Sales is sales.

Sales is not marketing, it’s not processing, it’s not administrative work. It’s sales. It’s a different skill set, with different goals than any of those other things.

To be sure, in small organizations, a sales rep may have to do more than just talk to clients. He may have to fill out his own expense reports. He may have to generate his own leads. But in the mortgage industry, he must absolutely be able to rely on the back-office to properly handle the paperwork.

This is a little more industry-specific than most of my blog posts, but I’ve been speaking with a lot of loan officers recently, as I’ve been trying to bring them into the Envoy family, and I’m a little shocked, appalled, and maybe even a little angry at how often I’m hearing the frustration in sales-reps’ voices as they describe how many deals are messed up by back-office failures, or how often they have to personally help with parts of the loan-processing effort, to keep things moving along.

Thankfully, this isn’t a problem at Envoy. But if it’s a problem in your organization, then you, as the sales manager, must do something about it.

Maybe you can’t do anything about your marketing department, and maybe there’s no budget to build out a sales-operations team, but processing failures are just unacceptable. Fix it.