Smart companies are measuring and focused on decreasing their new customer acquisition costs. But most companies are significantly under-calculating the true cost of acquisition.
How? We often measure the most obvious costs, and either forget about or ignore the “soft” costs that add up quickly. Many marketing departments, for example, calculate acquisition costs solely based on out-of-pocket spending – media costs, sometimes software or tool licenses. But what about the salaries of the people managing those campaigns? What about the designers, copywriters and developers required to build campaign infrastructure?
And that’s just on the marketing side of the house. Many organizations combine a marketing figure with the salesperson’s commission. But in complex sales environments, a sales engineer may have invested hours and hours into a deal. Is that time included in your overall acquisition cost calculation? What about travel costs, and sales management time?
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