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Cert++

  1. Home
  2. Study Resources
  3. Business Analyst
Resource Pack
·Study Checklist

Business Analyst

4-Step Path to Passing

  1. 1
    Complete the
    Business Analyst Trailmix
  2. 2
    Look at the
    Study Checklist
    Every concept you need to know for your exam, available for free to check off as you learn.
  3. 3
    Attempt
    Practice Exams
  4. 4
    Schedule Your Exam

Core Resources

  • Cert++ Practice Exam (1 free exam per cert, then paid)

    Free practice questions with detailed explanations. $10/mo for access to all questions, features, and certifications.

    certplusplus.com

  • Cert Prep: Salesforce Business Analyst

    Official Salesforce cert prep module with practice quizzes and flashcards for all six exam topics.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • Daily Certle Game (3 free questions per day)

    Practice your Salesforce certification knowledge daily with a challenge inspired by Wordle. Topics might not perfectly align with your preferred exam, but there's a lot of overlap between the certs.

    certplusplus.com

  • Official Trailmix

    Salesforce's curated Trailmix for the Business Analyst credential, covering the official Trailhead study path.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • Get Started as a Salesforce Business Analyst (Trail)

    Foundational trail covering the BA role, essential skills, user stories, process mapping, and best practices.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • Manage Your Projects as a Salesforce Admin (Trail)

    Project management, agile, process mapping, and scrum trail covering methodology the exam tests.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • Official Exam Guide

    Salesforce Help page with the official exam outline, objectives, format, and current exam details.

    help.salesforce.com

  • Salesforce Business Analyst Community Group

    Official Trailblazer Community group for Salesforce BAs. Good place to ask prep questions.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • r/salesforce

    Community exam reports and study tips. Search 'Business Analyst exam' for recent experience threads.

    reddit.com

  • Cert++ Discord

    The Cert++ community discord for Salesforce professionals. Exam prep, resource sharing, study groups, and more. Free and open to all.

    discord.gg

  • Trailblazer Community

    Connect with other Salesforce learners for peer support, mentoring, and study groups.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • SFXD Discord

    Large Salesforce community discord server with channels for admin topics, career advice, and technical help.

    discord.gg

  • Salesforce Certification Score Calculator

    Check your exam score based on section results. Estimates your total score from category percentages (community-maintained third-party tool).

    scuvanov.github.io

Exam Overview

From the official exam guide

Questions

65

60 scored5 unscored

Duration

105 min

1h 45m

To Pass

65%

Min. score

Pricing

$200 registration · $100 retake

Delivery

Online proctored or at a testing center

Experience

None (role experience as a BA recommended)

Prerequisites

No prerequisites required

Exam Topics

Each topic section shows the topic weight, learning objectives, and links to study resources.

Customer Discovery17%

BA role and responsibilities in the implementation lifecycle, business strategy and goal alignment, current-state analysis, Salesforce capability mapping, and project scoping.

  • Determine business strategies, goals, initiatives, and challenges to define the scope of a Salesforce project or business initiative.
  • Discover how a customer is leveraging existing products to establish the current state.
  • Understand and explain Business Analyst roles and responsibilities in different phases of the implementation lifecycle.
  • Apply the implementation lifecycle for planning business analysis activities.
  • Analyze the customer's Salesforce environment(s) to identify opportunities and constraints.
  • Demonstrate knowledge of Salesforce capabilities, align them with business needs, and recommend potential solutions.

Resources

  • Customize an Org to Support a New Business Unit

    Hands-on project: analyze a business unit's needs, manage access, and configure the org to match requirements.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • Salesforce Business Analyst: Quick Look

    BA role overview: what the job entails, skills required, and how the role fits on a Salesforce team.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • Admin and BA Job Comparison: Quick Look

    Admin vs. BA role distinction, overlap, and collaboration on a Salesforce implementation.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • Essential Business Analyst Skills

    Top BA skills, information-discovery techniques, communication strategies, and documentation types.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • Business Analyst Best Practices

    Customer empathy, scheduling for discovery, advocating for users, and building a habit of continuous improvement.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • Innovation Customer Discovery

    Rapid research tactics: empathy interviews, customer archetypes, and future-state visioning.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • Project Management Essentials

    Project management methodologies, waterfall vs. agile, and how a BA delivers value within each.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • Drucker School: Business Performance Basics

    Drucker's five key business questions: mission, customer, value, results, and plan. Useful for scoping discovery conversations.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • Salesforce Basics

    Salesforce platform overview: CRM apps, Agentforce, Data Cloud, and the platform's core capabilities.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • Sales Operations Use Case and Best Practices

    Sales ops process improvement approach and cross-team collaboration practices for project scoping.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

Collaboration with Stakeholders23%

Stakeholder identification and RACI planning, discovery activity design, elicitation techniques (interviews, workshops, surveys, observation, document analysis), trusted-advisor relationship building, current-to-future-state design, and consensus management.

  • Plan discovery activities based on the target stakeholders to perform a thorough analysis of business needs.
  • Identify key stakeholders and develop relationships with them as a trusted advisor to act as a liaison between business and technical teams.
  • Given a scenario, choose the most effective technique for eliciting business needs from stakeholders.
  • Explain how to move from current state analysis to an agreed future state design.
  • Given a scenario, manage competing priorities to obtain stakeholder consensus.

Resources

  • Design and Distribute Surveys with Salesforce Feedback Management

    Hands-on project: build and distribute stakeholder surveys to gather structured feedback on solutions.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • Trust and Influence

    Building trusted relationships, developing influence strategies, and navigating organizational dynamics.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • Relationship Building

    Empathy-based communication, building skilled working relationships, and fostering a trust-driven environment.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • Journey Mapping

    Current and future state customer journey mapping, workshop facilitation, and solution design input.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • Innovation Ideation and Prototyping

    Team ideation techniques, idea prioritization, rapid prototyping, and pitching future-state solutions.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • Strategies for Presenting to Executive Audiences

    Structuring presentations for executives, crafting a project narrative, and presenting recommendations.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • Virtual Whiteboarding: Quick Look

    Tips and best practices for running collaborative whiteboard sessions during remote discovery workshops.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • UX Personas for Salesforce

    Salesforce user research personas across Sales, Service, Marketing, and Experience Cloud.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • Organizational Alignment (V2MOM)

    V2MOM framework for aligning business goals, strategies, and priorities across stakeholders.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • Content Strategy Development

    Audience analysis, content requirements gathering, and aligning business needs to deliverable strategy.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

Business Process Mapping12%

Process decomposition and scope definition, UPN and swimlane diagram notation, current-to-future state documentation, version-controlled process repositories, and stakeholder visualization techniques.

  • Demonstrate how to define the scope of a complex business process and break it down into manageable steps.
  • Analyze and document a business process to elicit requirements and engage stakeholders to visualize a future state.
  • Document business processes in a version controlled repository to manage scope.

Resources

  • Create a Process for Managing Support Cases

    Hands-on project: define and implement a support process with record types, escalation rules, and workflow.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • Process Mapping for Business Analysts

    Process mapping basics, notation languages (UPN, BPMN, swimlanes), and tooling choices.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • Business Process Mapping

    Business analysis value, Universal Process Notation, map creation steps, and real-world mapping examples.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • Diagramming Essentials

    Diagramming best practices, Lucidchart integration, and designing business capability maps.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • Git and GitHub Basics

    Version control fundamentals, branching, team collaboration workflows, and GitHub repository management.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • User Experience Basics

    UX process overview, scope and requirements definition, artifact creation, and stakeholder feedback loops.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • Pro Bono Project Management

    Scoping, planning, building, and deploying a short Salesforce project from start to finish.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • Best Practices for Project Management

    Requirements gathering, activity scheduling, risk management, and project performance monitoring.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • Project Management Plan Lite

    Lightweight project management template: scope, constraints, schedule, and requirements tracking.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

Requirements18%

Business, functional, and non-functional requirements distinctions, scope vs. requirements vs. user stories, stakeholder identification and prioritization, requirements validation, traceability, and version-controlled documentation.

  • Understand the differences between scope, requirements and user stories.
  • Engage stakeholders to identify, validate, and prioritize requirements.
  • Document requirements in a version controlled repository to manage scope.

Resources

  • Build a Data Model for a Recruiting App

    Hands-on project: translate business requirements into a Salesforce data model using custom objects and fields.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • Salesforce DevOps with Copado

    Version control concepts, value stream mapping, agile planning, and continuous delivery in a Salesforce context.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • Salesforce Agile Basics

    Agile principles at Salesforce, iterative delivery, lean thinking, and the BA's role on an agile team.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • Challenge Framing and Scoping

    Framing a problem statement, scoping a challenge, building a diverse team, and defining success criteria.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • User Training and Enablement

    Communicating training goals, building a training plan, library, and in-app guidance for users.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • Jobs to Be Done Framework

    Jobs-to-be-Done framework: understanding what users are trying to accomplish and crafting job statements.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • Effective Decision-Making

    Decision-making tools for inclusive collaboration: how to prioritize and resolve competing requirements.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • UX Research Basics

    Research plan design, crafting interview questions, data collection, and synthesizing user findings.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • Salesforce Adoption Strategies

    Accelerating adoption, rollout planning, user journey design, and long-term change reinforcement.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

User Stories18%

User story format and components, acceptance criteria (Given/When/Then), Definition of Done, epics vs. features vs. stories vs. tasks, story granularity and splitting, and version-controlled story repositories.

  • Understand the components of a user story to perform thorough analysis.
  • Demonstrate how to write acceptance criteria that convey the requirements and are ready for development.
  • Document user stories in a version controlled repository to manage scope.

Resources

  • Improve Data Quality for a Recruiting App

    Hands-on project: implement validation rules and formulas that enforce data quality requirements.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • User Story Creation

    User story format (As a / I want / So that), story components, acceptance criteria, and writing well-formed stories.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • Scrum and Kanban at Salesforce

    Scrum ceremonies, sprint workflow, product backlog, Kanban boards, and choosing the right agile methodology.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • Copado Robotic Testing for Salesforce

    Business value of testing, UAT with Copado Explorer, and automated regression testing for delivered stories.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • LEVERS of Change Model

    Sustainable organizational change model: social, personal, and structural levers for driving adoption.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • Alignment as a Strategic Craft

    Achieving design-process alignment: gaining consensus, aligning teams, and resolving conflicts over scope.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • Customer-Centric Discovery Strategies

    Customer-centric interview techniques, knowing and being the customer, and creating with stakeholders.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • Change Management for AI Implementation

    Change management strategies for technology adoption, LEVERS framework, and empowering workers in transition.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

Development Support and User Acceptance12%

BA's role in sprint delivery and demos, UAT planning and execution, defect triage vs. change requests, test script creation, sign-off facilitation, and release readiness.

  • Support and validate project delivery to ensure the solution meets the requirements.
  • Support and validate user acceptance testing (UAT) to ensure the solution meets the requirements.

Resources

  • Automate Business Processes for a Recruiting App

    Hands-on project: implement automated workflows from user-story-style business requirements in a real Salesforce org.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • User Acceptance Testing

    UAT purpose, how it fits in the project lifecycle, planning, execution, and sign-off.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • Advanced Salesforce Release Readiness Strategies

    Release readiness process, feature prioritization, pre-release testing, and communicating changes to users.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • Drucker School: Organizational Change Leadership

    Drucker principles for driving organizational change, managing resistance, and leading change adoption.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • Core Responsibilities for Salesforce Admins

    Admin core responsibilities: user management, data management, security, and product analytics.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • Security Basics

    Security risk, org protection settings, and how to educate users. Relevant for validating security requirements in UAT.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • Innovation Solution

    Crafting a solution proposal, building a business case, creating a roadmap, and driving stakeholder momentum.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

  • Customer-Centric Conversation Strategies

    Engaging executives with effective communication: customer-centric messaging and executive conversation techniques.

    trailhead.salesforce.com

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