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Comment by throwaway98797 | Hacker News Reader

your probably leaving money on the table then

i’d find that unacceptable as a ceo

you got to do the work to do what’s best for the company, not yourself

No, they're protecting money on their company's table from being taken by random sellers. "Let's get on a call" game seldom leads to better deals for the buyer.

I see it like this. If the seller can have salespeople waiting on a call, there can be better deals somewhere else. If the seller can have people cold-calling other companies, there most certainly is a better deal around that they don't want me to know about.

Over the years I have developed a salescall aversion to the grade that I hang up as soon as I my unconciousness have detected one. It has gone so far that I have had to apologize to our salespeople calling me and I just hang up by reflex. Very awkward I tell you.

Who knows, maybe there is no better deal, maybe the cold-calling salesman is actually offering the very best deal there is on the market. Then again, maybe the Nigerian prince really needs help with their fortune, and I really just won a car for being the millionth visitor on that news site[0].

Point being, some stranger is calling me and asking for my money. I don't know enough about them to give them money just because they say it's going to be worth it.

[0] - https://xkcd.com/570/

CTO's time is worth ~$10k a day, spending a day "on calls" to save $2.50 is unacceptable.

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.

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

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.

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