A business does need a small number of their most senior engineers doing high altitude work that can, at times, include helping sales estimate new features. But in my experience, it's not rocket science and a good product team can do this on their own with a quick async check over chat. At most, a single meeting is all it takes.

I've heard of Sales Engineers as well, embedding programmers directly with sales teams.

But the vast majority of programmers should not be spending any significant amount of their time on this. Their value is in building and scaling well-specified systems.