Our marketing seat generates the leads and our sales seat closes them, but our customer acquisition cost is skyrocketing. Which seat on our Accountability Chart should own the weekly customer acquisition cost metric when both departments directly impact the result?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When a critical metric spans multiple departments, assigning absolute ownership on your Accountability Chart is essential to prevent finger-pointing. For a metric like Customer Acquisition Cost, which involves both marketing and sales, you cannot have split accountability. One seat must own the number.

In the EOS® framework, the seat that owns a scorecard metric is the one with the ultimate strategic lever to control that outcome. While marketing generates the leads and sales closes them, the Integrator is typically the seat that owns the overall corporate margin and cost efficiency of customer acquisition.

However, if you want to push this accountability down to the department level, the Sales Leader seat is often the correct owner of Customer Acquisition Cost. This is because sales has the final say on which leads are pursued and how efficiently they are closed.

To make this work, use your weekly Level 10 Meeting™ to review the numbers. If Customer Acquisition Cost goes red, the Sales Leader is accountable for identifying the root cause, which might be low-quality leads from marketing. They will then bring this to the table as an issue and use IDS® to solve it collaboratively with the Marketing Leader.

The person who inputs the data does not own the metric. The leader who has the authority to change the strategy and redirect resources to fix the number is the true owner on your Accountability Chart.