It depends on the incentives I suppose - if commission and bonuses for sales people comes only from new sales, then sure, maintenance is irrelevant and will be ignored.
>> Because you cannot sell maintenance to the customer, you only can sell features.
No, that's not true at all. If sales people are properly incentivised to sell support contracts (their base salary being a percent of maintenance fee for example) then it will be sold like crazy. I have seen this happen at my company - at one point we did not need new sales to be profitable - just raking support contracts fees was enough to keep up costs and then some.
