Salesforce Associate Certification Guide

The Salesforce Associate certification exam is designed for those candidates who have a fundamental awareness of the Salesforce platform and are able to solve the challenges. In this post, we will talk about how to pass the Salesforce Certified Associate. Let’s start our Guide to Pass Salesforce Associate Certification Exam.

Who is the Salesforce Certified Associate?

A Salesforce Certification Associate is one who has basic knowledge of the Salesforce platform and has up to 6 months of Salesforce user experience. Certification Associate should be able to understand reporting, user administration, sharing, customization, and data management at a foundational level is also beneficial.

Salesforce Certification Associates don’t need technical expertise.

• Know the Salesforce 360 CRM platform.
• Able to resolve business requirements with the Salesforce platform
• Fundamental knowledge of Salesforce reports, security, customization, and data management.

About the Salesforce Associate Certification

Read on for details about the Salesforce Certified Associate 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
• Prerequisite: None

Salesforce Associate Certification Exam Outline

This exam is divided into four parts.

• Salesforce Ecosystem: 32%
  • 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%
  • 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 and Dashboard: 15%
  • Describe reports on Salesforce.
  • Dashboards on Salesforce.

How to become a Salesforce Certified Associate?

As preparation for this exam, Salesforce recommends a combination of hands-on experience, training course completion, Trailhead Trails, and self-study in the areas listed in the Exam Outline section of this exam guide.

The self-study materials recommended for this exam include:

• Trailmix: Prepare for Your Salesforce Associate Credential
• Module: Salesforce Associate Certification Prep
• Check guide

Salesforce Certified Associate Practice question

Check out the trailhead module for Practice questions for Salesforce Certified Associate. Also, you can check Apex Hours FREE course for practice exam. I hope this sample Salesforce Associate Certification questions and answers will help you to clear your exam.

Topic to prepare for the Salesforce Certified Associate Exam

Here is a list of the topics in the Salesforce Associate Certification exam.

1. Salesforce Ecosystem: 32%

The Salesforce ecosystem drives the revenues and jobs created by Salesforce. The Salesforce ecosystem comprises 1) Salesforce, 2) Customer, and 3) Partners.

1.1. Various resources are available to learn and apply in-demand Salesforce skills.

Here are various resources available to learn and apply in-demand Salesforce skills:

1. Trailhead.
2. Trailhead Academy
3. Salesforce Help Document
4. Trailblazer Community
5. IdeaExchange

Trailhead

It’s a free app that teaches the skills needed to be successful in the modern world of work. You can create Trailhead playground to develop and practice Salesforce skills within Trailhead.

• Trailhead Quests: Fun way to learn and win prizes.
• Trailmixes: You can create a custom learning path for your employees using Trailhead.

Trailhead Academy

Use Trailhead Academy empowers businesses to develop expertise across their organization with expert-led learning and credentials that build and validate Salesforce skills.

Salesforce help document

Product documentation, a glossary, and release notes are posted in Salesforce help.

Trailblazer Community Group

The Trailblazer Community helps you learn relevant skills, connect with other Trailblazers, and give back. Learn about different Salesforce events in 2023.

• Dreamforce: Dreamforce is the biggest yearly conference for Salesforce.

IdeaExchange

Salesforce IdeaExchange is a website where you can share your ideas related to Salesforce products and services.

1.2. Given a use case, identify which Salesforce Customer 360 product offerings could be used.

Salesforce Product	Use
Marketing Cloud	Use Marketing Cloud Account Engagement to scale and automate marketing by improving alignment within teams.
Commerce Cloud	Use Commerce cloud to streamline the purchasing process, and personalize the buying experience and create a mobile-friendly shopping experience.
Experience Cloud	Empower customer (Self Service) and collaboration with partners.
Sales Cloud	Sales Cloud is a cloud-based application designed to help your salespeople sell smarter and faster by centralising customer information, logging their interactions with your company, and automating many of the tasks salespeople do every day.
Service Cloud	Service Cloud allows you to deliver service to every customer, anytime, anywhere. It is a part of Salesforce’s Customer Success Platform, an ecosystem of connected mobile and social tools powered by the cloud.
MuleSoft	MuleSoft is a vendor that provides an integration platform to help businesses connect data, applications and devices across on-premises and cloud computing environments.
Non-Profile Cloud	Nonprofit Cloud is a complete set of nonprofit technology solutions Salesforce.org built to connect your nonprofit with the people who care about your cause.
Salesforce Industries	Salesforce Industries started shortly after the acquisition of Vlocity. Salesforce Industries is the new name of Vlocity, a tech startup that was officially acquired by Salesforce.

1.3. Describe how companies use Salesforce

Salesforce developer org

You can use Salesforce developer org to learn development and try a new feature before implementing it for its client.

Types of instances

A Salesforce sandbox is an isolated copy of your organization’s production environment that is used for development and testing purposes. Your production environment has your live data and active users logging in.

Type of Sandbox in Salesforce

• Developer Sandbox: Developer sandboxes are special configuration sandboxes intended for coding and testing by a single developer. Developer sandboxes are limited to 200 MB of test or sample data. You can refresh a Developer sandbox once per day
• Developer Pro Sandbox: The main difference between this and Developer is the amount of data that can be stored. It also grabs some product data from production. It can only include up to 1 GB of data. You can refresh a Developer Pro sandbox once per day.
• Partial Copy: Partial Data sandboxes include all of your organization’s metadata and add a selected amount of your production organization’s data that you define using a sandbox template.
• Full Sandbox: Full sandboxes copy your entire production organization and all its data, including standard and custom object records, documents, and attachments. You can refresh a Full sandbox every 29 days.

Multi-tenant environment

Salesforce is based on Multitenant Architecture.

1.4. Differentiate between various job roles and career paths in the Salesforce ecosystem

Various Salesforce Career options are available in the Salesforce ecosystem. We will see different career choices you have or different job profiles that are available in the Salesforce job market.

Name	Description
Salesforce Associate	One who has basic knowledge of the Salesforce platform and has up to 6 months of Salesforce user experience.
Salesforce Admin	As a Salesforce Administrator, it is a very important responsibility to correctly set up the Customer Org, their roles/ responsibilities, and Hierarchy in the system. You also set up which login user should see what kind of data- controlling the visibility of the screens, etc.
Developer	Being a consultant means having a “Know How” of the system. Not just following what’s required to be done- but also to be able to suggest the processes that are industry best practices. A Salesforce functional consultant is responsible for creating a Functional Deign Document for the whole set of requirements for the Salesforce team and be able to suggest process improvements based on Salesforce Best Practices.
Salesforce Business Analyst	Right from the requirement capture, running customer workshops, requirement elicitation, interacting with different customer user groups, creating the business requirement document (BRD), capturing the as-is and to-be processes- this all is taken care by a Business Analyst(BA).
Salesforce Consultant	A program manager sits at the top of this hierarchy. This role cuts across all the teams similar to Enterprise Architect/Program Architect but is responsible for managing the customer teams, vendor teams, delivery teams, testing teams, etc. on an overall program delivery level
A Salesforce Designer	Designers work across the streams and systems and have a bigger additional responsibility to be able to see how Salesforce would fit in the overall program ecosystem. They would come up with the overall program-level design- a functional design that covers the whole program, which includes interacting systems and any inbound and outbound communications.
Sales Professional	Sales professionals are excellent communicators and relationship builders, and they enjoy helping others succeed.
Marketing Manager	Marketing managers understand the art and science behind creating targeted marketing campaigns that connect with customers. Marketers bring big ideas to the table that drive impressive results.
User Interface/User Experience Designer	User experience (UX) designers are problem solvers, working cross-functionally with product managers, engineers, content creators, and executives to create and refine a product vision.
Salesforce Architect	To stitch through all the requirements across the project and to be able to suggest the best approach for all the set of requirements, an Architect plays a pivotal role. The Salesforce Architect is responsible for gathering technical and functional details from each of the track tech specialists.
Program Manager	Similar to the functional consultant role- but Designers work across the streams and systems and have a bigger additional responsibility to be able to see how Salesforce would fit in the overall program ecosystem. They would come up with the overall program-level design- a functional design that covers the whole program, which includes interacting systems and any inbound and outbound communications.

2. Navigation: 28%

2.1 Given a scenario, identify how a user can locate and access necessary information.

Global search

Related lists: Includes details and links to other records.

My Favorites: You can add records or reports in my favorites

Tab: The Starting points for viewing, editing, and entering information for a particular object.

Recycle Bin: Use to view and restore deleted records. You can access the Recycle bin from App Launcher in the Lightning platform.

2.2 Given a scenario, identify where Salesforce customization takes place.

User settings

Users can change their profile from the settings icon under their profile icon. He can change his email address, his password etc.

• You cannot delete the user in Salesforce. You can only deactivate the user to free up the licenses.

Setup

The Setup menu is accessed from the Setup link on the upper-right corner of any Salesforce page. The Setup menu is organized into goal-based categories: Administer, Build, Deploy, Monitor, and Checkout.

Personal settings

Personal settings, which all Salesforce users can edit, are available from a separate My Settings menu. User settings ➡ My Personal information.

• From my email Settings, you set your email signature as well.
• You can also change your personal Language and Time Zone.

App Launcher

The App Launcher is how users switch between apps.

Object Manager

A tool that lets admins access object management and custom objects. With this, we can check all custom and standard objects available in Salesforce.

Company Information

Use company information to check sandbox details and available licenses in org and to change the default time zone for the organization.

Setup ➡ Company Information ➡ User Licenses

Login Hours

Can we use login Hours to restrict user login access outside of designated hours? You can setup that on profile level.

3. Data Model: 25 %

3.1 Explain the relationship between the core standard objects (account, contact, lead, opportunity, case).

Lead conversation

An account, contact, and optionally opportunity are created.

Field types

• Roll-up summary: A roll-up summary field calculates values from related records, such as those in a related list. You can create a roll-up summary field to display a value in a master record based on the values of fields in a detail record. For example, you want to show the sum of all closed opportunity amounts of the account.
• Number
• Formula
• etc.

You can make a field required with below option

• Page layout: Make the field required on the page layout level.
• Validation rule to make it required.
• Field Level: If you want to make field universally required. Then do it on field level.

Schema Builder

A tool that allows visualization and edits to the data model.

Object Relationships

Following are the different types of relationships available in the Salesforce

• Master-Detail Relationship: Master-Detail relationship is one type of relationship that forms a tight bond relationship between a parent object and a child object. Cascade record deletions. When a parent record is deleted, all its child records get deleted automatically. For example Account is parent of opportunity. If you delete the account record, then all child opportunities will deleted.
• Lookup Relationship: A lookup relationship is one type of relationship that forms a loose bond relationship between a parent object and a child object. For example, Account and contact relationship.
• Many-to-Many: We can create a many-to-many relationship using the Junction object.
• Self Relationship
• External Lookup
• Indirect Lookup

3.2 Given a scenario, determine which feature to use to ensure data visibility.

• Record Types: Used for different business processes, picklist values, and page layouts for different users based on profile.
• Page layouts: use page layout to add field on detail page. Also you can use same to add related list on details page too.
• Dynamic form: Use Dynamic Forms to define the layout of a record detail page that contains fields and sections (what we do with page layouts currently). What makes this dynamic is you can show/hide the sections & fields based on certain filter criteria, which currently is not possible with page layouts. Hence, it provides more granular control to admins and consultants
• Data Security:
  • Permission set and Profile
  • User Group
  • Permission Set Groups: Use to bundle permission set together.
  • Queue
  • Role Hierarchy: Use Role Hierarchy when you want parent can see all child record but not sibling. For example if you want manager should able to see all his team record.

3.3 Given a scenario, determine which tool to use to ensure data integrity

• Default values
• Data validation rules: Validation rules are best tool to enforce the restriction on records creation like making field required.

4. Reports and Dashboard: 15%

Reports and Dashboards section of the Salesforce Associate exam

4.1 Describe reports on Salesforce.

In its simplest form, a report is a group of data that meets a set of criteria, for example, a group of accounts or opportunities. To get the exact data you need, you can filter, group, and do math on the data in the report. If visuals work better for you, you can view the data in a graph or chart

• Report tab: The Reports tab is the central hub for Salesforce Reports and Dashboards. On the Reports tab you can create a new report, view the existing report and search for reports or dashboards in all folders.
  • Use Subscriptions to subscribe the report.
  • Conditional formatting
  • Bucket fields
• Report folders: Use report and dashboard folders to organize your reports and dashboards. To share reports and dashboards, you share the folder, not the report or dashboard itself.
• Report preview: 2000 rows can be displayed in reports.
• Report types: Report Types are the templates which gives you the ability to create the Reports in a different format
• Types of reports:
  • Tabular
  • Summary
  • Matrix
  • Joined Reports
• Report fields:
• Report filters and groups: When you’re using the report builder to ask a question about your data, filters, and filter logic allow you to get more specific. Row limits help you limit the answer you receive.
• Report export:
• Chart Types

Chart Types

Chart Type	Use
Bar Charts	A column chart is very much like a bar chart, but it can be a better format for showing relative counts of things, such as leads or dollars. Use a column chart when you have a summary report with a single grouping or you only want to display one grouping.
Column Charts	Use a donut chart when you have multiple groupings and want to show not only the proportion of a single value for each grouping against the total but also the total amount itself.
Line Charts	Line charts are good for showing changes in the value of an item over a series of points in time, such as week to week or quarter to quarter. Use a line chart when you have one important grouping representing an ordered set of data and one value to show.
Pie Charts	Use a pie chart when you have multiple groupings and want to show the proportion of a single value for each grouping against the total.
Donut Charts	Use a donut chart when you have multiple groupings and want to show not only the proportion of a single value for each grouping against the total, but also the total amount itself.
Funnel Charts	Use a funnel chart when you have multiple groupings in an ordered set and want to show the proportions among them.
Scatter Charts	Use scatter charts to show meaningful information using one or two groups of report data plus summaries.

4.2 Describe dashboards on Salesforce.

Dashboards offer a powerful visual display of your data around a common theme. For example, you can create a Sales Dashboard that shows you charts and graphs of your company’s sales performance with supporting metrics about your top accounts, top opportunities, win rates, and which account types perform the best.

• Dashboard refresh button:
• Dashboard components:

To learn more about the report and Dashboard, check apex hours session

FAQ

Summary

I hope this post will help you to become a Salesforce Certified Associate.