No Calls

I'm a CTO who makes purchasing decisions. There are numerous products I likely would have purchased, but I either find a substitute or just go without because I won't play the stupid "let's get on a call" game.

If your website doesn't give me enough information to:

1. Know enough about your product to know that it will (generally speaking) meet my needs/requirements.

2. Know that the pricing is within the ballpark of reasonable given what your product does.

Then I will move on (unless I'm really desparate, which I assure you is rarely the case). I've rolled-my-own solution more than once as well when there were no other good competitors.

That's not to say that calls never work or don't have a place, because they definitely do. The key to using the call successfully (with me at least) is to use the call to get into true details about my needs, after I know that you're at least in the ballpark. Additionally, the call should be done efficiently. We don't need a 15 minute introduction and overview about you. We don't need a bunch of small talk about weather or sports. 2 minutes of that is ok, or when waiting for additional people to join the call, but beyond that I have things to do.

I know what my needs are. I understand you need some context on my company and needs in order to push useful information forward, and I also understand that many potential customers will not take the lead in asking questions and providing that context, but the sooner you take the temperature and adjust, the better. Also, you can get pretty far as a salesperson if you just spend 5 minutes looking at our website before the call! Then you don't have to ask basic questions about what we do. If you're willing to invest in the time to get on a call, then it's worth a few minutes of time before-hand to look at our website.

This only works if your sales strategy is all about inbound sales, i.e. content marketing (like this article)/ads.

But if you're an enterprise b2b company and want to grow quickly rather than taking 8 years to go beyond 1 solopreneur like this guy you're going to want to do outbound sales.

It's also worth noting that this guys is mostly doing small deals. The literal largest price he has on his pricing page is 72k/yr, which isn't tiny, but his typical deal size is likely much smaller, so it makes total sense for him not to get on a call for $49/month, because that is not a scalable strategy.

But many enterprise b2b companies have a more complicated product than Keygen and charge orders of magnitude more than they do.

Which is not to say that he is wrong, it's just that this is the correct strategy for scaling a low ACV product, rather than a high ACV product. And a low ACV product has to have much broader demand.

In most of these discussions, people on the sales side claim, "but our customers WANT this! Trust us!" and most of the people on the buying side scream, "We hate this. Please let us buy it without this song and dance." It's a shocking disconnect to me. (For what it's worth, I'm squarely on the fouder/engineering buying side and hate the call song and dance, and only engage in it as a last resort.)

Parting thought: SpaceX tells you how much it costs to ship something INTO SPACE. I bet you can figure out a way to tell me your SaaS price, in ballpark terms, and what it depends upon...

I was once involved in a purchase for SonarQube for a bigger company (around 50-200 developers using it). It was just a horrible experience. My task was just to evaluate the software in a smaller team, get some evaluation licenses and write a report what our experience was.

It was a crazy ride, I got a sales person assigned, and this person kept asking me questions I couldn't answer. I kept telling them what my job was, and if my report would be positive they might be able to sell 50-200 developer licenses. But they kept pushing me to answer business questions I couldn't answer. It's not my job to know that stuff, and I wasn't allowed to share information about company internals to a third party.

In the end our team never completed that report, and I just put this sales person into all my block lists. Never heard from them again ;)

I was never really sure if they were scared we would abuse an evaluation license, but it was a reputable company (nothing shady at all, no US sanctions, nothing). Even if they had no idea about the market we were in, just reading the Wikipedia article about the company would've shown them, that this is someone they would probably like to be in business with.

Dear goodness will any other companies trying to sell to the company I work at please adopt this strategy. Please explain clearly what your product does, how you handle security, and what the enterprise license costs on the homepage.

Please do not harass us with calls and perpetual emails asking to schedule calls. If a call is what it takes to answer basic security and pricing questions, I loathe your company name before we've spoken and am very interested in doing business with anyone who *does* post that stuff online.

I do not understand why that's difficult, but it must be.

I wish I could use what this guy is selling.

One thing I find with enterprise is your call sometimes isn't entirely about you selling them on your product. It's about learning about the enterprise, from them.

It's about feeling out their organization, their issues, and the dynamics between different departments at that company. Even issues they don't realize they have that are solvable. I find none of that comes out very clearly in emails that tend to be bullet point style focused but don't reveal the nature of the issue.

I don't like calls either, but they are useful.

Been on the other side, running Technology in 3 listed companies.

People came telling me they could do anything, but everything was too shallow.

I turned it around. I would say “we have 40 mins. I will run through a list of our current pain points or challenges. If you feel you can add value to any of those, pick your best 3 and shoot an email and specific material next week”

The change was dramatic. Many sales people actually thanked later saying it was much more productive for them too.

Just this week I encountered this exact thing

On Sunday (first workday here), I needed a PoE injector that could take in 24V DC and step it up to PoE+ voltages (around 50V iirc), so I looked around, and found an industrial one that matched my requirements. On the manufacturere's website, there was only a GET QUOTE button, and when searching for the model number, I couldn't find a place where I could just buy the thing.

So I clicked on GET QUOTE and filled in my details, company, work email, etc.. I then got an automated email saying my request was received along with details of the request (just the one PoE+ Injector).

We needed this for a fairly tight deadline, so we ended up getting an industrial PoE+ switch, which also gave us some added flexibility, and had 2 units on my desk by Tuesday.

Fast forward to today (Thursday), I get a call from a local distributor who had _no idea_ which product I requested a quote for, and just asked about what my needs are. I of course told them it's no longer relevant, and they decided to send me an email with some wildly irrelevant brochures for ruggedized tablets.

All this is to say, if the manufacturer just put up a price or link to buy online, I would have likely ordered 1-3 units on the spot, either directly or via a distributor. But they decided to complicate the process, and lost the sale to someone who was willing to just sell the products instead of trying to get me on a call.

I also had a look at the distributor's website, and they seem to offer various vague "compute platforms" and "industry-specific solutions", I typed in the model number into the search box, and got no results, and when I typed in the manufacturer, it just brought me to a page saying they are a "Platform Partner", with another contact button.

This guy and I are on the same page. Love his boldness at committing to the “No calls” bit, and I wish them nothing but success.

Speaking as an introverted engineer myself, the number one turn-off on any given product is a lack of transparent pricing info or locking any sort of demonstration behind a mandatory contact harvester for a call or email chain. I don’t want to commit to a bunch of social “dances” when I’m trying to solve a technical problem, nor do I want to deal with overly pushy salespeople who either don’t understand my problem or immediately want to upsell to meet their own goals or quotas.

If your tool solves my problem, I will pay you money. That’s the transaction. Everything else - the swag, the sales calls, the free lunches, the conference tickets, the sportsball box seats - is extraneous to my core goal, which is solving the problem.

My understanding is that enterprise purchasing teams are often evaluated based on their ability to secure discounts compared to the initial sticker price of the software. Therefore, having a firm sticker price might make them less incentivized to purchase your SaaS. I suspect many companies don't put pricing up front so the email can say "Normally, we charge X per seat, but we'll give you a special volume offer of Y"

I don't dislike calls, I just hate time wasting. And some e-mail threads should have been a call.

From a customer perspective, if you're making purchases of a certain size "Call for Pricing" is just a dance you need to learn to do.

It is pretty annoying that the first call is almost always with an SDR who can't answer basic questions about the product, whose whole job is to make sure you are a qualified customer, and book a second call. The goal of that call is basically answer their questions as fast possible, book the next call, and get off the phone.

On the second call, hopefully with a sales rep and a good solutions engineer -- you don't have to politely listen to their whole spiel, more often then not they'll be very happy if you start peppering them with very specific questions, rather than sitting through the generic demo. A good solutions engineer is able to answer my questions a lot faster than I can find the answer on the website.

It's also highly beneficial to have individual names and phone numbers inside the company if things don't go so well once you're a customer -- if google shuts down your gsuite account, it's nice to have your account rep's cell phone number.

Also, differential pricing is a perhaps a silly dance we all do, but it's life when making purchases of a certain size. It can also work in your favor as a buyer -- if you can, figure out when the company's quarter end is, and line your purchase with that -- there's a pretty good chance they'll be incentivized to cut you a good deal if they're trying to hit their numbers. Also, even if you're not planning on buying from a competitor, get a quote from them, and say "your competitor gave me X price, Im going to go with them unless you do better."

One part of the article I found funny/absurd was that he was tired of talking with potential buyers who were not technical enough or authoritative enough to understand the product or make the purchase. And buyers like me are tired of talking with salespeople who are not technical enough to answer my questions or authoritative/knowledgeable enough to make the sale. That implies to me that in an effort to protect employee time, BOTH the buyers and sellers are often sending under-qualified, lesser paid people to these initial conversations, in an effort to vet each other before either are willing to take the risk of sending in their more expensive people who can make progress. Wow.

Sounds like he ran up against the snails pace of enterprise sales. It takes patience. When I cofounded a company selling a KYC solution to global banks, I did a survey of 30 FinTech founders on how long it took to get ink on paper with a global bank. 18 months was the usual answer, and it took even longer to get an actual check. If demand for your product is from large enterprises and you don't plan for this up front you simply can't survive. SaaS and "no meetings" are a great alternative... if the demand is there and it scales to a real opportunity. A lot of startups get lured into dealing with calls because a huge company with a potential $1M+ sale looms and they could raise their next round now if they close it. It is hard to say no.

Did the author forget to take "Schedule a Call" button from their pricing page if you drag the slider all the way to the right ? :) Kinda contradicts the entire post.

I'm reminded of a company I used to work for that had one sales guy with with a phone, you called him and he would quote a price and ask if you wanted it. I sat across from him. He never left his desk.

After a year, our company was bought and merged with a competitor and we got to see how their sales team worked.

They had a dozen sales guys doing the exact same job as our man, however, they met with prospective clients, had lunch, and 'worked the field'.

Our one man with a phone outsold all of the others combined.

Having a more efficient sales process can be a game changer.

One thing I've noticed in the security compliance space is that asynchronous communication actually works better than calls for complex technical reviews. When security teams handle questionnaires over email, they can pull in the right SMEs at the right time, reference past responses accurately, and give thoughtful, precise answers instead of making stuff up on the spot.

Plus, good documentation is a force multiplier – if you document your security posture well once, you've just saved yourself from explaining the same things over and over on different calls. I've seen companies go from drowning in back-and-forth calls to handling most security reviews purely through email and documentation, with their technical teams only jumping in for the truly novel questions.

But there's literally a button on their pricing page to "Book discovery call" if you increase the slider above 100k????

Or did you all upvote without actually checking that XD

https://keygen.sh/pricing/

I hope this reaches other companies selling to technical people. I’ve also been a CTO at a $xxM ARR company, and I made several buying decisions for competitors who let me try their product without requiring a meeting.

Of course, some people do prefer calls, but I think there’s a disproportionate default to “book a call first” when selling.

I'm a founder (and started solo like the OP) in the tech / devops / infra space. Doing calls, and in-person meetings is the 10x accelerator for sales. The OP is quite right in his assessment of what types of calls there are. Pretty spot on.

However, the moment you can afford to have AE (Account Executives) and "sales" in general to field these calls, you might benefit. He IS leaving money on the table.

(yes, we have all pricing, free plan and super extensive docs on our site. But still calls and meetings seal the sweetest deals)

Love that this at the top of HN right now. I understand having an option to do a call, but when it's mandatory just for a bigger customer to get access to a product, it makes little sense. It's like asking a fish to swim a little closer to the hook. The fish knows what you're doing, you know what you're doing, and it's zero fun for anyone involved.

I work at $bigco and there is a team of people whose job is to sit on these calls when we want to engage with a vendor. Engineers aren’t even allowed on these calls and everything is filtered through the gatekeeper.

I would love if we could talk with potential vendors directly through email. I think I one waited several months for the gatekeeper to ask the vendor engineers a 10 question document.

Geohot says nearly the same thing. "Its much cheaper for them to waste your time than it is for you to waste theirs."

https://youtu.be/GLGuA2qF3Kk?&t=320

I was a chief Procurement officer at multiple tech companies and just hated sales calls. What I really want is a clear pricing structure and a list of documentation to look into.

For anyone tired of the sales pitch, feel free to reach out as I've built a company who takes care of the entire procurement cycle for you (including negotiations)

If you are selling to a non-technical user, phone calls give them a hint of your support. Email support is horrible. Turn around times are too slow. This is the reason I wont buy another framework laptop.

Having spent ~15 years in enterprise software I doubt that this works at higher price points but holy hell is this guy living the dream

I literarily wrote this e-mail yesterday, when an enterprise customer asked to discuss, I hate calls:

"... I usually prefer discussing async, via email, so I can provide more comprehensive answers and solutions, especially that we are talking about specific technical requirements.

Via email, we also have everything written down, if we ever need to recall/search for some specific detail. Does this work for you, or do you have other suggestion?"

This whole thing works when you’re small, right up until it doesn’t. If you never have a call with a customer you never have a relationship. If you never have a relationship you have no idea what’s important to them, if there’s risk of churn, or if there’s a competitor sniffing at your door.

I doubt the random engineer you emailed with is going to send you an email letting you know their CTO had dinner with a competitor who is offering to undercut you by 10%.

This pops up at an interesting time. I'm thinking about starting a business that will require me to sell services to enterprise customers, and I feel much the same way about phone calls. I thought I would just have to get good at it, but maybe there's an opportunity to rethink the base assumptions. If my potential customers would rather have an e-mail exchange, I'd be all for it, so at the very least I can present that option up front.

"They're not only awkward, but a 30 minute call takes up hours of my headspace." This is so apt. I've found that I have the best calls with people who provide specific notes about what they want to discuss—the more specific the note, the less headspace the call requires.

Maybe it could be done via email which is the point of this blog, but I never had the confidence to try that.

Off topic but a developer using keygen.sh is at the mercy of any “keygen.sh key generator” program out there, no ? Crackers can centralize cracking all those software by only figuring out once the algorithm. Whereas if you implement your own dirty key licensing crackers would need to do manual work for your software. So, whats the point of this service here ?

You are so much spot on with this post. Nothing puts off more than someone on LinkedIn asking "When do you have time to have a call to talk about what I can do for your company?" or even worse: "Here's my calendly, pick the spot you would like!" Not to mention I am not a decisive person in the company, the largest choice I can do is whether I work on a Mac or a PC.

If I'm in a better mood, I ask them to send me some e-mail or PDF with what they have to offer.

I am adding your post to my bookmarks and will always reply to such messages with it.

As a CTO, I would definitely hesitate to make a corporate purchase without seeing a "Request a call" button. I don't need a call. I would almost never book one. But I need to be sure that live people are behind the web site.

I never buy anything that doesn't put its price upfront, at least for a basic configuration. I understand that any customization will change the price, and usually the cost will increase in this case. I'm OK with it. I also understand that when something is designed from scratch, then the price may only be known after the design. But I've only been in such situation once. In most cases it's just hiding the vital information from the customer.

Agreed on most sales calls being unnecessary.

But no internal calls? That's crazy.

No, I don't love calls, but I also don't love spending days on email threads when we could have a 30-minute conversation with all the stakeholders present (along with all the non-textual clues one gets from talking in real time to another human).

Is asynchronous communications sometimes a positive? Yes, sure. But it's also a big negative when you just need to discuss an issue, make a decision, and move on.

Side question: How does the bubble-merge effect on the home page[1] work? [1] https://keygen.sh/

One thing that email is not the best tool for is back-and-forth dialog. Once an email thread got to be a certain length or spans some number of days, it becomes difficult to follow. The increased roundtrip latency is also unfortunate.

Although the alternative to that is not necessarily voice calls. Text chats would have been great, but which platform do you use? Everyone has got their own instant messaging systems these days.

There is also the perception that voice calls have a reduced likelihood of leaving a record, which is why some people are only reachable by phone.

I'm the opposite. I live for calls. I don't like text messages. I'm not great at face-to-face. But over the phone, I'm at my best.

This may be a place were regulation would be helpful, there is a bit of a prisoner dilemma here where companies want to maintain the ability to price discriminate and so there is a strong motivation to keep the status quo vs bucking the trend and losing the consumer surplus.

A simple rule like, "You have to have pricing for you software service displayed on your website, if it's algorithmic you have to be transparent about the formula, how the variables are calculated, and provide a calculator".

Sure there are other good reasons to have a call - it is nice to have a high-bandwidth exchange about the needs of the company and build a relationship with the customer so you could still have calls for that purpose but if they're just trying to compare services, making it harder for the customer is just anti-competitive and leads to a less efficient marketplace.

I'm building something to bypass this entirely. As an IT Director I absolutely despise when I'm evaluating a SaaS product, and they don't have public pricing and my only option is to book a call.

This is annoying because:

1) I have to spend 2-3 calls with salespeople (intro, demo usually minimum) - huge waste of time. I've already evaluated your product and determined it fits my needs.

2) At the end of all of those meetings after a couple weeks (plus the time it takes to get the quote approved) the product could be completely out of my budget. For tools like PAM or vulnerability management the pricing is relatively arbitrary.

So, I started creating https://vendorscout.net when people who have previously received quoting can anonymously upload the pricing they received for so and so users/endpoints so that you can get on the site and look up relatively accurate pricing for the product. I'm still working on the MVP but if you are interested, I'd love some help.

This is an interesting read and take. I don't think it's applicable to everything because not everything fits neatly into "if I explain it, you will buy". This also cripples any kind of outbound motion, which for some businesses, they may never need so that's fine.

On an unrelated note, that squashed font look they're using everywhere is really killing my eyes.

If there's one thing I hate about sales pitches it's claiming one thing and then using weedle words like 'discovery' to essentially lie.

Different communication strategies have different strengths. The strength of talking, in person or over the internet is that the response is near instant, the greatest strength of written communication is that it is near permanent and delayed.

Remembering what you talked about two weeks ago can be hard, E-Mail allows you to look back and re-read about what has happened before (important for both sides). It also relieves you from the burden of having a response ready in seconds.

I do not think you could sell a car over E-Mail, but for a technical product, where technical questions need to be answered I do think it is different. But I also think it is a problem of management, which intentionally avoids technical issues.

this is not a good idea for most enterprise or even early-stage startups

I don't think their business seems impressive enough to really make this argument either

This dysfunction is much worse with hardware and unique to US/ Europe and almost non existent in China. In US, Europe, regularly to buy the simplest of sensors (which can cost < 100$), the price won’t be written and I need to fill a form with a bunch of details (why do you need to know my company industry?), and then schedule a call, just to buy the thing.

In Chinese websites you can just see the price at website, and they mention different prices for different volumes. And if I need something custom, I can contact them and they would build it.

I notice that when I started my software career everything was mostly emails and some text messaging. Then 10 years later, even before the pandemic, everything was a call. These weren't even sales people, but other developers. Its like everybody suddenly became allergic to putting things in writing and when pressed to do so they couldn't.

Yes, there are some advantages to sharing screens. But, being able to communicate with both precision and brevity in writing has its advantages. I strongly believe this skill is what prioritized me for promotion over my peers. It certainly wasn't my work ethic. Hard work is not well valued when somebody who works less hard delivers more.

> we have a security page that outlines all of this, and essentially answers the questions that are in most security questionnaires we've seen.

And yet, you still have to fill them in, because the people who ask you for them don't actually care to read them or do the data entry, and generally don't even understand them. It's often clear that they're the people who are supposed to be filing them out, when you get questions like "is the data stored according to our internal "level 3" designation described on this intranet page". I find it so frustrating. They say they have questions. They don't have questions, and they don't care about the answers. They care about whether their spreadsheet automatically highlights and cells in red.

"But hey, you want that sale don't you? So do my homework"

> #4: They want to build trust

For my business (micro-SaaS EdTech), the value of building trust with my customers cannot be understated. Further, I don’t believe i can effectively build trust with my customers in the way the author describes; without meetings.

As a customer, I absolutely abhor that the I need to book a call with sales to buy any enterprise product. Please, for the friggin love of <insert your deity or whatever rocks your boat here> let's do it over email!

I hate "let's just have a quick call" people. It's never quick, it's always manipulative, and always a waste of time.

I have a client who tries to use calls to weasel out of paying for things. Finally I refused to talk to him on the phone any more. Some invoices remain outstanding but I'm not willing to waste more time listening to BS. I can spend my time making money from responsible people and meanwhile continue to have my invoice system pester him.

Re: sales, there is no such thing as a quick sales call.

The post is about how they have a no-calls policy, even for enterprise sales. The author brags, "I nuked the 'book a call' button from my pricing page".

...But their pricing page actually has a big "Schedule a Call" button when you drag the pricing slider into enterprise territory: https://keygen.sh/pricing/

What am I missing?

Maybe this goes without saying, but this requires really good self-serve for most customers. In general it seems like the trend is more fragmentation, rather than just "more email" but that does mean less call-driven -- https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-s...

I'd love to do this. The context switching between doing development and then sales is so freaking high for me that I basically had to dedicate a specific day to just doing calls and the rest of the days to only doing dev work.

I'm in the camp that I'd rather hire the right person to do the job better than me (in sales) and focus where I'm most strong in instead.

A friend described calls as "high bandwidth information transfer."

An average typing speed is 40wpm but an average conversation is between 120 - 150 wpm so about 3 - 4x bandwidth.

Calls also offer sub second latency and maximum priority.

When you add video and audio in there, the pure amount of data transferred is higher.

I am truly astonished by the feedback in this thread. I would have called OP a bad salesman for not being able to close a deal in the phone.

If I want to buy something, I want a call to weed out the unuseful products quickly without having to comb through useless websites

This model works for customers where the user and the buyer are the same person (or highly aligned) but in many other cases, the “procurement team” gets in the way and is literally paid to make calls and negotiate. I love this approach but am concerned about its scalability.

I wonder if part of the reason people are comfortable ditching calls is that we’re already transitioning to a world where AI can handle so much of the back-and-forth. Tools like ChatGPT and automatic summarizers make it easy to manage and process large volumes of written communication, so async feels almost effortless.

On the other hand, it’s less clear if we’ve got good AI solutions for real-time calls. Yes, we have speech-to-text and live transcription, but they still require more setup and don’t always capture context as smoothly as a neatly structured email thread. For people who want everything documented and searchable—even the decision-making logic—AI-assisted written communication just works better right now.

I’m curious if future AI tools will make synchronous calls more appealing by automatically generating real-time summaries or helping participants get to the crux of the discussion faster. But at least for the moment, it seems AI is nudging us toward async rather than giving us a richer live conversation experience.

For context, keygen allegedly has $195.4K revenue and 100 customers in 2024.[1]

[1]: https://getlatka.com/companies/keygen

I might have missed it, but doesn't it seem like the best option would have been to provide an option for both? Some people (especially of a certain generation) absolutely prefer calls. Seems best to just meet the customer where they're at.

As someone who is also introverted and looking to start a business in the next few months, this is something I'm going to seriously consider.

When I'm on the consuming end of a service, I would always rather help my self than interact with a sales person or support team.

inspired by this post just wrote down small story about one of the calls

https://antiantihuman.com/programmable-intimacy

I have a small B2C app that requires no calls or interactions in general to get customers, just support afterwards. Currently have a few hundred subscriptions. It's not much but makes me pretty happy.

I am so behind this even in day to day interactions. I do not need to have a 1 hour meeting or teams call for something that could be an email thread.

This resonates with my experience. The consulting/software company I work for practices price transparency (even though we're the most expensive in our market) and pushes hard for email communication with leads and clients. Our stuff is heavily documented. More substance, less BS.

We used to do lots of sales calls years ago, but 99% of our entreprise growth came from being active members of our community and talking (email!) to engineers. We still do sales calls, but they're essentially what the author calls "discovery calls". And we prequalify the shit out of leads before we take a call with them -- yes, that means taking a few minutes to learn about what they do.

Always wondered how you can protect a php or python package with a license key. Its code, you can just ignore the key in the source code, can you not?

I've found that a good YouTube video can replace demo meetings, too.

We got a later-stage startup to integrate with our API entirely off of a demo video.

Once you move the slider on this site to Ent-1, you get a price, but you still get "Let's book a call".

Why?

Never heard of Fair Source licensing before.

If you don't want to make phone calls, isn't that what an employee is for?

To do everything that you don't want to...

"If your messaging is vague, people will need to get on a call to understand what you actually offer."

I am so tired of someone at work saying "Hey, we're thinking of using X" (or "going to use X"), and I go to their web page, and what is X? Why, it's a tool that will unlock the value of my business and allow unparalleled visibility into my business to connect with my customers and brings highly-available best-of-breed services to us to secure and empower our business, which has up to this point just been businessin' along without the full power of businessy business that we could have been businessing if we just businessed this business product earlier.

But...

.. what is it?

Is it a hosted database? Is it a plugin to Salesforce CRM? Is it a training program? Is it a deployable appliance or VM image? Is it a desktop application? Is it a cloud service? Is it an API? Is it some sort of 3rd party agency meant to replace some bit of my business? Who is meant to use it? Developers? Business? Finance? Ops?

These are all very basic questions that are only the very beginning of understanding of what the product actually is, and I frequently can't even guess based on the home page. I have more than once been told we're using one of these products and linked to the homepage in question, and still had to come back and ask the person "Yes, but what is it?"

The best thing you can do is hit the developer docs page, if there is one, but even then it's fairly rare for there to be a clear answer. You have to poke through frequently disorganized, task-based documents with no clear progression as to "here's where to start with our product" and frankly some products have defeated me even so. I can get as far as "Ah, you have some sort of web interface" and probably some clue about what it actually is, but that hardly nails it down. You'd think I could juts derive the answer almost immediately.

So glad it's not my job to poke through these things. I have to imagine there's a lot of people who would equally find it a breath of fresh air to hit a website and have some sort of idea what it is in 30 seconds or less.

I understand, even if it's not my personal philosophy, still being vague on price so you have to call about that. I don't understand the idea behind hiding what your product even is behind such a thick layer of vague buzzwords that a professional in the field is still left virtually clueless about what it actually is even after a careful read.

I can’t recall ever seeing the contraction “who’re” before. For obvious reasons I suppose.

Humans talk to people. It's about building a relationship.

Great article! Genuinely helpful to the entrepreneur community here.

Off-Topic: What is the best way to “subscribe” to blogs like this? Is there a popular service/tool out there even for blogs that don’t have RSS or TwitterX? Or, just keep a list of blogs of interest and check occasionally? Thanks.

You don’t actually know your customers needs until you talk to them. Most businesses determine how to build their products by having conversations with their customers.

My wife works in sales. She always pushes people to her email via her voicemail or email signature. When people need really technical support, there is a group of dedicated people to help with that aspect. Technical support really isn’t her job but in her mind it kind of is as being an important point of first contact to keep the relationship strong.

Granted, you need to be very responsive to your email, including monitoring it a little on the off hours.

She continues to grow her business territory each year for almost 2 decades and almost never makes sales phone calls. She does do scripted presentations for big deals from time to time but gets some support for those.

One sane man in a sea of glorified door-to-door salesmen that govern B2B.

I totally love it!

There’s good advice in this article like making your product messaging clear but there’s also terrible advice here.

“Discovery calls are just a formality” was something I cringed at. It’s basically the most important part of the sales process.

The author also didn’t like the sales process where pricing is fuzzy. But for enterprise sales there is a very good reason for this: you need to size up how your solution solves business pain for your customer and how much money it saves or makes them. If you are saving AT&T a billion dollars with your solution but you’re only charging them $1000/month, you’ve royally fucked up. And a big client like AT&T will stress your support and engineering staff with a lot of requests for help and customizations.

At some point the author perhaps should have recognized the need to have someone who knows enterprise sales on their side rather than going it alone. I wanted the author so badly to admit that it’s something they’re are bad at and that they should get help. They are probably leaving a lot of growth on the table by having this amateur sales strategy.

I would recommend to the author the book Sales on Rails. It’s a great resource for understanding how technical enterprise sales works. The author seems completely unaware of the account executive sales engineer sales team that is so common because it works.

If the author is lucky to expand their business further they will hit a point where leads stop just contacting them. They will have to make cold calls and surface customers who aren’t obviously interested. This no-call strategy will not fly at every type of company.

I would add video chats into this waste of time.

I can confirm as a (largeish) buyer, i despise useless calls and video conferences.

I do not have time, and it costs me money to hop on a 20 minute call just to find out it was a presentation of their slicks that were in PDF, or go through 30 slides that they could have emailed me.

It costs me money for a vendor and internal teams to eat time, and my cost change depending on the time of the day. My rate is highest during mid to late day. If you send me an email with the info and I can read it in my morning quiet time, it (mentally & $$) cost less, and I will be less grouchy.

there are some times when a call works. If the emails are fruitless because the writers lack the ability to be succinct, or cannot articulate what they need.

edit: @spiderfarmer wrote it much better.

What you do at Keygen is you take the specifications from the customer and bring them down to the software engineers?

Yes, yes that's right.

Well then I just have to ask why can't the customers take them directly to the software people?

Well, I'll tell you why, because, engineers are not good at dealing with customers.

So you physically take the specs from the customer?

Well... No. My secretary does that, or they're faxed.

So then you must physically bring them to the software people?

Well. No. Ah sometimes.

This article inspires me to institute a similar policy regarding zoom meetings in my lab. For some things, a quick chat is needed sure, but most of the time, writing and responding to an email in a thorough and thoughtful manner is 1000% more effective.

I love this aspiration and it's something I wanted to do, but unfortunately if you get into a situation where you're wanting to sell to larger more old-school enterprise or government customers it's going to be hard to impossible to execute. Unless your product is low cost and has no higher-level enterprise offerings, you're going to have to have sales.

I find it quite funny that if you go to the pricing page, they'll funnel you into a call if you get to the enterprise part.

OMG I'm doing this.

Not holding BS SOC2, HIPAA, and PCI certifications in the security space is probably even more non-conformist than nocalls.

This feels related to that “Nobody Cares” post from yesterday.

Nobody cares that calls are a pain, so everyone just keeps having them.

> Being an introvert, I absolutely hated calls.

Can we stop with this crap already.

You hate calls because you hate calls. Not because you’ve made up a definition of introvert that helps you avoid phone calls.

I can relate.

> When the next person asked for a call, I responded with a simple "No, we don't do calls, but happy to help via email. Feel free to CC any relevant team members onto this thread."

"No calls" and "talk to right people" is unrelated. Just have a call with the engineer. At least you know they heard you not just ignored a cc.

I felt this way for a long time, until a couple years ago. Talking with your mouth uses a completely different part of your brain than talking with your fingers. There's pros and cons to both methods. It's nice to have an ace up your sleeve when your competition is other nerds with great writing skills.

This is an incredibly inspiring story to read. Thanks for sharing!

Never having to take a sales call to grow a company is the dream for an introvert like me. And, as an open source developer, I care a lot about clear communication, transparency, and high-quality documentation.

Looking at the Keygen front page, I can see how effective they would be at targeting the kind of customer they'd want.

I personally have no use for software licensing products, but if I did, I would probably choose keygen just on the merits of this blog post.

This exists because sales guys don't know how to type, and generally have poor reading comprehension.

Typing out 3-4 sentences is an order of magnitude harder for them than making a few minute phone call.

I require everyone I hire take a typing speed test and know how to touch type. If they can't and they are a must-hire, I make their first two weeks involve an hour or two of typing tutor use. It's essential to an asynchronous workforce.

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Cool name. Looks like a cool product. I'd pay more if it plays MIDI while generating my license key.