nobody would be allergic to calling for a quote if calling got you a quote. problem is, it puts you in a pipeline/funnel and you still don't have a quote.

I don't even need the quote to be perfect, but giving me a rough order of magnitude will let me and the provider not waste each other's time.

Transparent pricing and a free/evaluation tier that is feature complete but scale limited, rather than feature-gated. With that combination I can put together a really tiny "this can do X for us and would cost us Y at our current scale, potentially negotiable" demonstration, which will make the CTO sit up and listen. Without transparent pricing I'm just not going to bother (because it's the first question I'll be asked) and if you gate off enterprise features I can't demonstrate enterprise use cases.