In my opinion, Sales is not political in the same way that banking or any other corporate job is. If you hit your sales target then you're good to go.
Arguably, in Consulting you do not get any more/less exposure to senior people than you would in banking. It's not common for a junior consultant to go round meeting executives and the CEO etc. Just replace Excel with Powerpoint. From my experience though, at least, consulting is an incredibly political career path. You really have to rely very heavily on your network within the firm to succeed (get the good assignments, good projects, good roles, not be on the bench, get promoted, make what you're doing look good, get people on your side, do loads of internal extracurricular stuff etc). For Consulting, you can have an army of stakeholders (both internally and especially at the client) to win over, and this can make it very difficult. You do not have this in Sales.
I think banking/consulting have similar offerings in terms of soft skills, probably more so in consulting. Banking has a good balance of hard/soft skill development.
Posted from TSR Mobile