I've been on the consulting side (though not R) and I've been on the procuring side and here are my thoughts:
Look to solve client pain points. Whilst we (the R Studio Community) might care about the latest R version, the latest developments in R and new packages, I think clients will (likely) only care so far as how it can benefit them, which for a business could be small scale such as productionising reports or performing advanced analysis which can help them achieve their business objective (cutting costs, gaining customer insight, growing revenue). In summary, really focus on the client and their needs.
I'd say it totally depends on the client, but as I said above, focus on their pain points. I'd strongly recommend to set expectations. Don't promise the world before you know what data you have access to, the cleanliness of the data and what resources available etc.,
I don't think it should matter, in fact, I would prefer programming! However, my feeling is that (especially in the UK) there is a trend for the "democratisation of data" and allowing a non-technical audience to reproduce analysis which is why Tableau, Qlikview, Power BI, Alteryx etc., are so in demand at the moment. I emphasise that this is just my intuition and feeling of the market - I haven't looked at market or sales stats to back it up.