The Three Drivers of Exceptional Success

Six attitudes that drive success

Let’s start with six attitudes that my experience has proven are shared by extremely successful advisors. Unlike skills and activities, attitudes tend to be innate within individuals – while people’s inherent attitudes can evolve over time, performance on these tends to be a function of your set point or where you start from. As you’re reviewing these, consider giving yourself and each of your team members a score of 1 (low) to 5 (high) on each one.

1. A drive to excel that doesn’t diminish with success

   Out of necessity, almost every advisor works hard when entering the business – if you don’t work hard, chances are you won’t be around very long. What separates extremely successful advisors is the drive to maintain a strong work ethic past the point that they need to.

   A common frustration at head offices is that once they hit a threshold of success, many advisors go into cruise mode and to a greater or lesser extent, this becomes a lifestyle business for them – they work only as hard as they have to in order to maintain their lifestyle. The very top advisors may take more holidays than they did when entering the business, but they maintain a burning desire to see their business continue to grow.

2. Discipline and focus

   To excel, it’s not sufficient to work hard; you have to work smart. And the essence of working smart is having the discipline to get out of your comfort zone and focus on doing the things you need to do, not the ones that you want to do. As just one example, most advisors have no difficulty picking up the phone and calling clients when the markets are going well, but many can’t make those calls when things are going badly.

   Along similar lines, once they hit a minimum level of success, many advisors make existing clients their sole focus and take a passive approach to new clients, relying exclusively on referrals. Most advisors who excel continue to put priority on reaching out to prospects, knowing it’s less comfortable than talking to clients.

3. Resilience

   Everyone, whether they be employees of a large company, business owners running start-ups or financial advisors, encounters setbacks and disappointments. I’ve written in the past about research with successful Israeli entrepreneurs who were asked to identify the single attribute that was the most important to their success – and the answer wasn’t having a great idea or superlative sales skills, rather it was the emotional toughness and resilience to bounce back from setbacks and disappointments.

4. Emotional stability

   The nature of markets means that the sentiment in this industry tends to be unusually volatile. Advisors who excel have the capacity to maintain their equilibrium in the face of wild swings. Part of that stems from having a set of firm beliefs at the foundation of their investment approach. And part is the ability to maintain emotional balance – to keep the highs from being too high or the lows from being too low. This can be particularly challenging in tough markets, when clients are panicking – but it’s in those markets that exceptionally successful advisors excel in maintaining their own perspective and helping clients keep theirs.

1. Adaptability

   As a general rule, top-performing advisors are exceptionally flexible and adaptable to implementing new approaches –inertia and the status quo are less important for them than for average advisors. Naturally, they share some core values on things like integrity and how you deal with people, but the very best advisors are always looking for ways to improve how they work. Show them a better way to operate – whether it is a superior approach to segmenting clients or a better way to compensate staff – and these advisors are early adopters in implanting new ideas.

2. Taking the long view on gratification

   Recent research on something called “the marshmallow test” has shown that the ability of four-year olds to defer gratification is a strong predictor of their future success. Exceptionally successful advisors share an unusually high willingness to invest time and money today for the likelihood of future gains in their business. Indeed, an attribute that prevents many average and above-average advisors from rising to the top is impatience and the reluctance to spend time and money on things that don’t have an immediate reward.

Three skills of top performing advisors

After attitudes come skills. As with attitudes, everyone has a starting point on key skills, but unlike attitudes, skills are more malleable and can be developed with effort and practice. As I reflect on the extremely successful advisors I’ve come to know, many are average at best on traditional sales skills like presenting recommendations, handling objections and “closing” or asking for the order.

Where they do excel are in three areas:

1. Engaging clients and prospects

   Some years ago, research was conducted with existing and prospective clients who had just met with a financial advisor. They were asked about the impressions of the advisors they’d just met with and also about the likelihood of their acting on the recommendations in that meeting. The one factor that correlated most closely with a positive impression of the advisor and the chances of a successful outcome: The amount of time that the client or prospect spent talking, which can be up to 80% of the meeting.

   Top-performing advisors ask questions that get clients and prospects talking and then are skillful at listening closely to the answers, looking for hidden meaning and picking up on non-verbal cues. And not only are they exceptionally good listeners, but they have developed the skill of letting the people they’re meeting with know that they’re listening.

2. Putting people at ease

   Meeting with an advisor is a stressful experience for many clients and for almost all prospects. The most successful advisors have developed the knack of putting people they’re talking to at ease – not only through the way the meeting space is set up but also through their own body language and demeanor. For example, most exceptionally successful advisors are quintessential Type As, but in meetings they dial back their goal orientation and impatience for results, so that they present as relaxed and the people they’re meeting with are more relaxed as a result. This can be something as basic as smiling when you greet people or the pace at which you walk or talk – but for the people you meet with to be relaxed, you have to appear relaxed.

3. Projecting confidence and balanced optimism

   The final core skill for outstanding success is your ability to project confidence and balanced optimism. In all markets but especially in uncertain times like the last five and a half years, investors look for advisors who present recommendations with confidence and who convey a sense of balanced optimism. Just to be clear, balanced optimism is not a Pollyanna-like “ don’t worry be happy” attitude, but rather communicating that your advice has taken today’s risks and challenges into account and having done that, you are confident that your client will achieve a successful outcome in the fact of these. Your demeanor is critical in these conversations - to project confidence and balanced optimism, what you say is less important than how you say it.

In next week’s column, I’ll cover the third set of essential attributes for top performance – the activities that set exceptional performers apart.

conducts programs to help advisors gain and retain clients and is an award winning faculty member in the MBA program at the University of Toronto. To see more of his written and video commentaries, go to www.clientinsights.ca. Use A555A for the rep and dealer code to register for website access.

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