I've been involved in a number of bids for one company I worked for. They would engage one of the senior devs or architects to accompany members of the sales team in the capacity as a "solution architect".

The process appeared to work well, resulting in a bid that had a far sounder foundation from a technology point of view.

Conversely, I have also been involved in projects where a customer has been sold a technology as the panacea for all of their problems, leaving the project team to hack together some really half-baked solution around a completely inappropriate technology.