> If your product is software, literally it is impossible that sales add more value than the engineering organization that builds the product. Without engineering organization, you don't have anything to sell.

Anecdote as counter-example: a previous employer was approached by a vendor which offered a solution developed by "former NASA specialists" (I think it was to manage inventory). The total cost of deploying it was around a million.

We tried hard to stop the executives from going ahead with it, but around $400k had been paid by the time we managed to kill the project when it became clear that a. the vendor did not actually have a product and was using us as the R&D guinea pig, taking advantage of the data from millions of our customers and b. the "NASA" part referred to one of their developers who had briefly interned with a NASA contractor.

So, the sales organisation managed to "create" $400k of "value" (in the sense of hard revenue in their bank account) without engineering being involved.