Claus Witt

Yesterday I wrote about how Sales is more important than marketing. While I wrote that, I was also looking at one of the ressources from the blogpost I was linking to. It is a very simple how to about cold calling. It seems very simple to follow. It is by far the best presentation/howto I have seen on the subject. On the other hand, I don’t have to do these kind of calls these days, so I have not tested it. Not yet anyway.

OnlinePR, a new blog about about – yes you guessed it – Online PR, states that getting subscribers for your newsletter is more important that getting the sale. There is even a great analogy about a bar-owner and his 100.000 potential customers. (If you understand danish I recommend that you read the post)

I agree with the statement. Lead generation is key. But my opinion is that it greatly depends on your product. (And this is where the analogy is bad).

I have previously written my opinion that sales is more important than marketing, and I believe that you should always strive for the sale. If you get the sale, you will – hopefully – have proven that you can fulfil the needs of your customer, making it easy for you to get them to opt-in for the newsletter.

If the sale fails, there can be many reasons. Many of them however can be adressed. If the user at one point has indicated their identity (email, name, address or phonenumber) you now have a lead. This is a strategy used by Spamfighter among others. This method is especially useful for organic visits.

When it comes to paid trafic however, you should listen to the advice. One of the ten tips for lead generation landing pages says “Focus your page around a single call to action”. This call to action may be to sign up for the newsletter.

So to sum it up, is newsletter subscriptions more important than selling? The answer: that depends.

While reading a post about the marketing trap I got to thinking. I have seen this behaviour before. In 9iA we had this belief, and reinforced ourselves and eachother, that we were not salesmen. As a consequence we relied on marketing instead of sales-activities. Marketing was in our case definitely the wrong way to go. We spend a lot of money on a lot of different things, believing that we were doing sales-work. In stead we were doing – very bad – marketing. Most of our business came from what we refererred to as network sales. In fact most of it was jobs which fell in our laps because of our participation in different “we are all here to sell to eachother”-networks.

We never tried cold calling, not even warm calling. Well, not exactly true. We tried once or twice. A few calls. And then went back to believing that we could not sell.

I just downloaded a whitepaper about increasing qualified leads online. In the process I was probably made a lead (however not a very likely customer I guess) for the authors. They made me fill out a form to get the whitepaper (which I off course would have done as well, had it been me.) It may not be rocketscience they have written about, but I must admit I learned a couple of things. And since it is free – apart from you having to write your contact information – I think it is worth a download.

This friday I am going to a seminar on E-business with some great danish speakers on the subject. Most notable – I guess – is Martin Thorborg, known especially in Denmark for starting Jubii and SpamFighter. He will be speaking about “How to Make Big Bucks on Social Media” (losely translated by yours truly). A subject that I have encountered several times in the last couple of weeks. I guess somehow this is the new buzz on the net.

I am however shure that when I leave the seminar, I will have learned something new. And if I know myself, maybe even with a couple of business ideas (for the evergrowing list of things I do not have enough time for). And maybe I should just be happy that the other people do not speak about “Platform as a Service” and “the Cloud”.

I know that I have posted a lot the last few weeks. (Escpecially today). And since I have gained a lot of followers lately, I would like to take this opportunity to post a picture of my beautiful son.

Toke - my son

Here’s a challenge, look at the picture, and try not to smile.