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Set your company’s numbers, then drag the bar to see how many closed deals make a LevelUp engagement pay for itself.
Treat the LevelUp fee as the cost of acquiring customers, in finance terms the Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). It's a fixed cost, so the more deals it produces, the less each won customer costs to acquire: one deal carries the whole fee, three deals split it three ways. That cost-per-deal is what the three checks judge, each from a different angle a CFO would weigh.
1 · Payback period: how fast the cash comes back. A customer pays you, but you only keep the gross-profit slice: revenue minus what it costs to deliver. Divide the fee by that monthly gross profit and you get the number of months before the customer has repaid what you spent to win them. Under 18 months is the bar a board will accept for a $50k+ deal; under 12 is excellent. It answers the liquidity question: how long is our cash tied up before this pays for itself?
2 · LTV : CAC, the return over the whole relationship. A customer doesn't pay once; they pay for years. Annual gross profit times how long they stay gives lifetime value (LTV), the total profit the relationship throws off. LTV divided by CAC is the return: dollars of profit earned for every dollar spent acquiring. 3:1 is the healthy floor; below it, you aren't getting enough back per dollar invested. It answers the profitability question: is this worth doing over the customer's life, and by how much?
3 · Cost vs. deal size, a sanity check on proportion. The plainest gut-check: are you paying more to land a customer than a single year of their contract is even worth? If the fee per deal runs above one year's contract value, the spend is out of proportion to the prize, regardless of margin. Keeping CAC at or under one year of ACV keeps the investment sensible. It's the only check that looks at top-line revenue instead of profit, which is exactly why it's a coarse bound, not the profit gate.
The headline floor is the stricter of the two profit tests, payback and return. Clear all three and it's a deal a CFO would sign off without a second look.