Salesforce Admin Interview Questions & Answers

Salesforce Admin Interview Questions & Answers to help you find your next dream Salesforce job.

Q1. What is a Profile in Salesforce?

Profiles determine what users can do in Salesforce. They come with a set of permissions which grant access to particular objects, fields, tabs, and records. Each user can have only one profile.

Q2. What is a Role in Salesforce?

Roles determine what users can see in Salesforce based on where they are located in the role hierarchy. Users at the top of the hierarchy can see all the data owned by users below them. Users at lower levels can’t see data owned by users above them, or in other branches, unless sharing rules grant them access. Roles are optional but each user can have only one.

Q3. Explain Organization-wide defaults (OWD).

Organization-wide defaults (OWD) specify the default level of access users have to each others records. You use organization–wide sharing settings to lock down your data to the most restrictive level, and then use the other sharing tools to selectively give access to other users.

For example, you can give all employees access to an object called Candidate to allow anyone to add a candidate to the database. But you can restrict access to Positions so that anyone can see the jobs available but only the employees with the proper permissions can edit them. OWD can be Private, Public Read Only, Public Read/Write or Controlled by Parent.

Q4. What is Role Hierarchy?

Role Hierarchy open up access to those higher in the hierarchy so they inherit access to all records owned by users below them in the hierarchy. Each role in the hierarchy represents a level of data access that a user or group of users needs. For example, you can restrict access to Candidates by setting the organization–wide default to Private, but allow recruiters to view and edit the candidate records that they own.

Q5. What are Sharing Rules?

Sharing Rules enable you to make automatic exceptions to organization–wide defaults for particular groups of users, to give them access to records they don’t own or can’t normally see. Sharing rules, like role hierarchies, are only used to give more users access to records—they can’t be stricter than your organization–wide default settings.

Q6. What is Manual Sharing?

Manual Sharing allows owners of particular records to share them with other users.

Q7. What is the use of Grant Access Using Hierarchies checkbox for a custom object?

Grant Access Using Hierarchies checkbox for a custom object is use to grant access to record to users who are above the record owner in role hierarchy. Unchecking the checkbox will make sure that users that are higher in the role hierarchy don’t receive automatic access.

Q8. What is Salesforce Identity?

Salesforce Identity is an identity and access management (IAM) service the lets you give the right people the right access to the right resources at the right time. You control who can access your orgs and who can use apps running on the Salesforce Platform, on-premises, in other clouds, and on mobile devices.

Q9. What is Single Sign-On?

Single sign-on (SSO) lets users access all authorized resources without logging in separately to each one—and without having to create (and remember) different user credentials for each app.

Q10. What is Social Sign-On?

Social sign-on allows users to log in to a Salesforce org with their username and password from an external authentication provider like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Google.

Q11. What are Governor Limits in Salesforce?

Because Apex runs in a multitenant environment, the Apex runtime engine strictly enforces limits so that runaway Apex code or processes don’t monopolize shared resources. If some Apex code exceeds a limit, the associated governor issues a runtime exception that can’t be handled.

You can specify users to receive an email notification when they invoke Apex code that surpasses 50% of allocated governor limits. Only per-request limits are checked for sending email warnings; per-org limits like concurrent long-running requests are not checked. These email notifications do not count against the daily single email limit.

Some of the Key Governor limits are:

Governor Limit Description	Synchronous Limit	Asynchronous Limit
Total number of SOQL queries	100	200
Total number of records retrieved by SOQL queries		50,000
Total number of SOSL queries		2,000
Total number of DML statements		150
Total number of callouts (HTTP requests or web services calls)		100
Maximum CPU time on the Salesforce servers	10 seconds	60 seconds
Maximum execution time for each Apex transaction		10 minutes

Please find complete list of Apex Governor limits here!

Q12. What is Salesforce Login Flow?

A login flow is used to direct users through a custom login process before they can access Salesforce org or Experience Cloud site. Login flow can be used to control the business processes to be followed when users log in to Salesforce.

After Salesforce authenticates a user, the login flow directs the user through a process, such as enforcing strong authentication or collecting user information. When users complete the login flow successfully, they’re redirected to their Salesforce org or site. If unsuccessful, the flow can log out users immediately. Custom Login Flows can be created using Flow Builder or Visualforce.

Q13. What is Salesforce Flow?

Flow is an automation tool to collect data and performs actions in your Salesforce org or an external system. You can create Flows using Flow Builder. Salesforce Flow provides two types of flows:

• Screen Flows – guide users through a business process, capture users input
• Autolaunched Flows – launches when a record changes or user clicks a button
  • Record-Triggered Flow – launches when a record is created, updated or deleted
  • Schedule-Triggered Flow – launches at a specified time and frequency for each record in a batch
  • Platform Event -Triggered Flow – launches when a platform message is received
  • Autolaunched Flow (No Trigger) – launches when invoked by Apex, processes, REST API and more

Q14. List the Flow Types supported in Flow Builder.

Flow Builder supports below flow types:

• Screen Flow
• Autolaunched Flow with No Flow Trigger
• User Provisioning Flow
• Autolaunched Flow with a Schedule Trigger
• Field Service Mobile Flow
• Autolaunched Flow with a Record Trigger
• Field Service Embedded Flow
• Contact Request Flow
• Checkout Flow
• Orchestrator (Beta)

Q15. List various Flow Distribution Methods.

Flows can be distributed (made available to users) via:

• Flow actions
• Lightning pages
• Experience Builder pages
• Custom Aura components
• Flow Orchestrator
• Custom Lightning web components
• Web tabs
• Custom buttons or custom links
• Direct flow URLs
• Visualforce pages
• Lightning Out
• Embedded Service deployments

Q16. What is Einstein Discovery?

Salesforce Einstein Discovery augments your business intelligence with statistical modeling and supervised machine learning in a no-code-required, rapid-iteration environment. Einstein Discovery enables you to: 

• Identify, surface, and visualize insights into your business data.
• Predict future outcomes and suggest ways to improve predicted outcomes in your workflows.

Q17. What are Salesforce Functions?

You can user Salesforce Functions can to build and integrate individual blocks of logic which extend your apps using the languages and tools of your choice. You write code that performs a specific task on trusted, managed Salesforce infrastructure, preauthenticated and preconfigured to use Salesforce data.

Apex code, or a low-code solution such as a Salesforce Flow, then invokes your code on demand. Your function automatically scales to meet the load. Since Salesforce Functions is built and managed by Salesforce, this frees your app design from the API limits encountered by off-platform solutions.

You can use Salesforce functions to perform compute-heavy tasks that were previously challenging to do in your org. Salesforce Functions use cases include:

• Complex business calculations, such as loan processing, managing product license keys, contract billing, and demand forecasting
• Batch processing, such as daily inventory stocking, consumer goods assortments, ERP calculations, and material resource planning
• Resource-intensive back-office automation, such as document generation, mail merges, invoice creation, payroll processing, QR codes, and case routing

Q18. Describe the Guidance Center in Salesforce.

The Guidance Center is a resource library right inside of Salesforce. It offers personalized setup and learning resources that align with your experience level and business goals. Whether you’re an admin starting your first or your latest org implementation, you’ll find all sorts of guidance tailored to you and your business needs.

Each set of Guidance Center resources includes suggested videos, Trailhead modules, Help topics, PDFs, and in-app guidance to provide helpful how-tos. 

Q19. What is Incident Management? 

Incident Management is an Out of the Box Service Cloud solution that helps your teams track large-scale disruptions and delegate tasks to the right experts to ensure your business delivers on customer expectations. With built-in fields, page layouts, and best practices.

Incident Management helps your service teams respond to any disruption and keep customers informed and with release management features, your team can implement changes to prevent the problems from happening again.

Incident Management can be accesses via Setup > Feature Settings > Service > Incident Management

Q20. Explain Field History Tracking.

You can select certain fields to track and display the field history in the History related list of an object. Field history data will be retained for up to 18 months through your org, and up to 24 months via the API. Field history tracking data doesn’t count against your Salesforce org’s data storage limits.

You can enable field history tracking for standard/custom objects in the object’s management settings. Changes to fields with more than 255 characters will only be tracked as edited, and their old and new values aren’t recorded.

Field Audit Trail lets you define a policy to retain archive field history data up to 10 years from the time the data was archived. This feature helps you comply with industry regulations related to audit capability and data retention. Field history is copied from the History related list into the FieldHistoryArchive big object. You define one HistoryRetentionPolicy for your related history lists, such as Account History, to specify Field Audit Trail retention policies for the objects you want to archive.

With Field Audit Trail, you can track up to 60 fields per object (can be increased to 100 at an additional cost). Without it, you can track only 20 fields per object. With Field Audit Trail, you retain archived field history data up to 10 years from the time the data was archived. Without it, you retain archived data for only 18 months.

Q21. What are Quick Actions in Salesforce?

Quick Actions are used to create new records, invoke Lightning components, flows or Visualforce pages. Quick Actions are of two Types:

1. Object Specific Actions – have automatic relationships to other records. You can use Object Specific Actions to quickly create or update records, log calls, send emails, and more in the context of a particular object.
2. Global Actions – are not specific to any object and are not related to any object. They can be put anywhere actions are supported. You can use Global Actions to log call details, create or update records, or send email with without context of a particular object.

Q22. What are Session-Based Permission Sets?

A session-based permission set applies to a specific user session to grant someone functional access to permissions. With session-based permission sets, you can limit functional access for select permissions in a permission set to an activated session. When a session ends for any reason, a session-based permission set must be activated again before the user can access restricted resources. To make a Permission Set session-based you must select Session Activation Required when you create your permission set.

Q23. What is Enterprise Territory Management?

Enterprise Territory Management is used to manage and maintain a company’s sales territories. Enterprise Territory Management uses territory types, territory models, and territory model states. Territories help companies keep track of which reps are assigned to which accounts and opportunities. Some of the key elements of Territory Management are:

• Territory Type – help you organize your territories by key characteristics important to your company. Every territory you create has a territory type
• Territory – organize groups of accounts and the Salesforce users who work with those accounts. Territories are created based on territory types
• Territory Type Priority – helps you choose the appropriate territory type for territories
• Territory Model – represents a complete territory management system for your company. Modeling lets you create and preview multiple territory structures and different account and user assignments before you activate the model that works best
• Territory Hierarchy – shows a model’s territory structure and serves as its main interaction point
• Territory Model State – indicates whether a territory is in the planning stage, in active use, or archived

Q24. What is Event Monitoring?

Event Monitoring lets you see the granular details of user activity in your organization. These user activities are refers as Events. You can view information about individual events or track trends in events to identify abnormal behavior and safeguard your company’s data. Some of the events that can be tracked by Event Monitoring are:

• Logins
• Logouts
• URI (web clicks in Salesforce Classic)
• Lightning (web clicks, performance, and errors in Lightning Experience and the Salesforce mobile app)
• Visualforce page loads
• Application programming interface (API) calls
• Apex executions
• Report exports

Q25. Explain Delegated Administration in Salesforce.

Delegated administration can be used to assign limited admin privileges to users in your org who aren’t administrators. Some of the duties a Delegated administrators can perform are:

• Create and edit users in specified roles and all subordinate roles.
• Reset Passwords.
• Unlock users.
• Assign users to specified profiles.
• Assign or remove permission sets for users in their delegated groups.
• Create public groups and manage membership in specified public groups.
• Log in as a user who has granted login access to the administrator.
• Manage custom objects and customize nearly every aspect of a custom object.

Q26. What are required fields when inserting Users?

Following Fields are required when inserting Users in Salesforce:

• Alias
• Username
• Email
• First Name
• Last Name
• Locale (LOCALESIDKEY)
• Language (LANGUAGELOCALEKEY)
• Email Encoding (EMAILENCODINGKEY)
• Time Zone (TIMEZONESIDKEY)
• Currency (CURRENCYISOCODE)
• ProfileId (not profile name but rather the 15-character ID from the URL of the profile in the UI)

Q27. What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud Computing is a technology that enables Internet-based services that let you sign up and log in through a browser. Salesforce delivers its service in the cloud. Other familiar cloud computing services include Google Apps and Amazon.com.

Q28. What is Software and a Service (SaaS)?

Software as a Service or SaaS is a modern way of Software delivery where Software is not delivered by traditional means (such as on disk) but in the cloud, as a service. There’s nothing to download or install, and updates are automatic.

Q29. What is Multitenancy?

Multitenancy is a mode of operation of software where multiple independent instances of one or multiple applications operate in a shared environment. 

Q30. What are Salesforce Releases?

Salesforce deliver hundreds of innovative features to customers three times a year during Salesforce seasonal releases: Spring, Summer, and Winter.

Q31. What are Salesforce Editions?

Salesforce Editions are bundles of features and services. Here is a list of Salesforce Editions:

• Essential – Designed for small businesses that want to get started with a CRM system quickly
• Professional – Designed for businesses requiring full-featured CRM functionality
• Enterprise – Designed for large and complex businesses
• Unlimited – Offers full flexibility offered by Salesforce Lightning Platform
• Developer – Free Org to be used for exploring Salesforce

Q32. What is a Permission Set?

A permission set is a collection of settings and permissions that give users access to various tools and functions. Permission sets extend users’ functional access without changing their profiles.

Q33. What is a Permission Set Group?

A Permission Set Group is used to bundle permission sets together based on user job functions.

Q34. What is Setup Audit Trail?

Setup Audit Trail tracks the recent setup changes that you and other admins make.

Q35. What is Login History?

Login History represents the history for all successful and failed login attempts for organizations and enabled portals.

Q36. What is AppExchange?

AppExchange is the enterprise cloud marketplace with ready-to-install apps, solutions, and consultants that let you extend Salesforce. 

Q37. What is the use of Password Policies?

You can use Password policies to ensure that the appropriate level of password security is used for your organization. You can specify password requirements with Password Policies settings for users assigned to a profile.

Q38. What are Objects in Salesforce?

Salesforce objects are database tables that permit you to store the data specific to an organization. Salesforce Objects are of two types:

• Standard Objects – are objects that are included with Salesforce. Example: Account, Contact .
• Custom Objects – are objects that you create to store information that’s specific to your company or industry. Example: Insurance Policy

Q39. What are various field data types in Salesforce?

You can find Salesforce Field Data Types in the image below:

Q40. What is a Page Layout?

Page Layout controls the layout and organization of buttons, fields, custom links, and related lists on object record pages. They also help determine which fields are visible, read only, and required.

Q41. What are Record Types?

Record Types allow you to have different picklist values and page layout for different profiles.

Q42. What are Object Relationships?

Object relationships are special field type that connects two objects together. Salesforce supports following Object Relationships:

• Master detail – one object is the master and another is the detail. The master object controls certain behaviours of the detail object, like who can view the detail’s data
• Lookup – links two objects together so that you can “look up” one object from the related items on another object
• Many to many – You can use master-detail relationships to model many to many relationships between any two objects using a Junction Object 
• External lookup – An external lookup relationship links a child standard, custom, or external object to a parent external object
• Indirect lookup – An indirect lookup relationship links a child external object to a parent standard or custom object
• Hierarchical – A special lookup relationship available for only the user object. It lets users use a lookup field to associate one user with another that does not directly or indirectly refer to itself

Q43. What is Lightning App Builder?

Lightning App Builder is a point-and-click tool to create custom pages.

Q44. What are different Lightning Page Types?

Lighting Page Types are:

• App Page – app home page where they can quickly access the objects and items
• Home Page – pages with features relevant to specific types of users
• Record Page – a customized version of an object’s record page

Q45. What are Accounts?

Accounts are Companies or Individuals you are doing business with. In Salesforce there are two types of Accounts:

• Business Account – Stores information about a company
• Person Account – Stores information about individual people by combining certain account and contact fields into one record

Q46. What are the key prerequisites to enable Person Account in your Org?

To use Person Accounts, your org must meet the following requirements:

• There’s at least one record type for accounts
• Users that have read permission on accounts have read permission on contacts
• Organization-wide default sharing is set so that Contact is “Controlled by Parent” or Account and Contact is “Private”
• If profile filtering is enabled, the View All Profiles permission is required

Once you have met these requirements you can request Salesforce Support to enable Person Account in your Org.

Q47. What is Lead Conversion?

Using Lead Conversion process you can convert a lead record into Accounts, Contacts & Opportunities.

Q48. What is Sales Process?

Sales Process is a set of important steps that your sales team can follow to complete a sales cycle.

Q49. What is Path?

Path is a visualization tool that you can use on objects to help guide users along a Path to a final destination.

Q50. What are Price Books?

A price book is a list of products and their prices. There are two types of Price Books in Salesforce:

• Standard Price Book – Master list of all your products and their default standard prices
• Custom Price Book – Separate list of products with custom prices, called list prices

Additional Salesforce Admin Resources

• Salesforce Admins Blog

I will be updating this article will be soon, please come back for more real world, frequently asked Salesforce Admin Interview Questions and Answers!

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