One of our sales guys told me over lunch that he didn’t understand what the hell our department - R&D - were doing. We didn’t NEED to do product development. All we needed to do was to do the same things our competitors did, only cheaper. I take it he wasn’t happy at work, he moved on. I hope he landed in a sales driven company. I’m glad I didn’t.
edit: some time ago there was a great article linked here detailing the Adidas/Puma history. Dig into that for examples of what Design driven VS Sales driven entails.