CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)
CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) is the total sales and marketing cost required to acquire one new customer. Fully loaded, it includes salaries, commissions, tools and programme spend — not just advertising.
Formula
Worked example
$120,000 of fully loaded S&M spend in a quarter that lands 80 new customers is a CAC of $1,500. If only ad spend ($30,000) were counted, CAC would look like $375 — a dangerous fiction.
Blended CAC divides all spend by all new customers; paid CAC divides channel spend by customers from that channel. Blended tells you whether the whole machine is efficient; paid tells you whether the next pound of ad budget is worth spending. You need both.
The most expensive mistake is excluding people costs. In most B2B SaaS, salaries are 60–80% of S&M — leave them out and every downstream metric (LTV:CAC, payback) turns falsely green.
Compute it: CAC calculator