I agree it's industry by industry. Your girlfriend's experience is at another end of the scale from mine. Every enterprise software company I've ever worked at,

I agree it's industry by industry. Your girlfriend's experience is at another end of the scale from mine. Every enterprise software company I've ever worked at, sales has both written and presented proposals. There's very deep subject matter expertise required to do so and I can't think of any occasion when sales didn't own that entire aspect of work. These were 50-1,000 employee firms selling complex . More established companies had standardized contracts and larger legal teams so less for sales to do; smaller ones were more bespoke and in those cases sales was heavily involved. (One particularly memorable job had me finding clients, pitching ideas, writing proposals, negotiating and closing the deal, drafting and negotiating contracts, and then managing the actual project itself for $1m+ fixed price bespoke software consulting engagements. I'd have sold organs to have someone like your girlfriend on the team.) I'm fortunate to have done both engineering and sales in my career. I'd like to say it's given me sympathy for both sides; mostly I've always just wished I was doing the other role at any given time :)