I am not in sales and don’t travel nearly as much as our sales team. But I have been in a customer facing cloud consulting role for 5 years. I am the first technical person that the client encounters after the sales team. I’ve done my fair amount of business travel.

The argument is not that face to face to build relationships with customers is not important. It’s that it’s dumb to have “field by design” roles be forced to be in an office when they aren’t on customers sites.

Besides that, it is disruptive in the office because you are spending a lot of time with the customer on conference calls and how it often works is that the people doing the work are not in the office or even in the same country.

Your client facing staff is US based. But US employees are too expensive to do the grunt work (unless you’re using one of the exploitive WITCH companies).

AWS exempted their “field by design” roles from being in the office during the first few RTO mandates. But they eventually forced them to be in an office this year (after I left).

GCP has in office requirements for their Professional Services staff now too - full time direct hire employees for both AWS and GCP.