A PERSON OR A PAGE

Founders get this wrong in two directions. Some talk to everyone, spending their best hours on customers a page would have closed. Others put everything on the page, including the distributor deal that needed three meetings and a person the buyer trusted.

Four tests

1. Deal sizeMeasured in first-year gross profit, not revenue. A conversation costs the same whether the deal is worth $500 or $50,000.
2. ComplexityHow many questions stand between the buyer and a yes, and whether the terms change per buyer: pricing tiers, custom packs, payment terms, exclusivity. Fixed terms suit a page; negotiated terms need a person.
3. The number of buyersOne consumer decides alone. A business buys in a group: Gartner’s research put the median B2B buying group at six to ten decision makers Reported. A group needs someone to find out who they are and what each of them needs.
4. The cost of a conversationPreparation, the meeting, travel, follow-up and the proposal, at the loaded cost of the hour. Founders tend to price their own hours at zero.

Buyers would rather read

Given a choice, many buyers would rather skip the salesperson. In Gartner’s survey of 632 B2B buyers in 2024, 61% said they preferred an overall rep-free buying experience; in its 2025 survey of 646 buyers, 67% preferred “a rep-free experience” Reported. And most of their time goes elsewhere anyway.

ReportedGartner, “Buyer Enablement: Win More B2B Sales Deals,” 2018, citing its 2017 Digital B2B Buyer Survey (n = 750). Read in a third-party copy; Gartner no longer hosts it.

So the conversation is a small, expensive slice of a decision mostly made from what buyers read. Put the teaching on the page and save the person for what a page can’t do: finding out what this buyer needs, handling the terms, and getting a group to agree.

Judge a conversation by the profit it adds per prospect, not by the cost of each customer it wins.

The calculation

The fair comparison takes the same prospects and sends them down two roads. Down one, they get a conversation, which costs time and closes at your conversation close rate. Down the other, they get a page, which costs nothing extra and closes at the page’s rate. The conversation pays when the extra customers it wins are worth more than the time it takes. That gives a break-even deal size:

With the defaults, a conversation costs $1,060 per customer won and the page $1,000, so on cost per customer the page looks slightly better. It isn’t. The conversation wins 25 of every 100 prospects and the page 4, and each prospect you talk to is worth $90 more than one sent to the page after paying for the three hours Derived. A conversation pays for any customer worth more than about $1,071 in first-year gross profit. With 120 hours a month you can hold 40 conversations, worth $3,600 a month more than the page alone, and the other 160 prospects still need a page that sells.

Two inputs move the answer most. The page’s close rate: every point it gains raises the bar a conversation has to clear, which is why chapter 8 matters even to teams that sell in person. And the hours: a one-hour conversation pays on much smaller deals than a three-hour one.

Do this

• Run the calculator for each kind of prospect you sell to, with your real close rates. Write the break-even deal size on one line and give it to whoever decides who gets a call. Anything below the line goes to the page, and the page gets better; anything above it gets a person.