If it's an important service it's not a big deal at all to speak to someone, and frankly, even though they do this for price discrimination, the fact is they can incredibly helpful and save you a boat load of time and effort trying to understand the product in many cases.
Yes, some things should 'just be self serve' but many things, not so much.
Well the job they have to do before I waste my time scheduling a meeting with your sales dude is 1) convince me that your product is valuable and 2) convince me that the ballpark pricing is workable for me.
You can really only know a car by test driving it. But that doesn't meant that Toyota doesn't publish photos of its interiors and asks you to schedule a test drive before finding out the price. I can quickly find out what cars might be suitable for my needs given their properties and their pricing, and THEN commit my time to test driving the best candidates. If you just say "Believe me. This is the best car. People are saying what a great car this is. This is a car that you'll come in and you'll test drive, and you'll say that you've never even seen a car this good." Well I'm just going to ignore you.
>the fact is they can incredibly helpful and save you a boat load of time and effort trying to understand the product in many cases.
I take having to explain what our product does to users as a failure on our part. We have the same mentality when we have to personally explain what code does to our colleagues. We take the necessary measures of using better abstractions, writing documentation and Wikis, simplifying code, and making efforts so that "failure demand" does not arise.
In terms of product, it's either our documentation sucks, or a problem of "affordances and signifiers", or a problem of targeting the "wrong" users.
Yes, some things should 'just be self serve' but many things, not so much.