What is the Power of 1?
Within the archive of Salesforce’s community trailblazer pages lives a mythical article covering the “Greatest Formula Ever Written”, the Power of 1. Once the steps have been followed to create and configure this field for an object, every existing record of that Object will simply have the number 1 on it, no matter how many hundreds, thousands, millions, etc. of them you have on your SFDC org, and every record that is created after that for as long as you have your SFDC org living. While this doesn’t sound so glamorous, the Power of 1 (Po1) field helps fill a gap in the way SFDC summarizes record counts while reporting. More information on the benefits of this field outside of Marketo Measure and detailed set-up steps can be found here.
Marketo Measure + Power of 1 Reporting
Let’s start with the question of “Why do we need this “power of one’ field 🤔?”. To help with that, let’s do a quick recap of why you might be using Marketo Measure today.
At its core, Marketo Measure is a marketing attribution tool. Its goal is to help you identify and analyze the various touchpoints and channels that contribute to a customer’s decision-making process and ultimately attribute credit to the marketing efforts that led to a new lead, a new opportunity, a new closed-won deal, etc. Out of the box, the tool is designed to help you achieve that and answer those types of questions. Where Marketo Measure needs a little help is helping you easily understand influence.
In this context, influence doesn’t seek to assign credit to touchpoints or tell you which channels or campaigns to invest in. Instead, influence simply
For example, have you ever wanted, with Marketo Measure, to answer a question like:
- How many leads had a touchpoint from Paid Search last quarter?
- How many opportunities were influenced by that tradeshow we did last month?
- How many unique people in our CRM (leads or contacts) filled out a whitepaper form last year?
- On average, how many buyer attribution touchpoints are we seeing on our new business opps?
With the Power of One field set up correctly, you’re on your way to answering those questions – here’s how!
Setup:
If this field isn’t already on any of your Salesforce objects, we’d recommend reaching out to your Salesforce admin to help get this set up. If you and/or they aren’t familiar with this field to begin with, here are some resources which cover how to get this enabled:
- https://adminhero.com/2015/08/31/power-of-one-the-most-brilliant-analytics-trick-of-all-time/
- https://trailhead.salesforce.com/trailblazer-community/feed/0D54S00000A7RsPSAV
- https://www.salesforce.com/video/296533/
To start, we’d recommend setting up the Po1 field for the following standard Salesforce and Marketo Measure-specific objects:
- Lead
- Contact
- Account
- Opportunity
- Campaign
- Marketo Measure Buyer (Bizible) Touchpoint
- Marketo Measure Buyer (Bizible) Attribution Touchpoint
- Marketo Measure Buyer (Bizible) Person
From there, you need to make sure that your relevant SFDC report types are set up to include this new custom field. All Po1 fields should be added to all of these report types outlined here.
To recap, we’ve created the Power of One fields on standard and custom Salesforce Objects and created/customized Marketo Measure report types to ensure that we can access those fields when we want to dive into reporting.
How do we use this? (& Common Reports to Run)
Similar to all reporting with Marketo Measure, we strongly recommend you go into building a report with a specific question in mind. That being said, here are a few easy reports to run with your brand new Power of 1 field! Feel free to add more filters onto this to help customize for your specific business questions/needs.
Example 1: Unique leads with a touchpoint from Paid Social last quarter
| Report Type | Leads with Buyer Touchpoints (Custom) |
| Date Field/Type | Touchpoint Date |
| Date Range | Select desired date range (ie. Last Quarter) |
| Filter(s) | Marketing Channel = Paid Social* |
| Group/Dimension | Marketing Channel – Path |
| How to add/use Po1 | Add Column for Po1 field; sum column |
*This value might be different, depending on how your channels are defined within the Marketo Measure platform.
From here, you’ll be able to see a total number of leads who had a touchpoint from a paid social interaction over the past quarter, broken down by the specific subchannel (Linkedin, Facebook, Reddit, etc.). Feel free to save this report for later use and further customization!
One way of building off of this report would be to add and sum another column with the ‘Count – U-Shaped’ field. This will show you, alongside the number of leads influenced by Paid Social, the number of leads being *credited* to Paid Social, using a multi-touch model. For some context, the U-Shape Model is designed to give credit to any Touchpoints that summarize how a Lead became a Lead. While subsequent touchpoints from these Leads can also be reported to understand additional engagement (Post LC), they are not a part of the Lead Creation journey so they do not get any attribution credit in the FT, LC or U-shaped models. Most commonly, U-shaped attribution reflects an even 50/50 split between FT and LC. Once added/summed, you’re now able to see influence and attribution side-by-side!
Example 2: How many new business opportunities (and revenue) in our pipeline right now have had a touchpoint from Campaign XYZ?
| Report Type | Opportunities with Buyer Attribution Touchpoints (Custom) |
|---|---|
| Date Field/Type | Optional, if measuring all open pipeline |
| Date Range | Select desired date range (e.g., Close Date = Next Quarter) |
| Filter(s) |
|
| Group/Dimension | Marketing Channel – Path |
| How to add/use Po1 | Add Column for Po1 field; sum column |
| Add Column for org’s revenue field; sum column | Add Column for org’s revenue field; sum column |
*These values are dependent upon your specific definitions of pipeline, and your campaign naming convention. We’d highly recommend checking out this article from the Marketo Nation on how to best leverage the Ad Campaign Name field to capture cross-channel campaign efforts
With having run this report, now you can see how your efforts on a specific campaign influenced new business opportunities and how much revenue you’ve influenced. Again, this isn’t necessarily actionable in terms of showing you how this campaign performed in a multi-touch model or against cost/investment, but it can still be useful to understand!
If you did want to see influence and attribution side-by-side, we’d recommend adding the ‘Count – W-Shaped’ as a column as well. The W-Shaped model incorporates three significant touchpoint positions as milestones. Within this framework, the FT, LC, and OC touchpoints are allotted equal shares of 30% for attribution credit. The remaining 10% is evenly distributed among any intermediary touchpoints that occur between these three milestones.
Essentially, this model encapsulates the progression of a new Opportunity, which often aligns with the creation of new Pipeline Revenue. When seeking to evaluate the influence of marketing on emerging Opportunities or newly generated pipeline, it is advisable to employ the W-Shaped model. Similar to like we did before with leads influenced/attributed, this report will now show you both influence and attribution!
FAQ
- Can I use the Power of 1 field in my reporting within Discover?
- No – this field will only be useful within Salesforce
- What’s the difference between Power of 1 and the “Count – U-shaped” and “Count – W-shaped” fields?
- The Power of 1 field will always show you an unweighted count of objects and is useful for understanding influence, but it has nothing to do with the position of the touchpoint in the lead/opportunity journey or attribution in general. Meanwhile, those Count fields will show you a weighted count of leads/contacts/opportunities within a specific attribution model, helping you understand which touchpoints were most impactful in the journey of a person or opportunity.
- What if I need some additional help with my reporting?
- We’re always eager to chat with people who have questions about how to approach reporting or who want to level up their instance of Marketo Measure/Bizible! Our contact info can be found below.
By now, you should have an understanding of what the Power of 1 field does, how to set it up, why it’s useful, and how to build some reports to leverage it using Marketo Measure report types. If you have any questions about the Power of 1, or want to learn more about Attributa’s services, please reach out to us at info@attributa.io or visit us at https://attributa.io/.
