Can we jump on a 15 minute call?

About a year ago, somebody must have published a very popular book or article proposing a new sales technique that leads to greater conversion. At least that’s what I presume, because since then, and suddenly, every sales-related email I have received has ended with some variant of:

What’s a good time for you this week to jump on a 15 minute call?

It’s pushy. It puts you on the spot. It jumps right past the question of whether you’re ready or even want to have a call.

It’s an attempt to move the conversation out of the comfortable world of email, in which you’re in the driver’s seat and can put time and thought into your response, and into the arena of the door-to-door salesman, where no matter what you say, they’ll have a readied response, and you simply won’t get away without making some kind of commitment, even if that’s just confirming a time for the next call.

My response to this technique is the following—as soon as I see that question, the conversation is over. Simple as that. (And I’ll point them to this article, so they’ll know what happened.)