No Calls
(keygen.sh)1496 points by ezekg 2 days ago
1496 points by ezekg 2 days ago
I do understand what you are writing.
For me, I can find out way more quantifiable information by just doing 15 minutes of OSINT, or even simpler pull up your D&B report.
I do not trust my emotions.
You seem confidant in your ability to present your exact needs and understand the product and so on, that's good, you're probably right.
But when it comes to something complex, something someone hasn't used before, and all the options and dynamics between enterprise departments that might not be pulling in the same direction, an email almost never covers it and often enterprises aren't aware of it to put it in an email.
If you don't address / discover those things it is potentially a recipient for disaster for everyone.
I've been on numerous calls where a potential customer is on the call and even asking about basic features, then one department head explains to the other "Well we can't do that because X,Y,Z and our other systems A,B,C." and it's the first those two departments REALLY heard each other talk about that. Then we find ways to sort it out.
I've even been on calls where for most of it I'm just there, not doing anything, it's the customer discovering their own processes and working it out internally.
In email that's almost always "we can't do that" because of course not, they're alone with their email, nobody is explaining or offering solutions.
Right or wrong it's just human nature and email doesn't work for some things.
> You seem confidant in your ability to present your exact needs and understand the product and so on, that's good, you're probably right.
It's not that - or at least not just that. The key insight I feel some comments here are missing is, from the buyer's perspective, the process is risky and (with market economy being what it is), adversarial until proven otherwise. All you're saying is true, but until I know you better, I can't tell whether you have my best interests in mind, or are trying to plain scam me.
To use an analogy, there's a reason people go on dates and gradually open up to a potential partner over extended amount of time, instead of just marrying the first person who promises the right things on the spot.
A D&B report is not going to tell you everything you need to know about a company and the dynamics and problems it has with respect to the problem space that you and your company deal with.
I mean, you could somehow get access to an entire company's email history and it still won't tell you everything you need to know. Whether people like it not, sometimes direct, high-bandwidth human interaction is required to adequately understand an issue.
> and it still won't tell you everything you need to know
Talking to them will? we cannot have it both ways (the entire company's email history is not enough to tell me what I need, but meeting for an hour, say three times with the salesperson will).
I think you _are_ right, but I do not need everything. I just need good enough to make a decision to move forward.
One of the most infuriating b2b calls I've ever been on was setup by our vendor to sound like this. After almost a year of using their product (on a month to month plan), they wanted to check-in and see what features we were using, what we liked, didn't like and show us the new stuff they'd released etc. And then in the last 10 minutes of an hour long call, they dropped a little "we just need to go over some administrative details" bomb where they started negotiations to get us on a year long contract. I will never accept another discovery call from this vendor again. It was such a huge piss off.
Weird reaction to say the least assuming you were happy with the product. I've been on calls where the vendor is already on thin ice because the product doesn't work and we're just making sure they are taking us seriously, where AE knuckleheads try to use that as an opportunity to upsell a higher tier of support or something. That's annoying and ime never goes well.
Offering an annual contract though, which presumably comes with a volume discount is a totally normal practice that should benefit both parties assuming it's executed well.
> 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'd like to trust you and your intentions specifically, but in the general case, this relationship is adversarial, so as the potential buyer, I definitely do not want you to "feel me out", and further disadvantage me in the coming negotiations. I'm fine letting you on the details of my organization, its issues and interdepartmental dynamics, but only at the point when I know enough about you and your product to feel safe you aren't just going to scam me.
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.
This makes a good point. Many salespeople want the process to be more effective as well. Their time is money, just like ours. Good communication principles absolutely apply
Most people you talk to on that level either don’t know what the pain points are or don’t want to tell you out of fear that you exploit that knowledge.
Most colleagues in the same role in the same industry are good friends or friends of friends.
We have lunch or dinner now and then and meet at sector events. We share a lot of what are our challenges, what works, what doesn’t, who is good and who is not and how much we are paying our suppliers
If a sales person took the info across the street, chances are a) they already known about it or b) the person across the street will ring me to let me know.
Again, I don’t meet the sales rank and file, in many cases the Senior Partner across the table also knows me well (past clients, suppliers or colleagues).
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.
Then don’t do calls, tell them “this is my problem”, describe it well, and insist on email communication. Tell them X$ is the price that you are willing to pay and stay firm on it. I think this will work for most companies - if not then you probably don’t want to do business with them. Who is forcing you to do social dances? State the problem, state what you want as solution and sign the contract, done.
Yeah, that doesn’t work unless you’re in the C-suite generally. Every time I’ve tried to throw up that sort of firm wall, the sales people just reach out above me - and ultimately usually end up forcing the sale even if the product doesn’t meet our needs, because they’re able to convince the higher-ups that it actually does and that their Engineers (i.e., me and my team) are mistaken.
Right now, unless you’re some sort of 10x rockstar extrovert, you’ve gotta play the game by the existing rules. It’s why I applaud this particular company’s position, since it means I don’t have to worry about being undermined by some outside salesperson with a quota to meet and a gift budget they haven’t emptied.
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"
The two categories of enterprises I’ve seen most react differently. There are staid, predictable and well understood businesses that highly value discounts, some to the point of absurdity. There are also enterprises with a more dynamic nature that are going in new directions and highly value flexibility. Most fall in one of those camps, and sometimes both.
I don't dislike calls, I just hate time wasting. And some e-mail threads should have been a call.
> In a call you can't be ignored or left on read for 4 hours.
You also have no time to formulate a thoughtful answer to complex questions, though, which is one my issues. Calls are fine for some things, but 90% of calls could be an email because they contain discussion that needs more than 15 minutes of thinking. And a lot of the time, these calls need a summary email to even keep track of what was said!
I think the gap issue in async communication is a feature, not a bug.
Right. The point is that reasonable response time can turn a 10 minute conversation into a 48 hour long conversation that requires me to context switch 11 times over two days instead of just once.
If it's a straightforward product that might not happen. If it's a product with lots of subtle complications and I need to ask lots of questions whose answers depend on their answers to previous questions it will definitely happen.
> In a call you can't be ignored
As someone on the Autistic spectrum... yes, yes you most certainly can. When you're speaking I'm (not necessarily voluntarily-)daydreaming about my current hyperfocus/obsession. I'm tuned-in just enough to not reply with something so far out of left field that it gives away that my attention is elsewhere, but I'm definitely not listening to you. Your words are going in one ear and right out the other. I'll shoot you an e-mail for "clarification" later.
I hate this about myself and I've worked very hard to overcome it, but after thirty-seven years I've learned to accept that it's my baseline. I'll have to actively work against it for the rest of my life.
Unfortunately, this applies to meetings and lectures as well. In school and, later, university I had to go to class and teach myself the material each night.
> I don't dislike calls, I just hate time wasting. And some e-mail threads should have been a call.
I like to think I can "read the room". I particularly try to send email, versus a call, when the recipient will need to take time to prepare a thoughtful reply.
I've had several calls, sparked after a detailed email, where I end up reading my message literally word-for-word only to be met with the response: "Yeah-- we I'll need to respond to that offline".
Just. Read. My. Damned. Email.
I think very little of people who won't take the time to read anything longer than a couple sentences. It's especially galling because I work hard to write terse, bottom-line-up-front style-emails.
Hot take: W/ LLMs being used to summarize text, and robust text-to-speech, maybe I won't have as time-wasting calls. The kind of person who can't be bothered to read probably likes those kinds of things.
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."
> 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.
No it isn't. I have never once found a situation where there wasn't an alternative to the vendors who try to waste your time with "call for pricing". There are companies who do business honestly, and I choose to use them.
What was the biggest contract you inked this way? I can’t imagine a company is willing to pay 6-7 figures without at least talking to one human on the other side.
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 touch on this at the end of the post. It's a short 15m 'discovery call', not a sales call. It's essentially a formality to intro each other, make sure we're human, and move onto email for any further discussion. Essentially, not all enterprises will shoot you a cold email to start the conversation, so this call is to capture those leads, with the end-goal of having all real discussion in email.
tl;dr: some enterprises will bounce if they don't see a 'book a call' button.
You seem to be doing this in good faith but honestly, there is no difference between 'Discovery Call" and a "Sales Call". The point is that the customer has to speak with someone first. I do think it is required for enterprise deals but the premise of your post seems to say otherwise.
The call offered here is optional isn't it? You can engage entirely over email for enterprise deals.
Yeah, I was annoyed at this too but I think they're differentiating it by having the price already set, and it's just a way for Companies to do the intro dance if they want to. I know my immediate decision-makers at my company wouldn't use a vendor if there was no call.
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.
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
I even went back to check the post date, but it’s from today and yet they do have a “book a call” button. I don’t get it. Is this just marketing?
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.
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.
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)
It's very obvious that keygen's market is people who hate sales calls.
Every market is different. Don't generalize your market to this market. Companies also go through phases where, what works for them when they are small and working in a niche won't work when they are larger. I suspect that keygen will need to do sales calls at some point when they are larger; if they choose to grow into that market.
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."
Counterpoint: Recently dealt with a vendor at work and asked their support several highly technical questions together with a bug report for an issue we were having.
They not only answered in 1 day, but also provided a real solution / workaround for our issue, as well as a technical answer to the questions and a technical analysis of why the bug occurs.
Outstanding support, and I would never have guessed it from their website.
I've had both great and terrible email support (great where L1 immediatelly involved L2 support and I got a straight up solution in 15 mins, for instance), but getting something done over a voice call has never been that great!
If L1 can solve things for you, a call sometimes can work, but really, if they can't, it meant multiple calls with L1 and multiple calls with L2 (in one recent example, it took 4 months for an issue to be resolved by internal support at BigCo where I was repeatedly asked for the same screenshot, including them recording me get to it a number of times, until I pinged their manager's manager via email pointing how they have the solution in there if they only read my emails, and got it resolved 2h later).
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?"
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)
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%.
I mean I think the OP is referring to sales call for differential pricing. Any mature product would have product team looking at active accounts (even if enterprise sign up was self-service) and scheduling calls to understand needs and drive product improvements. There's never a substitute for that for the reasons you said.
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.
If you dread customer calls, don’t start a business that will require to sell services to enterprise customers. It’s that simple.
"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.
We have a saying in my home country, roughly: 'spoken words fly away, written words remain'.
For reliable and specific matters using calls is unfit for the purpose. I avoid talking about those as a primary medium, being only suplementary. Something not written down never existed in the end.
In matters I do not know to the slightes, where to begin with, talking to a person is better starting with. Then after getting my bearings step back to the reliability of written words and written discussions and written agreements and such is the way.
And those insist on speeking instead of providing written info is a big warning sign about something fishy (intent of misdirection, incompetency, cluelessness, confused internals, ...) is hiding there.
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.
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.
While I find it excessive as well, it might have its benefits. If you're very strict about it, you'd have to either fail, or find ways to be efficient without it. That might mean communicating more explicitly and succinctly, so you don't need non-verbal cues, and don't need days to catch up, and that unlocks crazy amounts of efficiency.
But most companies who'd try that would probably fail before they achieve it.
You overestimate the ability of people to communicate "explicitly and succinctly".
With a mathematical background, I can weigh every word carefully and only include words that add meaning. One short sentence can say a lot.
But people will still assume things, ignore some of those words, and misinterpret so it aligns with their views. When you quickly notice this in a sync communication (which is much easier in a video call compared to an IM chat or even a phone call if you can read facial expressions, body language and tone), that's easily fixed, but email thread can go on for days.
But I agree that you need both (I prefer text, really, but see my point).
I absolutely agree, it's much easier to find out whether someone understood your message, or what they actually want to achieve, or whether they know what the goal is, when you have additional cues.
Once you have less need for these cues because everyone is open and says "I don't understand what you are asking, please rephrase it in simpler terms", or "I have no idea what this project is. Do you know what our goal is?", it gets a lot easier and quicker. But it's very hard to assemble a team that does that well.
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.
My personal experience is that emails and written documents are how things actually get done, but sometimes we have to go through voice calls and in-person meetings in order to get that far.
Those voice interactions felt like some sort of psychological barrier that couldn't be bypassed any other way, at least initially, but once I have opened up a non-voice channel, that's what we tend to use going forward.
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.
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.
> 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.
In addition, you can recall and copy/paste responses from previous emails.
This is one reason why I really, really like email.
Maybe I'm in the minority, but I recently went through the process of purchasing a car from another state and would've LOVED for it all to occur over email (and texting), but the dealership insisted that some of the communications had to occur over a phone call.
I remember buying a Tesla, all via their website, then picking it up when ready. Car sales really should be that simple, at least for new cars where you don't have to actually physically assess the vehicle in person like for used cars.
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.
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.
This feels unfair if it's implying I'm lying for still taking a 15m discovery call. #nocalls is about skipping the dance, not all communication. You can go to extremes, like I did, or adapt it to what works for you. I will say that I have not rejoined the enterprise sales dance, and that hasn't stopped enterprises from buying.
> 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?
> No sales calls, except for a short 'discovery call' if absolutely needed. Discovery calls are just a formality.
Author here. Quoted text is from the conclusion at the end of the post.
I do the occasional 15m 'discovery call.' It's not a sales call, but more of an formality where we intro each other and then move onto email for deeper discussions.
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.
Weird that I’d say almost exactly the opposite. 1-1 speaking is one of the slowest forms of communication today.
Writing copy is 1-many and the many readers can read much faster than they can listen.
Making a demo video is also 1-many and can be sped up (who doesn’t listen to content at at least 1.2x these days?).
I agree with you IRT scale but not speed.
Copy and demo videos are essentially one way communication channels ("fire and forget"). The creator has no idea if the message was understood.
Also, writing copy or making a video typically takes 10 - 100x longer than consuming the same video.
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]
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
I thought so, too, and I had imposter syndrome for a long, long time. But I wouldn't call myself a bad salesman, seeing as I sell to enterprises regularly (just sold a $30k/yr contract yesterday). I'm a bit unconventional in my business, and the typical high-pressure, size-me-up sales dance just doesn't suit me -- and that's okay.
If a customer can't read the website or documentation, I don't want them as a customer, because they'll just be a support burden. Similarly, if a customer can't determine if a product is useful, I either have a messaging problem, or they aren't a good fit; they can weed themselves out.
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
I'm glad you are having success, but B2C is wildly different than B2B. I can't think of any B2C company that could do calls with customers. The economics don't make sense. Instead they use large advertising buys to communicate, one way, with current and prospective customers
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.
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.
Demo meetings are for the people who own the checkbook not the people who will be doing the work.
"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.
Even more frustrating is when you're specifically looking for a simple tool to do X, but the marketing material is so aspirational you can't even find out if they offer X, and finally when you figure out that they DO offer X, it turns out it's only X, and not world peace and an end to hunger like they promised.
You just want a single-sign-on thingamajig with 2FA, but the website is selling ultimate trustworthiness and compliance in an everchanging regulatory environment for dynamic and growing digital natives with federated AI. Hmm.
I always try looking up the product or company on Wikipedia. If there's an article there, that's more often than not a lot more helpful than the company's own web page.
Of course, if you had already fully unlocked the value in your business, you’d be leveraging accelerating growth and reaching synergies few can even contemplate. Your go to market strategy would be adaptable, extensible, on-demand, customer focused, market driven.
How about we circle back to put a fork in it?
But seriously, when I see such nebulous companies, I immediately look elsewhere. They are either trying to sell snake oil or are just too clueless to understand what’s actually important.
Either way - a waste of time and effort.
Humans talk to people. It's about building a relationship.
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.
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.
I've touched on it in a few places, but you're right that there feels like a disconnect there which I didn't catch until pointed out. But there really isn't too much of a disconnect, and it's nothing nefarious. It's simply that over the years of doing #nocalls, I discovered that I was losing some leads that didn't want to cold email us, so instead, I added a 'discovery call' as a way to capture these leads -- not as a way to put myself, and them, into some sort of endless sales call pipeline, but as a way to start the conversation.
Really, all one of these discovery calls really are is a short 15 minute call where I intro myself for 30s, they intro themselves, and then I hear about their problem. After that, I tell them yes/no we can solve that with X/Y/Z, thenI tell them I'll follow up via email with additional links and documentation unless there are any further pressing questions. And in that email, I ask that they CC relevant team members onto the email thread for further discussion.
Not holding BS SOC2, HIPAA, and PCI certifications in the security space is probably even more non-conformist than nocalls.
> 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.
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.