This is a big problem in many companies, and it really sucks. Our company is a tech company that is very sales driven and it is starting to show.
Pecking order:
CEO
VPS
Sales
Marketing
.......
Software
Hardware
Chemistry/Materials (me)
....
Production
Sales is absolutely king here. They are on a commission structure and they are heavily incentivised and valued. They have quarterly sales meetings with metrics. We have a weekly email that goes out naming the top sales people for the week. Everything in this company is framed around sales, sales, sales.
Marketing is the next best to be here. They dictate all the product requirements for their markets and technical departments are basically expected to make it work no matter what.
The technical people (me) are in the middle. On the one hand, no one, including our CEO, has any true understanding of the technology behind what we make here which is a blessing and a curse. We don't get micromanaged. Our CTO is new and is still getting up to speed. But we have zero power to make any real decisions to to tell sales when something won't work. What sales says, goes. Sales people have direct authority to go to the engineers in the technical department to bother them at any time, which means that we end up doing more fire fighting and less innovating. The real key to understanding our lack of power is the fact that we have to get any expenditure above $250 approved, not by the CTO, but by the CEO himself. Our CTO has literally NO discretionary budget to speak of and so is powerless to make decisions.
But we still have it better than production. Our CEO comes down to the production department about once every 6 months to make a big speech and that is about it. Because our feedback emails are strictly sales focused, the production department could be working their ass off and they get no recognition for it. They are incredibly short staffed, and much of the electronics assembly work requires skilled labor, but they keep replacing production techs with temps who don't have any training at all.