We have a highly collaborative leadership team where marketing and sales work hand-in-hand to generate revenue, but this makes it difficult to assign sole ownership of our customer acquisition cost metric. How do we decide which seat on our Accountability Chart owns the CAC scorecard number when both departments influence it?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

In the Entrepreneurial Operating System, every single number on your scorecard must have one, and only one, owner. While your marketing and sales teams collaborate closely to drive revenue, shared ownership of a metric leads to zero accountability. When a scorecard number goes red, we need to know exactly which seat is responsible for explaining the trend and presenting a plan to fix it. To resolve this, look at your Accountability Chart. Typically, your customer acquisition cost, or CAC, is a combination of marketing spend and sales overhead. Because CAC is ultimately a financial efficiency metric, the seat that owns the strategic budget for customer acquisition must own this number. In most organizations, this is either the marketing seat or the sales seat, depending on where the majority of the acquisition budget is allocated. If your marketing seat controls the advertising budget and lead generation systems, they should own the CAC scorecard metric because their decisions directly dictate the cost of those leads. The sales seat then owns metrics like close rate and sales cycle length. When CAC goes red, the marketing seat owner must bring it to the Level 10 Meeting as an Issue to discuss, solve, and coordinate with sales if sales conversion rates are the root cause. This structure prevents finger-pointing. One person owns the metric, but they work with the rest of the team to solve the underlying issues.