Acquisition and retention are the same conversation
Treating them as separate budgets is how brands end up with paid traffic that doesn't compound. The argument for a single revenue model.
If the acquisition team and the retention team are reporting to different dashboards on different days, you don't have a growth problem. You have an organisational design problem.
Acquisition without retention is paying full price for traffic that exits through the back door. Retention without acquisition is optimising a database that's slowly contracting. Neither side is wrong; both sides are incomplete.
The most useful thing a senior CRM operator can do for a growth team is build a single revenue model that includes contribution margin per cohort over time. Once acquisition and retention are looking at the same number, the arguments about budget allocation tend to dissolve.
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Lifecycle strategy is a margin lever