I like your attitude about sales, but as a consultant I can tell you I won’t be billing many hours unless I am constantly thinking about how every hour billed helps my client. Clients can tell you tomorrow in an hourly relationship to stop working, so just want to clarify by your definition consulting is constant “sales” (in the sense of proving you give real value for the investment)
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> The difference between a consultant and sales is that the consultant gets paid by the hour, the sales person gets paid by the success of the customer,
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Yeah, my statement was hyperbolic on purpose. The difference with sales is you can put in 300+ hours and still get no pay. Which is partly why prices need to be higher than an engineer would otherwise think reasonable.
On the other hand, consultants live and die by repeat business and reputation so it's not as far removed from software sales as I'm saying above.
A major ongoing debate in industry is whether self-supported OSS with consulting and full time employees is a better model (time/cost) than enterprise software. I think at worst you have pathological tendencies in either case: the software company wants you to use the unique features that keep you renewing and make it hard to switch, whereas the consultants want to build a factory that keeps billing/renewing and makes it hard to maintain.