ServiceWinners International

Early in my credit career, I was taught: beware of sales. I was told, “You can make a good sales guy out of a credit guy, but you can never do the reverse.”

Perhaps these beliefs were due to the stereotypes we had of each other. Just looking at them I could differentiate the sales guys from the credit guys. The salespeople seemed to always be smiling, even laughing loudly sometimes. They dressed better than us plain credit folks. They had larger expense accounts and drove company cars. Although they looked better, most of them were more disorganized than the average credit guy. They called us “credit geeks” and we called them “sales jerks.” It felt like my old high school days with the nerds vs. the jocks.