CAC is the total cost to acquire a new customer, including all sales and marketing spend. The formula: Total S&M Spend ÷ New Customers Acquired in that period. Blended CAC lumps all acquisition together; channel CAC breaks it down by source. The metric that matters most is CAC Payback Period — how many months of gross margin to recoup what you spent to acquire a customer. Under 18 months is healthy; under 12 is excellent.
For example, if you spent $100K on sales and marketing in a month and acquired 20 new customers, your CAC is $5,000 — and if each pays $10K/year at 70% gross margin, your CAC payback period is ~8.5 months.
We track blended and channel-level CAC for every client — it's how we prove which channels are worth scaling and which should be cut.
Related Terms
Relevant Cactus Services
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Book a free strategy call →Demand Generation
Demand gen is the full-funnel marketing strategy designed to create awareness, generate interest, and drive pipeline for your product.
Lead Generation
Lead gen is the tactical activity of capturing contact information from potential buyers — gated content, webinar registrations, demo requests, contact forms.
Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
ABM flips traditional demand gen: instead of casting wide and filtering, you identify a list of specific target accounts and run personalized marketing just at them.
Intent Data
Intent data tells you which companies are actively researching topics related to your product — reading articles, comparing vendors, downloading relevant content — even before they fill out a form on your site.
Dark Social
Dark social refers to the sharing and discovery that happens in private channels — Slack communities, DMs, WhatsApp groups, private Discord servers, word-of-mouth — that attribution tools can't track.
Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)
LTV is the total revenue you expect from a customer over their entire relationship with you.