No Calls

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.

People buy 100k cars online nowadays, why wouldn’t a great online presence also work?

A 100K car is a commodity product with very limited customization.

If you don't like the car, the manufacturer is not going to make a new one for you personally.

A large SaaS customer is the opposite.

You can go to the Porsche configurator website and design a personally customized globally unique $300K+ car, and it shows you not only the price but also what it'll look like. So there's obviously nothing _technical_ preventing them from letting people just order online, like with Tesla. Frustratingly, you have to still go into a dealer for them to click the submit order button, and they might add a markup for this privilege despite them adding negative value to the experience. It is just as frustrating as B2B sales. I'm sure some buyers want to speak to a human, but enthusiasts tend to know exactly what they want and they dread having to "build a relationship" and wonder if they got screwed because they didn't negotiate hard enough / aren't good-looking enough / etc.

As for B2B sales, if AWS can show their pricing online, which has to be among the most complex pricing in existence - then so can every other SaaS company.

I think you and the parent comment are talking about different scales. A large SaaS company deal could be $300k per month per customer, and the sales process for a company like that can involve changing the software to meet the needs of the customer. A very early lesson is that what the customer says they need is not always the same as what they actually need.

One of the many reasons calls happen is that customers say "I need XYZ feature in order to do this deal," and the salesperson then needs to ask why they need XYZ feature, and what they want to accomplish, and maybe existing ABC feature actually meets their need, or maybe the company needs to develop XYZ feature to secure the contract. Once you get into a complex domain, that is not happening over email.

The article contains good advice to many businesses out there, but it's worth considering the situations where it doesn't apply, too.