Customer Acquisition
In the Acquisition section, you'll define where and how you will acquire new customers.
What is Customer Acquisition?
Customer acquisition refers to all the activities and actions your company takes to gain new customers. An easy way to think about it is that all of your Sales & Marketing efforts are part of customer acquisition.
Acquisition channels are the specific methods your business makes contact with and acquires customers. Common examples of acquisition channels include Digital Ads, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and TV ads.
In Sturppy, the output of any acquisition channel is the number of Customer Leads the acquisition channel is forecasted to generate, but not how many actual paying customers the acquisition channel produces. The Conversion Rate, or how many Leads you assume will actually convert to paying customers, will be inputted in the Revenues section.
Modeling Customer Acquisition
In Sturppy, the first step we take when building a financial model is to create our customer acquisition channels. To do this, we'll need to make a few assumptions about the future:
How many acquisition channels will our business use
How much we plan to spend on on each acquisition channel as we grow (i.e. $500 monthly budget for digital ads)
How many customers each of our acquisition channels will reach (i.e. how many potential customers will see one our digital ads)
This may seem like an overwhelming amount of assumptions you need to make about the future, but don't worry - just throw something in there and move on. The key to modeling is first building the correct barebones structure and then fleshing out the details afterward.
Adding an Acquisition Channel
We add acquisition channels to our model by clicking into the "Acquisition" section on the Nav Bar and then clicking "Add New Channel" in the upper right corner of the screen:
You'll then be asked what type of acquisition channel you want to add. There are many types of acquisition channels used by businesses of all shapes and sizes. We've included many of the most popular channels for to easily select from, but if the channel you're looking for is not listed, simply click "Other" to add a generic version that you can name and edit to fit your needs:
Based on the type of acquisition channel you selected, you'll have different inputs. For example, for Paid Ads, you'll be prompted to input a budget, cost per lead (CPL), and dates in which this acquisition channel will be active in the model. If you do not know what a particular term is, hit the (?) button next to a term; Sturppy will give you a 1-min video explaining the term along with a detailed blog post about how to calculate it, why it's important, etc.:
Sturppy will then calculate the number of leads you will generate from your start to end date based on how much it costs you to acquire a lead (CPL) and how you've budgeted. All acquisition channels work largely the same way, but they differ in subtle ways based on the type of channel. For example, leads brought in by a salesperson in a sales-led acquisition channel would not have a budget unto themselves, because the budget for those leads is technically the salary and associated sales expenses (i.e. business travel) of the salesperson.
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