Companies tend to track what's easy to measure. In my view, those are rarely the metrics that actually drive growth.
Here's the thing about marketing budgets: they're one lever. One. And yet they get treated as the primary variable when performance slips. CMOs fight for more budget, CFOs push back, and neither side is working from the right model.
Growth has nine levers. In the companies I've worked with, only a few get actively managed, usually the ones that surface most easily in whatever reporting tool they bought. The others sit untracked while the business wonders why the growth curve has flattened.
None of these require more budget. They require more discipline.
The Nine Levers
1. Blended Investment
Total variable investment across every channel: media spend, outside partner fees, sales cost, creative cost. That means everything that goes into acquiring a customer, not just the media line. Companies that track only media spend systematically understate true CAC and make investment decisions on faulty inputs.
2. Total New Customers
First-time buyers only (not reactivations, not active users). In my view, net new customers is one of the most useful leading indicators of where your business will be in 12 months. It's also a metric that gets muddied easily when reactivated buyers are mixed in.
3. Lifetime Value (LTV)
Gross margin per customer over 6, 12, or 24 months. Higher LTV sets the ceiling on how much you can rationally spend to acquire a customer. Companies that track LTV by acquisition channel unlock a meaningful strategic advantage: they can outspend competitors in the channels that produce the most valuable customers.
4. Activity Rate
What percentage of your customers placed an order this month? If activity rate is declining, your existing base is quietly disengaging. That is often invisible until it hits the P&L, by which point you may have lost months of compounding engagement.
5. Spend Per Active Customer
Among active customers, how much do they spend in a given period? In my experience, improving this number can be a cheaper path to growth than adding new customers, yet it rarely gets the attention it deserves from marketing teams.
6. Margin Rate
Fully loaded margin per customer, not blended margin. Growth without margin is a treadmill. Margin rate by customer segment tells you which parts of the business are creating value and which are subsidized by the ones that are.
7. New User Conversion Rate
Of first-time visitors or users, how many convert to paying customers? This metric speaks simultaneously to audience quality and product-market fit. A declining conversion rate usually means you're reaching the wrong people, or a friction point in the product experience has grown over time.
8. Organic-to-Paid Ratio
What share of customer acquisition is organic versus paid? Paid scales. Organic compounds. The ratio tells you whether you're building a sustainable growth engine or renting one. Shifting this ratio toward organic over time can lower CAC and support more durable growth curves.
9. Power Metrics
Once you're tracking the first eight, you unlock the composite metrics that drive real strategic conversations: Total LTV dollars, LTV:CAC ratio, and payback period, broken down by every key dimension of your business (channel, cohort, geography, product line). These belong in board decks and budget conversations. They require all eight inputs above to be accurate first.
The Actual Problem
In my experience, these metrics aren't hard to calculate. Companies skip them because no single tool surfaces all of them in one place by default. You have to build the habit, define the metrics consistently, and instrument them across your stack.
That's the discipline. And it's what separates companies that know where growth is coming from from companies that are perpetually surprised by it. No extra budget required, just the right model.
David Manela is co-founder of Exactius, a growth and data science company. Follow him on LinkedIn for more frameworks on growth, marketing, and capital allocation.
David Manela
David Manela is the founder of Exactius and creator of the Growth Operating System — a framework for deploying capital-efficient, compounding growth inside scaling companies.
FAQ
Frequently asked
What growth levers can you improve without increasing marketing budget?
The author tracks nine: blended investment, total new customers, LTV, activity rate, spend per active customer, margin rate, new user conversion rate, organic to paid ratio, and composite power metrics such as LTV:CAC and payback period. His argument is that budget is only one lever, and that the rest depend on defining and instrumenting metrics consistently across the stack.
Should LTV be calculated on revenue or on margin?
Margin gives the more conservative view. The author's list describes LTV as revenue per customer over 6, 12 or 24 months, while investor David Skok's SaaS Metrics 2.0 guidance calculates LTV on gross margin and sets LTV above 3 times CAC as a benchmark, assuming gross margins of 80% or more. Whichever basis a team uses, keeping the time window fixed keeps comparisons valid.
Why does customer retention matter as a growth lever?
Keeping existing customers active compounds over time. Research by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company, cited in Harvard Business Review in 2014, found that increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%. The author's activity rate, the share of customers who placed an order this month, is designed to flag disengagement before it shows up in the P&L.
How do you measure the organic to paid ratio?
Compare new customers acquired through organic channels with those acquired through paid channels, using fixed channel rules. In Google Analytics 4, the User acquisition report shows how new users first found a site, using the First user default channel group. Default groups are rule based, such as Organic Search and Paid Search, and teams can build custom channel groups for their own definitions.
What is a good CAC payback period?
There is no universal number; the author treats payback as a power metric that needs accurate inputs first. Investor David Skok's original guideline of under 12 months dates from 2011. His updated notes say under 12 months is very rare in practice and around 20 months can work for enterprise businesses with a land and expand model. These are SaaS guidelines. The 2024 KeyBanc and Sapphire survey estimated median fully loaded payback at 20 months.
Why do consistent metric definitions matter?
Composite metrics are only as reliable as their inputs. Gartner research from 2020 estimates poor data quality costs organizations at least $12.9 million a year on average. The SEC's January 2020 guidance on KPIs in MD&A asks public companies to give a clear definition of each metric and how it is calculated, and to consider disclosing changes in methodology, which makes a workable checklist for internal dashboards too.
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