Yep. I used to do technical sales support. I would come in after the sales manager had broken the ice and arranged for some of the customer's technical team to listen to our proposed solution. But the sales training we got told us to always sell at the highest level possible, preferably the person who would sign the purchase order, not lower level technical people.
That didn't always work out. We sold a lot of stuff to Hewlett-Packard and they always forced most of the decisions down to the engineers. They would rarely let us talk to the people who could sign the purchase order. The sales people didn't like it much since they didn't have the control that they were used to. But it was kind of great for all of us technical people because we could sit around with the HP engineers and talk about technical stuff without a lot of sales-speak getting in the way.
That didn't always work out. We sold a lot of stuff to Hewlett-Packard and they always forced most of the decisions down to the engineers. They would rarely let us talk to the people who could sign the purchase order. The sales people didn't like it much since they didn't have the control that they were used to. But it was kind of great for all of us technical people because we could sit around with the HP engineers and talk about technical stuff without a lot of sales-speak getting in the way.