BigCommerce doubles down on B2B
BigCommerce beat Q4 earnings and revenue estimates while emphasizing its B2B strategy. CEO Travis Hess noted significant greenfield opportunity with manufacturers and distributors looking to digitize operations quickly on modest budgets. Andy Hoar announced an upcoming live interview with Hess on LinkedIn where he agreed to take any and all questions. The hosts noted this continues the trend of platform vendors recognizing B2B as a growth market.
What is customer acquisition cost
Customer acquisition cost divides total acquisition spending by new customers acquired in a period. The denominator is straightforward: count new customers. The numerator is where complexity begins. Should it include only direct marketing spend like Google ads, email, trade shows, and promotions? Or should it also include sales team costs, brand awareness, marketing tools, onboarding, and overhead?
Spoiler alert: you should go broad versus narrow. The question is not why you should do this or which version you should choose. It’s how do you do it.
Andy Hoar, Master B2B
Why CAC matters
Customer acquisition cost provides multiple benefits. It measures financial efficiency and ROI of acquisition efforts. It helps optimize marketing budgets by comparing costs across channels. When paired with customer lifetime value, it enables growth planning: if CAC is low relative to CLV, scaling becomes viable. It provides competitive benchmarking and reveals pricing sensitivity. When paired with retention metrics, it shows whether companies are acquiring the right customers.
The B2B complexity
B2B customer journeys involve buying committees with multiple influencers. Acquiring a company may require convincing the CFO, CMO, internal champion, and others. Each person must be acquired individually before the company converts collectively. This raises the question of whether CAC should be measured per persona or per company. The hosts concluded it must be at the company level since companies pay bills, unlike B2C where individual consumers purchase.
The missing marketing leadership
Forrester research found only 48% of B2B-focused firms have a CMO or senior marketing executive reporting to the CEO. Prior research found only about 33% had a CMO specifically. The hosts attributed this to B2B companies being sales-led, with marketing functioning as sales support. When marketing reports through sales, sophisticated metrics like CAC become undervalued and ecommerce takes a backseat to traditional sales approaches.
If marketing is really just sales support, and the website is simply supporting the sales function, then CAC is going to be undercounted and sales-centric.
Andy Hoar, Master B2B
Attribution challenges
Even with marketing leadership, attribution remains difficult. A customer service agent spending 15 minutes in chat moving a prospect forward contributes to acquisition. That time has cost. Do you capture it? When products are researched online but ordered through EDI, how do you attribute digital influence? The hosts noted that B2C companies track these metrics religiously against competitors, representing significant opportunity for B2B to adopt similar data-driven approaches.
Poll results favor broad
A LinkedIn poll asked for the most reasonable way to measure customer acquisition cost in B2B commerce. Results showed 70% favor a broad definition including sales teams and overhead, while 30% prefer narrow direct marketing spend only. The hosts agreed broad is theoretically correct but wondered if a follow-up poll asking which approach companies use in practice would show the opposite, since many lack data access or CFO buy-in for comprehensive measurement.