Review and tips for four recently passed Salesforce Certifications

I’ve spent most of 2024 outside of project work busying myself with passing an array of Salesforce certifications.
The following are the 4 most recent && in-demand certs I passed (ranked in difficulty) and tips for passing them:

1. Salesforce AI Associate

   • 2nd easiest Salesforce cert I’ve passed (only behind Salesforce Associate exam).
   • Salesforce AI Associate exam is largely a high-level overview of concepts in AI such as generative AI, NLP, ethics, etc.
   • 30 minute crash course by Salesforce Help Club
     • By just having a general knowledge of recent AI hype/advancements + watching this video, you could likely pass the exam.
   • If you’d like additional preparation, watch this video series as well: Inspirate Solutions AI associate playlist
   • Salesforce AI certs free for remainder of 2024

2. Salesforce AI Specialist

   • Much harder than the AI Associate && almost exclusively Salesforce-specific concepts and tools (I only had one general AI ‘term’ type question).
   • If you wanted to hack passing Salesforce AI Specialist exam quickest, review the Trust Layer material closely as it’s scattered throughout the exam, and the questions are relatively easy once you have the general key concepts.
   • Fantastic blog-post study guide
   • Focus on Einstein Trust Layer as Salesforce loves this type of content and it’s scattered throughout the exam:
     • Pratima on Trust Layer
     • Einstein Trust Layer Guide
   • Focus on Generative AI portion (it’s by far the toughest part of the exam and seems to comprise more than 17%):
     • Einstein Generative AI Features
       • Particularly focus on:
         • Einstein for Service features
         • Einstein Sales Tools
       • What makes these questions difficult is the branding of tools running together while their functions are similar: ‘Einstein Service Replies’, ‘Einstein Reply Recommendations’, ‘Einstein Work Summaries’, ‘Call Summaries’, ‘Call Explorer’, etc.
   • Test your readiness before the exam

3. Salesforce Certified Tableau CRM and Einstein Discovery Consultant
   I’ve spent most of 2024 working in a CRM Analytics-enabled Salesforce org, so I went ahead and sat for and passed the Certified Tableau CRM and Einstein Discovery Consultant exam.

Some Salesforce exams are a good representation of your ability to implement solutions in that particular cloud/test subject, but this certification exam does not (at least not on the development side … possibly an OK representation of some Admin aspects of CRM Analytics).
Whilst not being indicative of what someone does on the job implementing CRM Analytics, it is also a difficult exam full of oddly specific questions regarding CRM settings, steps needed to turn things on, and options you’d almost never encounter while developing in CRM Analytics.

I don’t have a great focused study path for this exam, but I can give advice on what to NOT spend time on && can also provide learning tips for those wanting to truly grow as a CRM Analytics admin/developer (more of those coming later as I summarize my learning resources).

Tips:

• If you just care about passing the exam (and not your actual implementation skills of CRM Analytics), then don’t spend time mastering SAQL.
  • SAQL is a unique, tricky query language, and I figured it would be a difficult part of the exam (and I actively needed to work with it anyways on big projects), but there was only 1 question involving SAQL code.
  • The only exception to the prior statement regarding SAQL is Time Series Analysis. It is definitely worth thoroughly reviewing how to perform them using SAQL.
    • SAQL Developer Guide (page 11)
• Compare tables (focus on building them using the point && click UI)
  • Think default settings && options as you begin to build one … default number of rows.
  • Salesforce Help: Compare Tables
  • Great blog post: Rolling Aggregation with Compare Tables
• Bindings
  • 9-part blog series on Bindings by Rikke Hovgaard — having a general understanding of this series is more than enough for the exam.
• Limits
  • CRM Analytics limits doc
    There are numerous questions that are specific numbers from this, so if there was something you were going to memorize, it would be this.
• Einstein Discovery
  • This section would be quite the struggle without at least getting hands-on briefly. Create a test model inside Model Builder, and then focus on the visual ‘Insights’ charts such as ‘Why it Happened’ && ‘Predictions and Improvements,’ and pay attention to what the different chart types represent.
  • Common Data Prep Quality Issues — these are worth studying up on.
• Tableau
  • There were only 1 or 2 questions that had anything to do with Tableau, so it’s not worth studying anything related to Tableau Desktop or spending too much time with Tableau <-> CRM Analytics integrations.
  • AutomationChampion study-guide
• CRM Analytics and Einstein Discovery Consultant cert prep — do right before you take the exam to gauge readiness.

4. Salesforce CPQ
   Difficult exam and a great gauge of how well you know the intricacies of Salesforce CPQ && overall one of the best Salesforce certifications I’ve seen at being an indicator of someone’s ability to use the platform/library.
   It’s been several months since I passed this exam && have been heavily into CRM Analytics projects in recent months, so until I can review my test materials, here are some general tips:

Tips:

• It’s crucial that you get hands-on configuring CPQ components such as bundles, product rules, price rules, etc. I was fortunate enough to learn CPQ on the fly while working in a very complex CPQ org laden with tech debt, but if you aren’t working at a company with CPQ, it’s important to sign up for a trial org (find out how to do this).
• When creating various test products, make sure to create subscription products of various types and renewal terms so that you will be able to encounter the various tough edge cases that come along as you move subscriptions through the Quote -> Order -> Contract -> Renewal lifecycle (the trickiest questions will involve the behavior of such products at particular junctions in this lifecycle).
• I learned MDQ before taking the exam (wasn’t using it on project work), but there were 0 questions regarding it.

I will be releasing more tips related to the CPQ exam as I circle back into playing with it (especially if Salesforce ramps up their Revenue Cloud push).