I arrived at the same realization as you--having sales as a skill is beneficial no matter the career path a person is on.

As developer of ~10 years experience, the path I took to get sales experience was to take a job as a sales engineer for a technical product in my software domain. It is the best career decision I have made so far.

My fear was that I would lose my technical knowledge, but I quickly realized that was not the risk I thought it was. I am consistently challenged by the breadth and depth of questions posed by each customer based on their unique needs. As a sales engineer, I learn more in my technical domain than I did at my last humdrum dev job.

And on top of that, of course, I get exposure and practice in this other side of the business and set of skills that was previously an enigma to me.

For me, sales engineering is the best of both worlds.