GTMcraft Plays · The Channel Payback Play

One blended efficiency number cannot tell you which motion to fund next year; split it by channel and you get a number you can act on now.

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The 90-second read

A blended LTV to CAC ratio is popular in board decks, but it is a compound of revenue, churn, retention and gross margin, so a single swing in it never tells you which lever moved. Datadog's own FP&A team solves this by clicking CAC payback down to the sales channel level instead of reading one company number. You can run the same split this month, off a HubSpot or Pipedrive export, in a spreadsheet, no new tool required. Sort your channels by payback ascending, fund the top 2, and cap or kill the bottom 1 in next year's plan, while next year is still a decision.

• Blended LTV to CAC compounds revenue, churn, retention and gross margin into one number, so it hides which lever moved it.
• CAC payback splits cleanly by channel, and you can click down into the organization with it, the way Datadog's FP&A team does.
• A founder-sourced deal and a paid channel do not carry the same payback math, so one target for both is wrong.
• Sort your channels by payback ascending, fund the top 2, and cap or kill the bottom 1.
• September is the window. Next year's budget locks in weeks, and this number is what earns a channel its share.

Read time: about 5 minutes. First step runnable Monday morning.

The #1 move this week

Build the channel payback sheet for your last 2 quarters, one row per acquisition channel.

Most founders hold one blended CAC payback number and cannot say which channel earned it. Split it once this week, and the next budget conversation runs on your own math, not on a feeling.

Start here: pull your last 2 quarters of fully loaded sales and marketing spend and new ARR from your HubSpot or Pipedrive export, then tag every deal by channel: founder-sourced, inbound, outbound, partner, events.

Ignore this week: do not buy attribution software or argue over multi-touch models. A clean spreadsheet with 5 channel tags beats a perfect model you never finish.