Zach Brown, creator of software licensing platform Keygen, found that eliminating sales calls actually helped him land bigger clients — including a Fortune 1000 company.
"Being an introvert, I absolutely hated calls," Brown writes on the Keygen blog. "They're not only awkward, but a 30 minute call takes up hours of my headspace."
Brown discovered that typical enterprise sales calls were creating more problems than they solved. "I felt like I was constantly talking to the wrong people, slowly climbing the ladder to an actual stakeholder, repeating myself over and over every call," he writes. After removing the "Book a Call" button from his pricing page, he started telling prospects that all communication would happen via email.
The results surprised him. Instead of resistance, clients began looping in their engineering teams directly. This connected Keygen with actual decision-makers rather than intermediaries. "Instead of speaking with somebody who was multiple positions removed from the project, I was speaking with the actual people who could champion Keygen within the organization," Brown writes.
He identified four key reasons enterprises typically default to calls — unclear product offerings, complex onboarding, opaque pricing, and trust concerns. Brown addressed these by publishing transparent enterprise pricing, creating self-serve onboarding, maintaining detailed public documentation, and building trust through clear security policies.
"I'm sure some people will scoff at some or all of this, but maybe others who are like myself will read this and realize they don't have to do sales like everybody else."
His one concession? A brief 15-minute "discovery call" if absolutely needed — but it's "essentially a formality to intro each other, make sure we're human, and move onto email for any further discussion."
Previously:
• This is the CIA's official guide to sabotaging business meetings
• Me, Al Franken and the worst meeting in the history of show business: a true story
• Clock calculates wasted time at meetings
• Japan's ruling party welcomes women to attend meetings, but only if they observe and remain silent
