Archive for the ‘sales’ tag
Is Newsletter Subscriptions More Important Than Selling
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.
Sales is More Important than Marketing
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.