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No Calls

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1603 points ezekg | 5 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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freedomben ◴[] No.42728008[source]
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.

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dimatura ◴[] No.42731654[source]
Agreed. As someone in a place to make purchasing decisions, if I can just sign up and try something without having to "jump on a call" and sit through a demo, I'm more likely to do so. I'm more willing to meet afterwards if I like what I see.

As it happens, a while back I did exactly this for a company after reading a post about their launch on HN. In a later conversation with their CEO, I found out we were their first customer!

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1. eastbound ◴[] No.42731873[source]
You can go to the SpaceX website and see the price of rockets. You can literally enter your credit card numbers to pay for it.
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2. mushufasa ◴[] No.42732049[source]
you mean... the gift shop with the model rockets?
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3. dimatura ◴[] No.42732327[source]
I'd wait to see if they have a good black friday sale.
4. WJW ◴[] No.42732340[source]
No, go to https://rideshare.spacex.com/search?orbitClassification=2&la... and click through a couple of times. It literally asks you for your contact data and credit card number so you can pay 650k USD for launching 15 kg to LEO.
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5. wat10000 ◴[] No.42732734{3}[source]
Technically you’re just paying the $5,000 deposit with your card. They probably don’t want to eat the card processing fees on the full amount and will request some other sort of transfer for the remainder.