At our small consultancy, I was lead developer and the SE. Out on demos it was the President, our Marketing fellow, and me. I did all the demos and talked up te

At our small consultancy, I was lead developer and the SE. Out on demos it was the President, our Marketing fellow, and me. I did all the demos and talked up tech and the stack. The money quote from one demo "You're a 5 man company, and 3 of you are here?". The President was technically savvy, and also an (ex) developer, the sales guy was a sales guy. The President was also the domain expert. I loved the SE part. I loved our product, I enjoyed the demos, I was enthusiastic to evangelize it. It also helped that anything we promised was probably going to be done by me anyway, so there was little of that discontinuity between what was promised and what was delivered. That said, you certainly needed a good relationship with the sales guy and make a point to never contradict them when they're presenting something, even if it's egregious. Nobody is signing anything, there's always time later to correct issues. It's also important to let the sales folks make the promises, as they're the ones doing the contracts when it's all said and done. There's a bit of a political line to stay on one side of, so in the end, I always deferred to the sales guys. But it was a lot of fun, I really enjoyed doing that work, I'd do it again given the right opportunity. It helps a lot to believe in the product you're selling. That said, like a comedian, giving a demo to a dead room is just exhausting.