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.

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.