alt Hacker NewsNo Calls
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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?
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.
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 might have missed it, but doesn't it seem like the best option would have been to provide an option for both? Some people (especially of a certain generation) absolutely prefer calls. Seems best to just meet the customer where they're at.
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
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 have a small B2C app that requires no calls or interactions in general to get customers, just support afterwards. Currently have a few hundred subscriptions. It's not much but makes me pretty happy.
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.
Always wondered how you can protect a php or python package with a license key. Its code, you can just ignore the key in the source code, can you not?
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.
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.
Once you move the slider on this site to Ent-1, you get a price, but you still get "Let's book a call".
Why?
Never heard of Fair Source licensing before.
If you don't want to make phone calls, isn't that what an employee is for?
To do everything that you don't want to...
"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.
I can’t recall ever seeing the contraction “who’re” before. For obvious reasons I suppose.
Great article! Genuinely helpful to the entrepreneur community here.
Off-Topic: What is the best way to “subscribe” to blogs like this? Is there a popular service/tool out there even for blogs that don’t have RSS or TwitterX? Or, just keep a list of blogs of interest and check occasionally? Thanks.
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.
You don’t actually know your customers needs until you talk to them. Most businesses determine how to build their products by having conversations with their customers.
I totally love it!
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.
OMG I'm doing this.
Not holding BS SOC2, HIPAA, and PCI certifications in the security space is probably even more non-conformist than nocalls.
This feels related to that “Nobody Cares” post from yesterday.
Nobody cares that calls are a pain, so everyone just keeps having them.
> Being an introvert, I absolutely hated calls.
Can we stop with this crap already.
You hate calls because you hate calls. Not because you’ve made up a definition of introvert that helps you avoid phone calls.
I can relate.
> 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.
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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.