A company I met with recently took their single unit value from ten dollars to over two hundred by figuring out how to turn the initial contact into a “multiple problem-solving experience” for their customer. That company’s valuation (they are public) has increased ten-fold in less than eighteen months.

The problem hidden inside a low or non-existent single unit value is that there isn’t sufficient money to satisfy distribution partners, marketing partners, or (sometimes) quality manufacturing or coding requirements. Without an adequate dollar per customer per unit amount, companies that adopt low single unit values are doomed from the get-go.

Loser companies never make back their cost of acquiring a customer. Solid companies focus on achieving at least an ROI on the cost of acquisition (i.e. a lifetime value of the customer greater than the cost of acquiring them).

Great companies (and there are only a relatively small number of them) focus on knocking that ROI out of the park – by focusing first and foremost on single unit value.