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.