Agreed. However, I mentioned the aside because over the years I've been in the business, I've consistently seen techies look down their noses at sales and marketing staff, bringing their at-home policy over cold calls to work, and taking out their frustrations over their own sales and marketing staff against all vendor sales and marketing staff they meet, especially those who cold call. Your own organization's sales and marketing staff could genuinely suck rocks, but that doesn't mean all outside sales and marketing staff have no value on offer, but by and large technical staff don't recognize that.

That unfortunately perpetuates a vicious cycle, because with only minimal effort, technical staff can easily get a respected seat at the gatekeepers' table, and vastly mitigate the "management picking vendors' technical solution" issue. That very characterization of which illustrates the depth to which technical staff misunderstand what is really going on, because it really should be called "management picking the ROI and solutions to business' challenges, in the absence of proactive solutions put up by technical staff for consideration".