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Customer Acquisition Cost in B2B IT Markets

Dieter Weißhaar • Feb 14, 2023

Foto von Arno Senoner auf Unsplash

How much do I need to spend to get a deal

This is probably one of the hardest questions to answer. How much do I need to spend to win a customer and close a deal. This varies highly by market, product, target group, persona - let's have a look at the IT B2B market.

Customer Acquisition cost starts at the very beginning. How to I get customers aware and attracted to have an interaction with my company? The world is changing and we obviously moved from from the above-the-line Marketing like fairs, classic advertisement more into below-the-line marketing with sponsoring, public relations and especially social media. It is not an either or but the marketing mix has changed. Have a look at how to build pipeline in my blog as well. It highly depends whom you want to reach and how your message can be placed best. This is about your personas in your target group.

To reach potential customers there are quite some things to do which will cause sales & marketing cost and will drive your customer acquisition cost.

You need company branding hence you need to have your brand guidelines done (logos, colors, key messages, values, purpose ...) and create your marketing material. This can be anything like collateral (PDF or Print), eMail templates, banner, ads, pictures, videos. You need channels to place your messages, like a website, social media accounts or public relations with a network of relevant journalists. 

You need IT Tools to automate, process and measure your work. Key elements are:
  • Web Content Management Software to create and adopt your online presence (e.g. Wordpress)
  • Marketing Automation Solution to manage GDPR, Contacts, leads, campaigns (e.g. Hubspot)
  • CRM System to follow through the sales process (e.g. Salesforce)
  • Analytics to measure all of the above (e.g. in Hubspot plus Google Analytics)
and most important all of the systems must be connected and handover data automatically in real time. 

If the groundwork is done you decide on how to get awareness on what you want to position to the market, e.g. brand awareness campaign, employer branding or campaigns to generate followers or leads. You choose your target groups and personas, create campaigns and off you go. Traffic will rise, become meaningful contacts by using gated content to collect name, email address, company etc. step by step from them and nurture these leads to move up to become a marketing qualified lead (MQL). Your inside sales team may catch up evaluate the MQL and qualify it further to be a sales qualified lead (SQL) to be handed over to your sales person. Have a look at BANT - Budget Authority Need Timeline - to ask your lead to qualify for further steps.

At the very end your leads will evaluated and scored and handed over from marketing to a sales organization to follow a certain sales process. Along of the process from branding to awareness to attraction, leads, opportunities and orders, you create cost but you have clear KPIs as well. Some things will work out great and others may fail, hence you need to start, measure, adjust or stop. 

All of this from the first idea to the order will drive your customer acquisition cost.

Lead Generation and Nurturing Process

To have a Data Driven Sales approach you need to define the relevant KPIs, Targets and measure them regularly. Automated systems which are easy to use are important and help closing the feedback loop if things work out or need change. KPIs and Targets vary a lot by industry, product or service to sell and customer target group.  Let's have a look at certain KPIs.


Sales & Marketing Pipeline Mechanics

Creating traffic with relevant content is an absolute a must. The whole company needs to support the marketing team to create valuable insight for potential customers. The conversation rates above on the Marketing & Sales Funnel are typical conversation rates in an IT Software and Services business depending on customer segment and deal size obviously. Large Enterprise deals are different from small SME SaaS transactions. For the deal size of 100.000€ per transaction this is a feasible set of rates for new business.


Customer Acquisition Costs

Finally our example of a mid sized IT Software and Service business with a new deal size of 100.000 € is showing a customer acquisition cost of app. 35.000€ per customer. This sounds quite high but if this is a software deal with a customer lifecycle of minimum 8 years, it is quite reasonable if you create 100.000€ subscription revenue p.a. at a new customer. Don't assume that your sales cost will now lead to 35% of revenue. You have a second bucket which will be far more efficient: the existing customer base which can be farmed, upsold at a lower cost rate. Small SaaS businesses may only pay 1.500 € for customer acquisition cost while large enterprise deals are far above 35.000€. It needs a deeper analysis. and the right KPI setting for your business.


One question might be interesting to discuss. The assumption is that we spend 200 € per MQL. This may vary a lot. The target group in the example were mid sized businesses in DACH and the Personas were C-Levels like CEO, CFO, CDO, CIO, CHRO. An MQL can come from a traditional fair and exhibition. Typically your cost of your own booth may incl. your staff may lead to cost up to 400 € per MQL. From experience your cost per contact on LinkedIn can be 2,50 € and with a conversation of 14% to a lead, your Cost per Lead are 18 €. To get this natured to an MQL it takes quite same actions, like Downloads, Webinars etc. and the Cost per MQL can easily increase to 150€ per MQL. On Twitter your cost per contact is lower and can be around 1,60 € but the conversation rates are lower hence your cost per lead increases to 22 €. This all depends highly on your content and quality of your marketing team, the customer segment etc.


Executive Summary:


Your Customer Acquisition  Cost can be calculated. You can move towards a data driven sales approach and clearly defined targets. You need to be flexible as not all campaigns and initiative will be equally successful and it requires a deeper look into the business to drive excellence throughout the process. It is obviously far cheaper to hand over leads to the more expensive sales team to let them focus on real potentials rather doing random cold calling. But you need to get the whole company incl. yourself to create relevant and meaningful insights for your customers and you need a toolset that is easy to use, fully integrated and automated to make it fly.

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