CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost): How a CRM helps calculate the real cost of each customer

Another typical problem is manual calculations in Excel. People include the advertising budget but forget:

• salaries of marketing and sales staff;
• subscription fees for email services, CRM, and phone systems;
• design of creatives, photoshoots, contractors.

Below are the key setup elements without which accurately calculating customer acquisition cost becomes a lottery.

• Source tags (UTM). Every ad click must carry UTM tags: channel, campaign, ad. The CRM reads these tags and links the deal to its source. This way, the system calculates CAC separately for Google, Instagram, Email, referrals, and other channels instead of averaging everything into a single number.
• A unified scheme for recording sources in CRM. It’s important that the team uses a consistent directory of sources and campaigns. Otherwise, your report might show “Google,” “Google Ads,” “Search,” and “Advertising” as four separate sources, losing the meaning of channel-based CAC calculation.
• Tracking advertising costs. Even if ad accounts aren’t connected directly yet, it’s worth setting up a simple structure in CRM — for example, a smart object “Advertising expenses” with fields like “channel,” “period,” “campaign,” and “amount.” Budgets from Google, Meta, TikTok, etc., are then aligned with deals and easily pulled into reports and the CAC formula. When integrations with ad accounts become available, these fields simply populate automatically instead of being entered manually.
• Accounting for indirect costs. In CRM, you should create separate line items: rent, software, sales team bonuses, fixed marketing contractors. These can be allocated proportionally across channels or clients in reports, giving you a “full CAC” instead of just the “ad CAC.”
• Unified rules for deal management. If managers create deals differently, fail to complete some leads, or “forget” to close lost deals, analytics becomes distorted. A clear process is needed: when a deal is created, at which stage it counts as won, and how rejections are marked.

Warning signals in LTV/CAC ratios:

• 1:1 — you’re breaking even or losing money. All revenue goes to acquisition, and the business is heading toward bankruptcy.
• 2:1 — seems positive, but the margin is thin. Any spike in marketing costs or drop in conversion can break the model.
• 3:1 — healthy ratio. Marketing pays off, unit economics are balanced, and scaling is feasible.
• 4:1 — efficient model, but growth pace may need attention. It might be wise to increase budget and capture more market share.
• 5:1 or higher — sounds great, but this signals the business is under-investing in marketing and missing out on potential revenue.

Instead of a blanket “cut costs” approach, you can optimize channels, funnel stages, and customer base management with precision.

• Eliminating inefficient channels. A CRM report shows: TikTok delivers cheap leads at $2 each, but only a few convert, making CAC $50. Google Ads delivers leads at $10, but conversion is high, CAC = $15. From a marketing ROI perspective, TikTok burns the budget while Google generates revenue. The solution is clear — turn off or radically restructure underperforming channels.
• Recovering abandoned carts and incomplete deals. Automated reminders, promo emails, and triggered calls from CRM bring back some customers without extra ad spend. Each “recovered” deal lowers average CAC because you didn’t pay for a new click or impression.
• Reactivating the existing customer base. Selling to an active or inactive customer is always cheaper than acquiring a new one. Segmented campaigns, personalized offers, upsells, and cross-sells through CRM increase LTV without increasing CAC. Simple logic applies: more profit from the same customer → better LTV/CAC.
• Funnel optimization. CRM analytics highlights where leads drop off — first call, proposal sent, contract negotiation. Streamline scripts, SLAs for managers, and response times — conversion improves. Lead inflow stays the same, but more customers convert — CAC drops.
• Automating lead nurturing and management. Email sequences, reminders for managers, chatbots, and auto-tasks — all can be set up in Uspacy as no-code workflows. Less loss due to human error, more leads converted to deals — lower customer acquisition cost at the same spend.