[apohn]

>> However, the feeling I get is that presales only lead to more presales roles, where most of your time is spent meeting clients and producing countless presentations to get to an eventual prototype...and there's more presales to do, so your involvement on most projects (even those you sell) is marginal at best, and that makes it harder to move to other roles.

This was one of the main reasons I left PreSales. I love technical work and I did really well with and clients who needed somebody who could deeply understand hard questions and solve problems that took longer than 1 day to solve. But at the end of the day most PreSales organizations reward demo experts who can sell quickly, not people who sell based on solving tough technical problems that take longer to solve.

The end result is that a lot of PreSales people either lose the deeper technical skills they once had and IMO the profession attracts a lot of people who had a technical background but truthfully weren't very technically strong when they did have a technical role.