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No Calls

(keygen.sh)
1603 points ezekg | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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focusedone ◴[] No.42726381[source]
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.

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ToucanLoucan ◴[] No.42727027[source]
> I do not understand why that's difficult, but it must be.

Because historically and even presently to a distressing degree, sales is not about communication, it's not amount mutuality of purpose, and it's not about explaining what the product is. If you have a product that does it's job and does it well, and solves a problem for a person or a business, you don't need a sales call because a sales email is more effective. You need a sales call (and arguably, a salesperson) when the value proposition isn't remotely that clear.

Most salespeople when you're on the phone with them do not care about you as a customer. They care about making their quota and/or getting their commission. I appreciate at my current employer that while we offer bonuses for sales folks that really go above an beyond, like scoring a large account or solving a large problem, we don't do commissions, we just pay good salaries. That means the sales person as they're working is not incentivized to sell as much as possible, they're incentivized to figure out the (potential) client's needs, and how we can best meet them, irrespective of what they end up paying.

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Levitz ◴[] No.42727640[source]
>Most salespeople when you're on the phone with them do not care about you as a customer. They care about making their quota and/or getting their commission.

This is my experience too, along with sunk cost. It's one thing to look at a few service and compare pricing and product, it's a whole different thing to book 5 different calls with 5 different companies before you can even begin to decide what to do, it gets extra bad when you have questions they can't answer, so you book an additional call in which you are informed that some important feature is out of the question and tadaa, you just wasted a whole lot of time for a bunch of people with nothing to show for it.

Anecdotally, I find engineers are way more prone to omitting the video feed and to lean on emails as response mechanism. I guess there's also a "people's person" vs "things person" thing going on.

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1. TeMPOraL ◴[] No.42731169{3}[source]
> Anecdotally, I find engineers are way more prone to omitting the video feed and to lean on emails as response mechanism. I guess there's also a "people's person" vs "things person" thing going on.

To me, it's refusing to show up with a knife to a gun fight. The company needs a thing. The "things person" stands no chance in direct confrontation with a "people's person" and they know it, so they to avoid calls (direct or otherwise) to level the playing field. A "people's person" could fare much better against the seller's "people's persons", but then a "people's person" is in much worse position to understand the thing the company needs in the first place.

For buying things, a win-win outcome can occur only when people on both both buyer and seller side are "things persons".

It's basically a Prisoner's dilemma, with "people's person" and "things person" in place of "defect" and "cooperate".