Schedule a call is a huge red flag to me because:

- it implies differential pricing, meaning they will charge you as much as possible both now and in the future (when you may be locked in)

- it usually obscures what the product actually does

Differential pricing is really pernicious because if the product happens to be super valuable to you, they're likely to find out and charge you even more

Even just the pricing component would be lovely — I'm so tired of the "call us to discuss license cost" for anything larger than "absurdly tiny". You don't need to make it penny-accurate, even: I just need a sense of scale. If your product costs something wildly outside my budget, wouldn't you rather save your time to talk with people that can actually afford what you're selling?

(I can hear the salespeople warming up in the silos already and no: if I don't have $36 million right now, absolutely nothing you say will make it possible to "find those dollars somewhere".)

> I do not understand why that's difficult, but it must be.

Because historically and even presently to a distressing degree, sales is not about communication, it's not amount mutuality of purpose, and it's not about explaining what the product is. If you have a product that does it's job and does it well, and solves a problem for a person or a business, you don't need a sales call because a sales email is more effective. You need a sales call (and arguably, a salesperson) when the value proposition isn't remotely that clear.

Most salespeople when you're on the phone with them do not care about you as a customer. They care about making their quota and/or getting their commission. I appreciate at my current employer that while we offer bonuses for sales folks that really go above an beyond, like scoring a large account or solving a large problem, we don't do commissions, we just pay good salaries. That means the sales person as they're working is not incentivized to sell as much as possible, they're incentivized to figure out the (potential) client's needs, and how we can best meet them, irrespective of what they end up paying.

I was in an email back and forth with someone that cold emailed us about a service. Sometimes, I say "what the hell" and take their pitch and see if it's actually worthwhile. But this guy, after I asked him some basic details about his service and what differentiates them, refused to answer my questions and insisted on getting on a call.

Nope, I'm not interested. If you can't give me basic info without wasting my time to get on a call about something I'm not sure I give a shit about yet, then I won't do it. You lose my business and my company's business by proxy. Marked as spam and moved on.

> ... post that stuff online.

> I do not understand why that's difficult

It's not. Having worked on the other side, both in startups I founded and later as a senior exec inside the large F100 valley tech company we were acquired by, this inability to communicate what 'customers who want to buy' 'want to know' constantly mystified me.

After deep diving into why it wasn't working at BigCo, I think the root cause is systemic and it's the bottom ~80% of sales and marketing people. In my experience, the top ~20% of sales and marketing people are generally excellent. But the rest seem to be 'performing' their job functions generically without deeply thinking through how to most effectively communicate and sell "this product" to "this customer" in "this context". That's why so many product information pages follow templates which supposedly implement 'best practices' but in reality are pretty terrible. And it's probably why so many product pages lead with vague puffery. I had an anti-puffery rule for marketing copy: only lead with statements of fact about what makes this product different from the top three alternatives which can be proven true or false. "Best in Class"? Nope, anyone can claim that. Say something concrete that matters that we could get sued for lying about.

Typical entry level salespeople don't really care that most introductory sales calls are a waste of everyone's time. They are paid to do it anyway - and it's one of the few pre-sales metrics that can be easily tracked, so lazy sales managers make increasing introductory sales calls an objective. That's why anyone suggesting #nocalls, or even just offering it as an alternate sales funnel, faces so much resistance in an existing sales structure. Even proposing an objective A/B test of #nocalls met was met with departmental 'circle the wagons'. After talking it over one-on-one with different stakeholders, there was no clear reason they could articulate to oppose trying it. I suspect it was part "this is the way we (and everyone like us) always does it" and part fear that if it worked it would upset current metrics, budgets and even head count. Professional mid-level managers in large companies aren't interested in upsetting their departmental apple cart (or turbo-charging it), they just want to add a few more apples to it each year.

Ironically, I also actually can't figure out what this company does from its website.

People who behave this way are spammers and I mark their emails as spam. It's a small gesture, but it feels good to help identify the spammers.

> Please explain clearly what your product does

Please please!!! I’m so tired of sites with promises “double your productivity” “never lose a file again” blabla… but they never say what the product is really.

Burt. This bloke won't haggle!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwWz0VM94m8

You are the norm in that you seem to be communication-averse. Technical staff don't make purchasing decisions anyway.

May it happen that CloudFlare stops sending their call invitations to me. I have an account at them which has shared access to company domains, because sometimes I was needed to assist with them. CloudFlare reps repeatedly e-mail me to schedule a call, even after I replied to them and told that I am not a person directly responsible for our domains and asked to stop mailing me. Whoever was their rep at that time, answered that they will stop. Some time passed, and they started e-mailing again. Eventually I started putting their e-mails to spam folder.

But they say what they do on their product page. They provide a solution.

Its difficult because lying about "implementation details" is a marketing detail.

On the other hand, I would hate to wade through email chains, type out large emails and wait for delayed async responses drawn out over days. I thrive when I can read the documentation, come prepared to a call and have my questions answered quickly in real time. There’s also something about quickly parsing the realtime information that brings out the best and most relevant questions in me.

A lot of companies don't actually sell a product that does anything useful, though. They sell an idea that sounds useful to management, and obscuring the truth earns more money.