Glossary

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Glossary / Evaluation and implementation guide

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is the total cost of acquiring new customers divided by the number of customers acquired in a period.

In B2B it should include sales and marketing costs: salaries, tools, agency fees and media. It differs from CPA, which counts any acquisition event (often a lead), while CAC counts paying customers only.

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A practical example

Example: a SaaS team sums quarterly marketing spend, sales salaries and tool costs, divides by the number of new logos closed in the same quarter, and tracks the resulting CAC against average contract value.

What to evaluate before investing

  • Verify the tool can ingest sales costs and headcount-related spend, not only marketing platform data.
  • Check whether CAC can be segmented by channel, segment or region, since blended CAC hides where efficiency lives.
  • Confirm the tool supports payback-period views comparing CAC to gross profit per customer over time.

Limitations and tradeoffs

CAC lags reality: customers closed this quarter may come from spend made quarters earlier. Long B2B sales cycles make period alignment tricky, so pair CAC with cohort-based payback rather than reading it month to month.

Plan your next step with MeshLine

Connect this decision to your automation, organic marketing and customer lifecycle management. In a MeshLine demo, discuss your existing tools, the scope you need and how to measure the result.

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