Start from the CAC you can afford and get the ceiling at every stage

Forward planning starts with what the platform charges and hopes the funnel turns it into an acceptable customer cost. Backward planning starts with the only number that is not negotiable, what a customer may cost, and derives what every earlier stage may cost. The output is a set of ceilings: the most you can pay for a held call, a booked call, a lead, a click, a thousand impressions. When a campaign's CPC sits above its ceiling, no amount of optimising the later stages will rescue the CAC; when it sits below, there is room to bid up and win volume.

It also turns "is this campaign working" into a question with an answer. Working means every stage is inside its ceiling. The planner shows which one is not.

The planner is built for the call-based funnel most B2B, agency and high-ticket teams run: click, landing page, lead, booked call, held call, customer. Each rate has a benchmark range, and the planner grades yours against it.

• Close rate, held calls that become customers: 15 to 25 percent is normal. Lower usually means unqualified leads reaching the calendar.
• Show-up rate, booked calls that happen: 60 to 75 percent. Lower is a booking flow problem, not a marketing problem.
• Lead-to-call rate, leads that book: 30 to 50 percent. Lower means the gap between the form and the calendar is leaking; speed to follow-up is the fix.
• Landing page rate, clicks that become leads: 6 to 12 percent for a lead-gen page.
• Click-through rate, impressions that click: 1 to 2 percent on cold paid social, higher on search.

A funnel is a chain of multiplications, so the weakest rate costs the most. Improving a 15 percent close rate to 20 raises every ceiling above it by a third; improving a 1.5 percent CTR to 2 does nothing for the cost per lead, only for the cost per click. The planner names the first stage below benchmark and what usually fixes it, because the answer to "how do I hit this CAC" is almost always one stage, and it is rarely the bid.

Add your current CPC and the planner also shows where today's price lands: the CAC these rates produce at that click price, and how far above or below target it sits. That is the sentence to bring to the budget meeting.