The customer who just wants to put in their CC# and buy the product isn't a pipeline customer. You can't come back to that customer every other quarter and take them out for golf and pump them for additional services based on the "strength" of your relationship. You don't have any opportunity to make an in-person upsell pitch at the customer who just wants to put in their CC# and go.

In-person sales work at least in part because salesbros are trained to handle and overcome objections. They do it in many ways, and most of those ways take advantage of the fact that people by and large tend to want to act agreeable and kind to each other kind of by default. If you opt for the in-person meeting, the salesbro knows they have the opportunity to guilt or nudge or suggest you into buying additional services, or a longer service agreement, or a higher SLA, or whatever.

So, OP isn't the customer because they're announcing they're not interested in the dance. Many (not all!) IT vendors prefer the dance because it makes more money.

I say this as a former presales engineer for EMC (before it was EMC/DELL), serving large enterprise named accounts in the Houston area. If my boss saw me in the office, he'd kick me out and tell me I should be out taking clients out to lunch or to Astros games or whatever. I spent probably $2-3k/week on entertainment, and it was basically imaginary money to EMC, because if me and my salesbro blew $20-30k hooking a client, we were going to be doing it on a $2-3 million Symmetrix deal with 70-80% margin.

So yeah. OP isn't a customer because they don't want to play, and (most, not all!) companies can extract more revenue out of customers who DO play.