Required email verification during onboarding?

Hi all, I'm just looking to get some input around onboarding.

I'm currently in the process of completely overhauling the onboarding for the product my company makes. A few stakeholders are pushing for required email verification. Effectively meaning that until you verify your email, you can't proceed to sign up.

The two main reasons for this are to give sales better leads, and secondly for security. I'm torn over the correct way to go.

The UX designer part of me despises this concept. It just feels to me like it's a massive barrier to stop people discovering the value our product has to offer.

My proposal to compact the security risk is to require email verification before specific parts of our services can be accessed. Primarily payment gateway setup. I'm also against it as a way to get better sales leads as I'd rather people use our product, see the value and pay as opposed to not completing the steps and get poked later on by sales.

Has anybody here experienced any similar situations?

I'm open for my assumptions to be proven wrong. I'm just on the hunt for advice/data/knowledge that can help us make a more informed decision as I know it's going to crash the number of people signing up if we force verification.

Great design resource

100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People (Voices That Matter) Submitted October 04, 2018 at 04:24PM by DeadPixel217 https://ift.tt/2OyUrKk