a non-production environment allows developers to freely test and experiment applications end to end.
Types of Sandboxes are:
• Developer
• Developer Pro
• Partial Copy
• Full

13. Can you have a roll up summary field in case of Master-Detail relationship?

Yes. You can have a roll-up summary in case of a master-detail relationship. But not in case of a lookup relationship.
A roll-up summary field is used to display a value in a master record based on the values of a set of fields in a detail record. The detail record must be related to the master through a master-detail relationship.
There are 4 calculations that you can do using roll-up summary field. You can count the number of detail records related to a master record. Or, you can calculate the sum, minimum value, or maximum value of a field in the detail records.

14. Explain the term “Data Skew” in Salesforce?

“Data skew” is a condition which you will encounter when working for a big client where there are over 10,000 records. When one single user owns that many records we call that condition ‘ownership data skew’.
When such users perform updates, performance issues will be encountered because of “data skew”. This happens when a single user/ members of a single role own most of the records for a particular object.

15. Explain skinny table. What are the considerations for Skinny Table?

In Salesforce, skinny tables are used to access frequently used fields and to avoid joins. This largely improves performance. Skinny tables are highly effective, so much so that even when the source tables are modified, skinny tables will be in sync with source tables.
Considerations for skinny tables:
• Skinny tables can contain a maximum of 100 columns.
• Skinny tables cannot contain fields from other objects.
• For full sandboxes: Skinny tables are copied to your Full sandbox organizations, as of the Summer ’15 release.