Customer Acquisition: Getting the right customer in a buyer-led world.

Most businesses require new customers to grow and build value.

Businesses need new customers to grow.

Considering the importance of new customers to most businesses, it makes sense that customer acquisition is a top priority comprising strategy and execution.

Recruiting new customers has never been more difficult.

Today's business environment is fraught with competition across town, across the country, and across the globe. What's more, there are so many messages, screens, and platforms that while there are more mediums with which to communicate, it has never been more difficult to reach prospects.

Strategy is needed to convert leads into prospects, and prospects into customers — which typically integrates Sales and Marketing. But a lot of stars must align before a prospect becomes a lead: you need to reach the right prospect with the right message at the right time through the right medium.

Customer acquisition requires strategic thinking.

Goals and expectations.

Most business goals and expectations are predicated on hitting a sales number — yet so many goals and expectations are inconsistent with the strategy and execution needed to gain new customers.

Digital is different. Not magic.

It has been widely reported that prospects are much further down the funnel than they have been in the past. Why? Because self-education and research has become the de-facto way of learning about a product or service. The sales rep is no longer the gatekeeper to pertinent information, and hasn't been for a long time. If prospects want to self-inform, aren't we impeding sales and brand value if we're not assisting them through valuable, educational content?

Given how people research online, it is important for management and team members to accept that the selling environment has changed dramatically. Alignment on goals and expectations is essential between all stakeholders, and developing a sound strategy that can be executed is critical in acquiring new customers effectively and efficiently.

Know your numbers.

Two sides of the same coin.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) are two sides of the same coin. Unfortunately, they are often overlooked — like that lost penny on the street.

Strategy, expectations, and results.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) sounds complicated, but it's simple. Knowing how much a customer spends with your company over their lifetime informs you about how much to spend to get a new customer.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is how much you spend on a new customer. If CAC is higher than CLV, that may result in a non-profitable customer relationship or a long break-even period. Conversely, if CLV is a lot more than CAC, the company may consider investing more money in customer acquisition to accelerate growth or increase market share.

Most companies expect to break-even on customer acquisition costs within a year, but every business is different. Not every sale is good; CLV and CAC inform companies on how much should be spent on new customers versus how much value customers bring to the business.

Two fingers on the same hand.

Marketing and sales separation.

Marketing and sales should be two fingers on the same hand, but are often pointing fingers at each other. Marketing says sales doesn't follow up on leads, and sales says the leads aren't qualified.

Marketing and sales alignment.

Google serves 3.5 billion searches every day. Corporate Executive Board says 57% of the buyer's journey is completed before the buyer ever talks to sales — because prospects are doing their own research.

Customer acquisition entails building relationships with people who are immersed in digital technology. But their human behaviors, actions, thoughts, and feelings are informed from and transformed by the digital environment. People have changed. Shouldn't marketing and sales?

Companies with aligned sales and marketing generated 208% more revenue from marketing. [Source: MarketingProfs]

Would you rather be pushed or pulled?

Buyers are in control now.

The old lines between "marketing" and "selling" don't map to how buyers actually decide. B2B and B2C buyers self-educate long before they raise their hand — through search, social feeds, review sites, podcasts, private Slacks, and increasingly AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews. By the time a prospect fills out your form, they've already narrowed the field.

The businesses that grow now aren't the ones interrupting hardest. They're the ones showing up as the trusted answer while buyers are researching.

Create demand. Capture demand.

Modern acquisition splits into two jobs.

Demand creation builds awareness and category authority through content that lives where buyers already are — LinkedIn posts, YouTube videos, podcast appearances, useful frameworks shared openly. It earns you trust before you're even a candidate.

Demand capture picks up the buyers who are actively looking — through search, retargeting, referrals, and a website that makes it easy to say yes.

Skip demand creation and you're fighting for the same in-market buyers everyone else is bidding on. Skip demand capture and the awareness you built leaks to whichever competitor is easier to buy from.

Most of the journey happens where you can't see it.

The uncomfortable truth: most of the buyer's journey is dark. Recommendations traded in private DMs, podcasts consumed on commutes, AI queries you'll never see in your analytics. You can't attribute it — but you can seed it.

Your job isn't to build a perfect funnel. It's to build authority in the places your buyers already trust — so that when they're ready, or their peers, mentors, and search engines are asked about your category, your name is in the conversation.

Deep focus versus wide focus.

Narrow your focus.

Account-based marketing isn't new, but when integrated with sales and buyer-led acquisition, ABM can produce results that are indeed new and improved.

Leads are generated. Accounts are earned.

Specific accounts are the focus in account-based marketing. Rather than targeting a segment or detailed persona, ABM targets accounts in ways that are more strategic, focused, and personalized — like a target market of one.

A primary challenge in many B2B sales is navigating decision influencers and the ultimate decision maker(s). Even in small companies, there are often multiple decision makers, and likely several influencers. The premise of ABM is to build relationships throughout an organization and provide personalized marketing to facilitate deeper engagement — resulting in opportunities to earn sales that might be larger, more profitable, and more strategic to your company's growth goals.

Manage what you measure.

Data and analytics = new sales and marketing.

Integrated marketing and sales is still part science and part art, but it is more data and technology than ever. And it requires significant strategy and planning — not to mention pre-planned and sometimes unplanned execution.

Sales and marketing have long been about metrics, but activity was often difficult if not impossible to measure based on data availability.

Marketing Automation, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and Analytics have enabled smarter as well as more effective and efficient customer acquisition and customer retention.

However, new challenges exist: determining which data to collect; review and analysis; and acting on insights. Tools like Salesforce and HubSpot offer myriad reports — but human input is essential to make informed decisions consistent with goals and expectations.