By Stop Burning Cash: A Frank Talk on Lowering Customer Acquisition Cost with Italo Leiva
In the high-stakes world of SaaS and digital services, there’s a metric that can quietly make or break a business: Customer Acquisition Cost, or CAC. You can have the best product on the market, but if it costs you a fortune to get each new customer in the door, you're fighting a losing battle. The pressure to grow often leads to a "growth at all costs" mindset, where marketing budgets balloon and efficiency is forgotten.
But what if you could acquire customers more effectively, more intelligently, and more affordably? How do you scale without simply throwing more money at the problem?
To get to the bottom of this, we once again sat down with Italo Leiva, the founder and CEO of the RevOps-focused agency Peddling. Known for building lean, efficient growth engines, Italo has a reputation for cutting through the noise and focusing on what truly drives sustainable growth. We talked to him about the common pitfalls businesses fall into and the practical steps they can take to stop burning cash and start acquiring customers with precision.
Let's Be Honest, What is Customer Acquisition Cost and Why is it So Scary?
P.D.: Italo, welcome back. It’s great to have you again.
Italo Leiva: Hey, thanks for having me. Always a good time.
Interviewer: So, today we're tackling a big one, a metric that gives a lot of founders anxiety: Customer Acquisition Cost. Can you break it down for us? What exactly is it, and why does it keep leaders up at night?
Italo Leiva: (Laughs) It’s the ultimate "how much did it cost to get you?" number. Simply put, your CAC is the total cost of all your sales and marketing efforts needed to win a single new customer. You take your entire sales and marketing spend over a given period—salaries, ad spend, tools, commissions, you name it—and you divide it by the number of new customers you brought in during that time.
The reason it's so scary is because it’s a direct measure of the efficiency of your growth engine. If that number is too high, especially in relation to your Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) which we talked about last time, you’re basically lighting money on fire. You could be incredibly busy, your team could be closing deals, but your business is on a path to unprofitability. It’s that quiet, creeping number that can signal deep problems in your go-to-market strategy.
Why Do So Many Companies Get CAC So Wrong?
P.D.: That makes total sense. It feels like a lot of businesses, especially startups, fall into a trap of just pouring money into ads and hoping for the best. From your perspective, what are the biggest mistakes companies make that send their CAC skyrocketing?
Italo Leiva: Oh, it’s a classic story. The number one mistake is what I call "chasing vanity metrics." They focus on top-of-funnel numbers like website traffic or social media followers, which are easy to buy. You can always get more traffic by spending more on Google or Facebook ads. But if that traffic isn't the right traffic, it's not converting, and you're just paying for clicks that go nowhere.
Another huge mistake is the disconnect between sales and marketing. Marketing runs a campaign, throws a bunch of leads "over the wall" to sales, and wipes their hands clean. But if those leads are poor quality, the sales team has to work ten times harder to close a deal, if they can at all. That’s a massive amount of wasted salary and effort, which drives your CAC through the roof. It’s an efficiency killer.
P.D.: So it’s not just about ad spend, it’s about the cost of wasted time and effort inside the company too?
Italo Leiva: Exactly. That’s a huge part of your CAC that many people forget to calculate. It's not just the ad budget; it's the human cost of inefficiency.
How Can You Fix a High CAC? Is it Just About Cutting Marketing Spend?
P.D.: So for a company that’s realized its CAC is too high, the knee-jerk reaction might be to just slash the marketing budget. Is that the right move?
Italo Leiva: It's the most common reaction, and it's almost always the wrong one. Slashing your budget is a defensive move, and while some trimming might be necessary, it doesn't solve the root problem. The real goal isn't just to spend less; it's to spend smarter. Lowering your CAC is about improving efficiency, not just cutting costs.
The first step is actually understanding your numbers. You’d be shocked at how many companies don't have a firm grip on their CAC by channel. How much does it cost to acquire a customer from Google Ads versus organic search versus a trade show? If you don't know that, you can't make informed decisions. You might cut the budget for your most effective channel and double down on your most expensive one.
P.D.: So, before you do anything, you need to get your data house in order.
Italo Leiva: One hundred percent. You need a single source of truth. This is where having a well-implemented CRM like HubSpot, which is central to our RevOps approach at Peddling, becomes a game-changer. When you can track a customer's entire journey, from their first click on a blog post to the final sales call, you can accurately attribute costs and see what's actually working. Without that clarity, you’re just guessing.
What are the Most Powerful Levers for Lowering CAC?
P.D.: Okay, so once you have that data clarity, where do you focus your efforts? What are the big, powerful levers a business can pull to actively drive down their acquisition cost?
Italo Leiva: I see three primary levers you can pull. First, optimize your funnel. Second, invest in organic channels. And third, leverage your existing customers.
Funnel optimization is about converting more of the people you’re already reaching. This is Conversion Rate Optimization, or CRO. Instead of paying for more traffic, you focus on improving your landing pages, your ad copy, your website's user experience, and your sales process. A tiny 1% increase in conversion rate can have a massive downstream effect on your CAC. A/B testing headlines, simplifying forms, adding social proof—these aren't just cosmetic changes; they're high-leverage activities.
P.D.: So making the most of what you've already got.
Italo Leiva: Precisely. Then there's investing in organic. Paid ads are like renting land. The moment you stop paying, your presence disappears. Organic channels like SEO and content marketing are like owning the land. It's a long-term investment, for sure. Writing blog posts and building backlinks doesn't pay off overnight. But over time, it creates a sustainable, compounding stream of high-intent traffic that comes to you for free. Every customer you acquire from a Google search for a problem you solve is a customer with a near-zero marginal acquisition cost.
Finally, leverage your customers. Your happiest customers are your best and cheapest sales force. Implementing a formal referral program is one of the most cost-effective growth strategies out there. You're acquiring a new customer based on the trust and social proof of an existing one. These leads are warm, they convert at a higher rate, and they usually have a higher lifetime value. It's a trifecta for profitable growth.
How Does a RevOps Approach Systematically Lower CAC?
P.D.: You’ve mentioned RevOps a few times. It sounds like it’s more than just a buzzword. How does adopting that operational model directly help a company lower its acquisition costs on an ongoing basis?
Italo Leiva: RevOps is the framework that makes all of this possible systematically. It’s the cure for that sales and marketing disconnect we talked about earlier. In a RevOps model, marketing isn't just incentivized to generate a high volume of leads; they're incentivized to generate high-quality leads that actually turn into revenue.
This alignment means you stop wasting money on campaigns that don't produce results. Your sales team becomes more efficient because they're talking to people who are genuinely a good fit for your product. The feedback loop is also much tighter. Sales can provide direct feedback to marketing on lead quality from within a unified system, allowing marketing to quickly pivot and optimize their campaigns.
Essentially, RevOps forces you to look at your entire revenue engine as one cohesive system. You start identifying and removing friction everywhere—from the first ad click to the final onboarding call. It builds efficiency into the DNA of your company, and that naturally and continuously drives down your Customer Acquisition Cost.
Can You Give a Real-World Example?
P.D.: This is all great in theory. Can you share a real-world example, maybe of a change you’ve seen a company make that had a big impact on their CAC?
Italo Leiva: Absolutely. We worked with a B2B SaaS company that was heavily reliant on paid search. Their CAC was high and climbing, and they were stuck on that treadmill of just needing to spend more every month to hit their growth targets.
The first thing we did was a deep dive into their funnel. We realized their lead-to-customer conversion rate was incredibly low. Marketing was driving traffic to a generic "Contact Us" page, and the sales team was swamped with unqualified inquiries.
So, we implemented a few key changes based on a RevOps strategy. We created a series of in-depth, problem-specific blog posts and guides to attract more qualified organic traffic. Instead of a generic contact form, we created resource-gated landing pages and a lead scoring system in HubSpot. This meant that only the most engaged, high-intent leads were passed to the sales team.
P.D.: So sales started spending time only on the best prospects.
Italo Leiva: Exactly. The sales team's efficiency shot up. They were closing deals faster because they were talking to the right people. At the same time, the organic traffic from the content started to build. Over six months, they were able to significantly reduce their reliance on paid ads. Their overall CAC dropped by over 40%, not because they just cut their budget, but because they completely re-engineered their acquisition model to be smarter and more efficient. It was a total game-changer for their profitability.
What's One Piece of Advice You'd Give a Founder Worried About Their CAC?
P.D.: That’s a powerful story. To wrap this up, if you could give one piece of advice to a founder who is currently staring at their CAC numbers with a sense of dread, what would it be?
Italo Leiva: My advice would be this: stop looking for a single silver bullet and start embracing a culture of continuous optimization. Lowering your CAC isn't a one-time project; it's a process.
Start small. Pick one part of your funnel—your highest-traffic landing page, for example—and focus on improving its conversion rate by just 1%. Get your sales and marketing teams in the same room once a week to review lead quality and pipeline. Write one good, educational blog post a month. These small, consistent efforts, guided by clean data and a commitment to efficiency, are what compound over time to create a truly unstoppable, and profitable, growth engine. Don't just try to spend less; learn to win more with what you already have.
P.D.: Italo, this has been incredibly clarifying. Thanks again for your time and for sharing such actionable insights.
Italo Leiva: My pleasure. Glad I could help.