A friend in financial-services sales has a private joke — funny to the two of us, not to our wives. The real power move in his job isn’t closing, it’s the “click forward, type handle” email. Customer says yes? Forward it to the deal team, handle. Customer asks something outside your lane? Forward it, handle — your job is new revenue, not keeping them happy.
I used to rib him for it. It read like a way of not owning the customer’s whole experience — a polite version of “not my problem.” I also envied it — someday, when my scrappy setup leveled up, I’d have someone whose entire job was handle.
A couple years later, that whole concept looks like a fossil. Not because the gesture died — because the handler did.
You still decide the thread has enough context. You still pick where it goes. What’s gone is the person on the other end — now it’s an agent somebody built. So the job quietly picks up two things nobody wrote into the description: build the thing that receives the forward, and check what it sends back.
That second part isn’t optional theater. The fully autonomous sales agents going live right now are visibly missing deliverability and losing to hybrid setups within months — unsupervised handling breaks exactly where you’d expect it to.
I run lean enough that there’s usually no one left to forward to. I’m either the handler, or I build the one that is. Routing was always the human part of the job. Now it’s the only part.