To all the newcomers to Salesforce, in this blog, I am going to share my study notes regarding  Salesforce Associate certification.

Salesforce has a lot of great certification options, and they recently announced the new Associate certification!

You might want to check out my other blog regarding How to pass Salesforce Certified Business Analyst Certification

I passed this exam on September 14th, 2022 and here in this blog post, I am going to share my notes which helped me to crack this one.

You can get notes about my other certifications below

Salesforce Certification Notes

About the Exam

  • Content: 40 multiple-choice/multiple-select questions
  • Time allotted to complete the exam: 70 minutes
  • Passing Score: 62%
  • Registration fee: USD 75 plus applicable taxes as required per local law
  • Retake fee: Free
  • Prerequisites: None

Exam Guide

Exam Outline

Salesforce Ecosystem: 32%
  • Given a scenario, describe various resources available to learn and apply in-demand Salesforce skills.
  • Given a use case, identify which Salesforce Customer 360 product offerings could be used.
  • Describe how companies use Salesforce.
  • Differentiate between various job roles and career paths in the Salesforce ecosystem.
Navigation: 28%
  • Given a scenario, identify how a user can locate and access necessary information.
  • Given a scenario, identify where Salesforce customization takes place.
Data Model: 25%
  • Explain the relationship between the core standard objects (account, contact, lead, opportunity, case).
  • Given a scenario, determine which feature to use to ensure data visibility.
  • Given a scenario, determine which tool to use to ensure data integrity.
Reports & Dashboards: 15%
  • Describe reports on Salesforce.
  • Describe dashboards on Salesforce.

Exam Trailmix

Study Notes

Salesforce Ecosystem: 32% (13 Questions)

The largest and most important exam section is this one. Your comprehension of the Salesforce ecosystem will be tested here

  • What is Salesforce?
  • What Is Salesforce Customer 360?
  • What Customers Want and Expect from Companies in a Digital-First World
  • What is CRM, and How Does it Work?
  • Key Salesforce Products
  • Values of Salesforce
    • Trust
    • Customer Success
    • Innovation
    • Equality
    • Sustainability
  • Salesforce 1-1-1 model
    • Salesforce donates 1% of the time of its workers, 1% of its equity, and 1% of its product to charities. Since its founding in 1999, Salesforce has donated millions of volunteer hours, millions of dollars in grants, and thousands of its products to charities and educational institutions.
  • Salesforce partners help customers:
    • Maximize your use of Salesforce.
    • Adapt Salesforce to their company’s requirements.
    • Expand into new fields and industries.
  • Who is a trailblazer?
    • An innovator, pioneer, lifelong learner, mover, and shaker.
    • A leader who paves the way for followers.
    • Above all, someone who creates a better world for others.
  • The Trailblazer Community enables you to gain useful knowledge, make friends with other Trailblazers, and volunteer.
  • To accommodate all types of learners, the Trailhead curriculum combines a variety of content formats and methodologies.
    • Videos
    • Code samples
    • Walkthroughs
    • Screenshots
    • Images
    • Tables and charts
    • Step-by-step instructions
  • A hands-on challenge requires more work than a quiz and rewards you with more points as a result. You must look at a list of requirements and take action in a Salesforce org to meet them in order to complete a hands-on challenge.
  • You can use a Trailhead Playground org to take on practical tasks, learn new features, and test customizations.
  • By bringing together the marketing, sales, commerce, support, and IT departments with a single, shared customer view, Salesforce Customer 360 is an integrated customer relationship management (CRM) platform that aids enterprises in transforming their operations.
    • The entire Salesforce product line—including our primary applications, platform, services, and connected ecosystem—is covered under it.
  • How the right tools and shared customer insight can benefit each department.
    • By tailoring your marketing messages to the right person at the right time on the right channel, you can increase lead generation, customer acquisition, and upselling opportunities.
    • Give your sales team the resources and information they need to create and implement a precise, repeatable sales process so that sales representatives can spend more time thoughtfully engaging with customers and less time entering data.
    • Create straightforward, seamless digital commerce experiences to connect commerce to the rest of your business and increase revenue.
    • Deliver consistent, individualised customer service throughout each interaction—from the contact centre to the field, and from chatbots to service automation.
    • Create cutting-edge apps to satisfy all employee, partner, and customer needs. Automate crucial business processes to increase productivity.
  • The definition of a database in the context of Salesforce must be understood. Think of a sizable spreadsheet when we talk about the database. Salesforce stores the data you enter so you can access it again later in the database. It’s kept in a very specific manner so you can always get to the data you require.
  • Multitenancy is a fantastic word to use at dinner parties to look intelligent, but all it really implies is that you’re sharing resources. In the multitenant cloud, Salesforce offers a basic set of services to each and every one of our clients. You have access to the same computing power, data storage, and essential features regardless of the size of your business.
  • Your organization’s functionality, code, and standard and unique configurations are all metadata. You can move so quickly on the platform in part because Salesforce is skilled at storing and providing you with that metadata as soon as you create it.
  • You can get to Setup from any page in your Salesforce org.
  • The Salesforce platform has a network of partners who leverage its adaptability to create incredible apps and other solutions that anybody can use. These products can be downloaded and installed on AppExchange (some for no charge, others for a fee).
  • Lightning Platform can be used
    • Create responsive, custom pages and apps with a wide range of configurable components using straightforward drag-and-drop operations.
    • With Process Builder and Lightning Flow, which include point-and-click workflow and process tools, you can increase productivity in your company and turn complicated processes into apps.
    • Create complex programmes with the best user experience, design patterns, components, and time savings with the Lightning Design System, and keep your code consistent with current trends without having to manually update it.
    • With Lightning Components, create apps more quickly and scale development more quickly.
  • For Salesforce products, the status sites offer transparency regarding service availability and performance.
Navigation: 28% (12 Questions)

Your knowledge of how to locate information such as licenses, company details and organisational settings, list views (including use cases for Kanban), Search, and personalization will be tested in this scenario-based portion (tabs, language, timezone).

You should be able to recognise where end-users can make changes, such as adding a phone number, changing their default locale, resetting their password, or altering their App navigation tabs, in addition to knowing where to make changes at a more general level.

You should be familiar with the AppExchange, user administration, and the setup tools that allow for basic customisation, such as the Lighting App Builder.

  • Using accounts and contacts, you can keep track of customer data in Salesforce. Accounts are the businesses you do business with, and contacts are the employees of those businesses.
  • There are three different kinds of relationships between individuals and the accounts . Different types of relationships provide various perspectives on your company.
    • Ties between businesses (accounts) and the personnel who work there (contacts). Your customers’ (accounts’) interactions with other customers (other accounts).
    • You may keep track of connections between people and the businesses they collaborate with by connecting a contact to many accounts (referred to as Contacts to Multiple Accounts). Moving the sale along depends on knowing whether a contact has a connection to Get Cloudy indirectly.
    • Customer (account) relationships with the coworkers that deal with them (other Salesforce users). Account teams also reveal which sales representatives are engaged in the Get Cloudy deal. You can coordinate more effectively by using account teams.
  • You can simply track the connections between people and companies without maintaining duplicate records when you link a single contact to several accounts. Still, the ground rules are straightforward. Each contact must be connected to a specific account. The company the contact is typically most closely affiliated with is the account that appears in Account Name.
  • Every Salesforce cloud and product is covered by AppExchange, although there are typically only two types of listings: consultants and solutions. A solution is something that connects to Salesforce and enhances its essential features. For instance, a program that connects Service Cloud with a third-party survey tool
  • Packages, which are containers for apps, tabs, and objects, are how AppExchange solutions are installed in your organization. Managed and unmanaged packages are available. Which package type the solution provider chooses to use for distribution determines how the solution will operate in your organization.
  • Scrum has five core values. 
    • Focus
    • Courage
    • Openness
    • Commitment
    • Respect
  • Scrum drives us to:
    • Deliver or demonstrate something every sprint so the team can get feedback on deliverables frequently.
    • We must always work to enhance our performance, that of the team, and the final result.
    • Put together a smart team and delegate all decision-making to them.
    • Designate a single person to take down the obstacles so that someone is in charge.
    • Designate a single person to create work schedules and project priorities for teams so that everyone is concentrating on what matters.
  • Use SOQL:
    • Retrieve data from a single object or from multiple objects that are related to one another.
    • Count the number of records.
    • Sort results as part of the query.
    • Retrieve data from number, date, or checkbox fields.
  • Use SOSL:
    • Retrieve information for a term you are aware of existing in a field. SOSL searches are quicker and can produce more relevant results because SOSL can tokenize multiple terms in a field and create a search index from this.
    • Effortlessly retrieve various objects and fields, including related or unrelated objects.
    • Retrieve data for a particular division in an organization using the divisions feature, and you want to find it in the most efficient way possible.
  • You can view the records that are important to you in list views. You can use filters to create lists of accounts, contacts, opportunities, or other Salesforce records that are unique to you and your sales reps.
  • Home is a cutting-edge, intelligent home page with a variety of tools to help your sales team get their day off to a quick start. Sales agents can track their progress toward their goals and get information on important accounts from home. Additionally, they have access to the Assistant, a schedule of activities, and locations.
  • The Opportunity Kanban is a visualization tool for opportunities that sales representatives can use to review deals arranged by the pipeline stage. Sales representatives can move deals between stages using drag-and-drop functionality, and they can also receive customized alerts on important deals as they are in flight.
  • Sales representatives will enjoy the option to customize report filters when using Lightning Experience Report, and admins will value the dashboard editor’s spanning columns and flexible style, which let you combine more dashboard components (charts) of various sizes on a single dashboard.
  • The information about your business is gathered in your corporate settings. The majority of this collection is recorded when you buy a Salesforce product, however, you can change the settings if your business relocates or goes worldwide. It’s essentially a snapshot of the character of your business.
  • Providing information to users in a familiar format enhances their Salesforce experience and increases their effectiveness as spies. The display formats for date and time, user names, addresses, and periods and commas in numbers are determined by the Salesforce locale settings.
Data Model : 25% (10 Questions)

You must show that you comprehend the Salesforce architecture, common items, and their relationships in this area. Accounts, Contacts, Leads, Opportunities, and Cases should be familiar to you.

You will determine how visibility is managed based on a scenario, thus you must be familiar with features like roles, role hierarchy, profiles, permission sets, record kinds, page layouts, and field visibility.

Additionally, you should be aware of the methods for ensuring data integrity, such as default values, mandatory fields, and validation guidelines.

  • There are two main types of object relationships: lookup and master-detail.
    • Lookup Relationship: You can have one-to-one or one-to-many lookup connections. Because a single account might have numerous linked contacts, the relationship between an account and a contact is one to many. You might establish a one-to-one relationship between the Property object and a Home Seller object for our DreamHouse example.
    • Master-Detail Relationship: Master-detail connections are a little closer knit than lookup relationships, which tend to be more casual. One object serves as the master in this connection, while another acts as the detail. Who can view the data in the detail object, for example, is controlled by the master object.
  • Using the tool Schema Builder, you can view and modify your data model. It is helpful for creating and comprehending intricate data models.
  • Leads are the individuals and businesses you have recognised as possible clients. There are various techniques to find leads. Many of your leads may come from satisfied clients referring you to others. Additionally, you can collect leads through website contact, conference booth visitors, and information exchanges with partner businesses. Lead records in Salesforce are where leads’ information is kept.
  • You can quickly access useful utilities and popular productivity tools from the utility bar, which is a fixed footer. These include Notes, Quip, a flow launcher, telephony features, and even customized options that your admin creates.
  • Each record in Salesforce comes with a number of standard fields. Most CRM organizations use standard fields like company name, contact information, account number, status, date, and amount. However, because every company is different, you might want to record significant information that isn’t covered by a typical field.
Reports & Dashboards: 15% (6 Questions)

Get yourself familiar with –

  • Reports
    • Report formats e.g. Tabular, Summary, Matrix, Joined
    • When to create and use custom report types
    • Bucket fields
    • Conditional formatting
    • Report formulas
    • Report limitations, e.g. how many records are displayed in a report
    • Subscriptions
  • Dashboards
    • Components
    • Filters
    • Subscriptions

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