In my company, there is a blurriness between support and technical sales, and while that can be a little chaotic, one benefit of that approach is support is looked at as a profit center to a degree. This is because the support people keep an eye out on upselling, maintaining subscriptions, and promoting consulting work. We're not obnoxious about it, but there's some awareness that part of the role of support is to promote the long-term growth of the customer relationship and sales.

I think if there was a stricter division between support and technical sales, there would be more of a temptation to focus on burning through support requests as quickly as possible. The flip side of this is that it is easy for us to get bogged down in a complex half-support half-sales opportunity situation and that can sometimes cause other support requests to fall through the cracks.