But part of doing what's right is considering opportunity cost.
If buying something would be a win for an org takes up too much organizational bandwidth because of how hard it is to procure, then it's not worth fiddling about trying to buy it.
The org gains a whole bunch of time he's not wasting on useless calls.
There's a bazillion things we could be thinking about buying.
Being able to serve yourself and figure out if there's any fit removes friction. Spending an hour on an initial sales call to find out that information isn't optimal.
As he's said, when he's desperate, he will do more work. And he is willing to do calls when it makes sense, but expects them to be efficient and expects to be able to qualify the vendor.
when your purchasing 100k+ products having a conversation makes a lot of sense
lots of opportunities to find easy win-win
finding out what the salesmen incentives are and working with them can lead to a good outcome
obviously not worth it for smaller ticket stuff