You're listening to “Financial Advisor Marketing”—the best show on the planet for financial advisors who want to get more clients, without all the stress. You're about to get the real scoop on everything from lead generation to closing the deal.
James is the founder of TheAdvisorCoach.com, where you can find an entire suite of products designed to help financial advisors grow their businesses more rapidly than ever before. Now, here is your host, James Pollard.
James: Financial advisors, I hope you're doing well. Welcome to another episode of the Financial Advisor Marketing podcast. In this episode, I want to chat with you about personality types of the most successful financial advisors. This is some really fascinating stuff and I'm thrilled that I get to share this with you.
Truthfully, I don't think I get enough credit, because I'm the guy who really pushed this whole personality-based marketing thing into the financial-advice industry. I know that's arrogant or whatever, but it's the truth. I'm not talking about marketing to various personalities. I'm talking about building a business around the advisor’s personality, because I believe that your business should serve you, not the other way around. [01:08.6]
I was talking about personality-driven marketing and building businesses around your personality years ago, and I'm seeing it start to bubble up in various places now. I have a lot of examples like that, marketing assets for advisors. I started talking about that, multiple marketing strategies. I mean, that's my thing. That's what I'm known for, and a whole bunch of other stuff. I don't really speak on it, though. I just sit back. I get the bag. I handle my business, but I want you to know that you should probably put some respect on my name, because I've really been that guy for a long time and I've shared a lot of stuff that you are just now seeing.
I've had so many conversations with financial advisors about personality-based marketing specifically, and a lot of it is basically helping advisors realize that they don't have to do things a certain way just because someone says so. [01:57.3]
For example, new financial advisors might get these mentors who tell them that they have to make a bajillion cold calls or something, or rent rooms at the local library and conduct seminars, and they tell the new advisors these things, no matter what their personalities are. They're just applying the same cookie-cutter advice over and over and over to multiple people.
Imagine being a sports agent and your goal is to help your athletes make as much money as possible. But you have a bias, right? You played hockey and you were really successful as a hockey player, so you think that all of your athletes should play hockey, too. One day, you meet this guy and his name is Michael Jordan, and he talks to you about how much he loves basketball and how good he is, and he just is so passionate about the game of basketball, right? But you in your infinite wisdom decided to convince him to play hockey instead because that's your bias and that's where you had success. That's how a lot of sales and marketing, and business-building training is done. [02:55.0]
I'll give you another example to set the stage here. Before Jeff Bezos started Amazon, he was a physics major at Princeton University. Let's just pause right there. Think about those words. Physics major at Princeton University. So, Bezos is no dummy, right? I think people need to realize that a lot of these top guys, these billionaires, these business leaders, these CEOs, these successful entrepreneurs, they're straight up conquerors, but they're also not foolish enough to play games where they can't win, because even though Bezos was one of the top 25 students in the Honors Program at Princeton—think about that for a second—he realized he was not smart enough to compete.
Here's a quote from him. I'm just going to read this quote. “I looked around the room and it was clear to me that there were three people in the class who were much, much better at physics than I was, and it was much, much easier for them. It was really sort of a startling insight, that there were these people whose brains were wired differently.” That should be an aha moment for you. What is your brain wired to do? [03:57.0]
Bezos went on to talk about how he could have solved this, or he was trying to solve this partial differential equation and he spent hours working on it with his roommate, and eventually, they went down the hall and they asked one of the classmates for help. They showed him this problem.
The guy looked at it. He stared at it for a few minutes and then he gave them the answer, and Bezos was like, Did you do that in your head? The guy was like, No, I solved the similar problem three years ago or four years ago, or whatever, and I recognized the principles here, and he wrote out three pages of how he got to the solution. According to Bezos, that was when he realized he should pursue a different career, because this guy did in minutes what Bezos and his roommate could not do in hours. His brain was wired differently.
I'll give you another example. I want you to think about the most charming, most extroverted person. For me, it's one of my uncles. He's not here with us anymore. He died years ago. But this guy could walk up to anybody, anywhere, at any time, and strike up a conversation. It didn't matter if it was the CEO of a company or a homeless person on the street. It did not matter. He could crack a joke. He could get the other person to smile. He could start a conversation so effortlessly. It was amazing. It legitimately blew my mind how good he was at this. [05:13.2]
He may not have been the smartest person or the best looking, or the most persistent, but my goodness, he could talk to people and he could make them feel good. I'm telling you, if he talked to you, then it felt like you were the only person he cared about at that moment. It was remarkable. I envied that skill.
Now let's compare his personality to mine. This is true, I rank in the bottom 10% of all people for something called agreeableness, and we're going to talk about this in this episode and in next week's episode. According to Wikipedia, agreeable individuals value getting along with others. They're generally considerate, kind, polite, and friendly.
Overall, I consider myself a nice person, don't get me wrong. However, I'm not naive, I'm not stupid, I know that the overwhelming majority of the population is nicer than me. If you put me in a room of 100 random people who are representative of the population, about 90 of them will be more polite than me, more cooperative. They'll be friendlier than I am, and that's okay. That's totally fine. I accept that. [06:15.6]
What's funny is that sometimes I will read my responses to emails and things like that to my wife, and she will say, “Holy crap, you can't talk to people like that,” and that's when I'm trying to be nice, so it just simply does not come naturally to me. My point with this is that I could work for years, I could try my hardest and train myself and take etiquette classes and hire a coach, and I wouldn't even get close to the same level of just raw ability and natural talent that my uncle had, because it was his natural strength.
Every so often, I'll do a podcast interview or a private group meeting with financial advisors or something like that, and people will ask me about advisors working on their weaknesses, like, how can advisors get better at stuff they're not very good at? Truthfully, a lot of those things should be ignored or abandoned, just like Jeff Bezos abandoned physics. [07:05.3]
I'm all about self-improvement. I don't want to say that you should abandon self-improvement. I want people to become better versions of themselves, but again, I'm also not naive, right? There's this quote that hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard, and I agree with that.
If you're a hard worker and you're going up against a talented person who doesn't work at all, then it's very possible that you can beat that person. However, if someone is naturally talented and that person also works hard, you are probably never going to beat that person. I could never become a better basketball player than Michael Jordan, even if I work twice as hard as he did. I hope you understand that. It is so important for you to know.
Now that I have you thinking about that, I would like to make a specific recommendation. I think that everyone listening to this podcast episode should take the HEXACO personality test. I think the HEXACO is one of the best, if not the best personality test out there today. [08:01.2]
One of the biggest criticisms of personality tests is that they have poor retest reliability, which means you can take it 10 times to get 10 different results. The nice thing about the HEXACO is that the results give you a range, which is what personality traits are anyway. I think the people who criticize personality tests don't really understand what personality actually is, but that's a story for another day.
So, people typically fall within the range, right? And as long as they're honest with their answers, they will be in the same range pretty much every single time. If you're a naturally conscientious person, then you're probably going to be on the upper end of the conscientious scale, even if you move around a little bit, you're unlikely to be a highly-conscientious person one day, and then when you take the test like next week or the week after, then you're going to be on the other end of the range. It just does not happen.
Each letter of HEXACO stands for one of the six domains it measures. The domains are: honesty-humility, that's “H.” Emotionality, that's “E.” Extraversion, that's “X.” Agreeableness, that's “A.” Conscientiousness, that’s “C,” and openness to experience, that's “O.” So, HEXACO. [09:08.5]
Here's a little overview of each dimension. I'm just going to go through this one by one, simply so I can give you some background and you understand where I'm coming from because this is a big topic. It's one of the most important things I've ever shared on this podcast.
You have honesty-humility, that's “H.” That dimension assesses elements like fairness, sincerity, modesty. High scores indicate individuals who are genuine or uninterested in manipulating others. People who have low scores, they tend to be a little bit more deceitful. They tend to be a little bit more arrogant, and we'll talk about this in this episode and next week, like I said. We're going to dig deep into this. I'm going to go through everything with you.
Then you have emotionality. That’s emotional attachment. How sentimental are you? Are you anxious? How do you experience emotions? How serious is it for you? High scores, they suggest that people have intense emotional bonds. They have concern for others. People who have low scores, they're a little bit more detached. [10:02.4]
Then you have extraversion and that's extrovert vs. introvert. This is how social are you? How assertive are you when interacting with others? People who are very extroverted are typically energetic. They're social. They get their energy from hanging out with other people. Introverts, the people who score a little lower on this, they're more reserved. They regenerate when they're by themselves. They need quiet time. This is pretty common stuff that people tend to know. People tend to know what an introvert is and what an extrovert is.
Then you have agreeableness. This is all about patience, tolerance, gentleness, friendliness, cooperation. This is what we just talked about. I rank really low in this, right? People with low scores, they tend to be critical. They tend to be competitive.
I took the CliftonStrengths, which used to be called StrengthsFinder, and competition is actually my second biggest strength. I'm all about competing, and I know that I talk about the religious aspect of this and how pride is very dangerous, and I agree with that. I'm working on it, right? I'm not perfect. [11:00.4]
But my natural personality is geared to just go hard, right? So, I lean into it. I acknowledge that sometimes it's not always the right thing to do, and I think that's part of being human, right? It’s fighting against these urges and these tendencies that really aren't the best, and I struggle with it just like everybody else does.
Then you have conscientiousness? We’re going to dig deep on this one, for sure. This measures organization, diligence, precision. How much of a perfectionist are you? How much pride do you take in your work? People who are very conscientious, they're generally reliable. They're disciplined. They get things done. You can depend on them. People who are not, they're more spontaneous. They're flexible. They miss deadlines. You cannot rely on them as much. Generally speaking, you want someone who is conscientious in your corner, okay? We're going to talk about this, too. [11:55.4]
Openness to experience is the “O” part of HEXACO and this is about someone's appreciation for art, adventure, and just variety of experience. These are world travelers. These are people who like art. These are people who can like new music, like trying new things, like try new foods, and they're curious, right? People who are not open to experience, they are just conventional. They like to conform. They're more practical. They are not spontaneous. People would describe them as rigid.
The reason I want you to the HEXACO is because you will see your existing strengths. Then you should improve those strengths. Let me give you a few examples.
Advisors with high honesty-humility, those advisors might excel in building trust and having sincere relationships with clients, and that can actually be emphasized in their marketing approach. I know that giving financial advice is a relationship business, but you could amplify it even more. You could lean into the relationships that you have with your clients. You can make them stronger to increase referrals. You could talk about it in your emails and your content marketing, your social media marketing. You could talk about how you have relationships with other people. [13:00.0]
Advisors with high emotionality, they might be adept at empathizing with people. They might be adept at emotional appeals and, again, relationship building. They could emphasize that in their marketing.
Extroverted financial advisors, they would like networking events and seminars, and things like that, which means they should do them. If you're an extroverted financial advisor, you should get your butt out of the office and talk with people, and kiss babies and shake hands and all that. You should just get out into the world, because that is your natural strength. Don't try to sit behind a computer all day.
If you're naturally introverted, you should try to do stuff that requires you to be in your office and actually working. You could make the calls and you can email people and you could get on social media, but you're not necessarily out in a big conference room with hundreds of people and you're just shaking hands with everyone, because that's really draining and that's not going to be good for you. Now, I'm not saying that you shouldn't do things that don't get you out of your comfort zone, but, I mean, let's be realistic. [13:54.1]
Advisors who are very agreeable, they should leverage that cooperative, friendly nature. You should collaborate with other people, if that's you. You should get in touch with centers of influence. You should work with estate-planning attorneys and CPAs. You should go out to dinner with them. You should get lunch, because if you're very agreeable, then you're like a social butterfly. And if you're really agreeable, and you're an extrovert, oh my goodness, you should double down on this. It's obvious that you should be doing that stuff.
Hey, financial advisors. If you'd like even more help building your business, I invite you to subscribe to James' monthly paper-and-ink newsletter, “The James Pollard Inner Circle”. When you join today, you'll get more than $1,000 worth of bonuses, including exclusive interviews that aren't available anywhere else. Head on over to TheAdvisorCoach.com/coaching to learn more.
Conscientious advisors, they are usually phenomenal technicians. They're organized. They’re meticulous. They’re the ones who do great work. Yes, you need to be able to market your services, but you also need to deliver a quality product, and the conscientiousness, it helps with that, because you are delivering quality. Your actual work is going to be really good. You're going to meet deadlines. [15:05.0]
If someone schedules an appointment with you at four o'clock, you're going to be there at 3:55, if you're a conscientious person. If you're not very conscientious, then you might be there at 4:05 or 4:10. You're going to be late and it's just not going to be a good look, and you should really work on that.
Finally, you've got advisors with high openness to experience. Those advisors might be more innovative. They might embrace different marketing strategies. When ChatGPT first came out on November 30, 2022, advisors with the high openness to experience in that dimension of the HEXACO, they were the ones to play around with it. They were the ones to embrace it and think to themselves, How can this help my business? How can I use this? How can this be useful to me in accomplishing my goals?
The advisors who were not open to new experiences, they said, “Oh, I don't want to use that,” or “I don't want to play around with that yet.” They made whatever excuse they made to not try this thing out, and that happens all the time. It happens with split-testing ads, trying a new marketing strategy. [16:03.0]
I'm known for multiple marketing strategies, and financial advisors who are not open to new experiences might say, “Oh, I don't want to add another marketing strategy. I just want to do the thing that I'm doing and do it and do it and do it.” What if you depend on LinkedIn and LinkedIn changes its algorithm? What if you depend on direct mail and some list stops working for you or there's just a dramatic change in the postal regulations? Who knows, right? Things change all the time. The “Do Not Call” list completely transformed the way that people reach out to other people on the phone. You have to be aware of this, and openness to experience is really important.
Those are just very quick overviews of each trait and how they can apply to financial advisor marketing. I want to dig a little deeper, though, so I'm going to break this up into two parts. That's why this episode is titled Part 1, so that's this episode. In next week's episode, I'll talk about the second part, which will be all about building a successful financial advisor from the ground up, meaning, if I had to create the perfect financial advisor, what would that person's personality look like? [17:06.3]
Personality and personality types, it's such a fascinating concept to me, because it truly takes all sorts of people to make the world go round. There is no one right or wrong personality to have, and if you study evolutionary psychology, you realize that having people with a bunch of different personalities is a great way to ensure that humanity survives.
For example, I think conscientiousness is “the” most important trait to have if you want to be successful in anything, not just marketing or financial advice. This has been replicated in many studies. Highly-conscientious people are more likely to be in better shape. They're more likely to be happier. They're more likely to have more money than their peers.
But high conscientiousness, it comes with a high energy cost. People who do more physical work require more energy to fuel their bodies. People who make the mental effort of planning and inhibiting their impulses will require more energy to fuel their brains, because it requires a lot of energy to exert your willpower, and that's what these people do. [18:01.1]
In premodern times, when food supplies weren't as secure as they are today, those energy costs would, could and would come at a heavy price. Highly-extroverted people, as an example, they also consumed a lot of energy and they still do today, because even though the extroverted people would have a ton of mates and allies in their little tribes and hunter-gatherer societies, they would also consume more than their passive counterpart, and when resources became scarce, extroverted people had more trouble surviving, especially when they were pitted against introverted people who weren't as friendly, because the introverted people would keep the resources to themselves and they would survive.
It's crazy stuff when you really dig into this and all the hypotheses and theories for why we have so much variation in our personalities, and the evolutionary psychologists would tell you, it's simply to help humanity survive. Our chances of survival would not be as high if everybody had the same personality. [18:56.7]
It's also interesting when you start to think about various historical figures and how those historical figures may have scored on the HEXACO, like conquistadores. Hernán Cortés, who took over the Aztec empire, and Francisco Pizarro, who crushed the Incas, those people probably had extremely low “E,” emotionality, so that means they were fearless and tough. They had a little concern for others. They didn't form emotional bonds.
Think about what low “E” actually means. If you don't form bonds with others and you're detached from what you're doing, then you can just do the most ruthless stuff and not look back. I don't think these conquistadores could have wiped out entire populations and done the absolute crazy ruthless stuff they did if they did not have low “E.”
But—but—let's think about this. Does that mean having people with low “E” is bad for society? Not at all. Trust me, you want people like firefighters and police officers to have low “E.” You don't want them to get anxious. You don't want them to get distracted on the job. You want them to be calm, cool and collected. That's how people with low “E” are described. [20:04.5]
People who are low in “E,” they can stay composed under pressure. They can make quick, clear-headed decisions. If you're in the middle of a war and the enemy is closing in on you, then you want someone with low “E” to have your back.
Let's circle back to conscientiousness. I said that I think conscientiousness is the most important trait for being successful in anything. But let me challenge myself here. Let me challenge my thinking. Is there a place in the world for people who have low “C” on the HEXACO Scale? Yes, for sure, there is. People who rank low in “C” are very flexible. They're spontaneous. They're creative. That means they would flourish in the arts or a research department, or working in a startup somewhere.
I pretty much maxed out the scale in conscientiousness, and I actually took another personality test. I actually mentioned it earlier, it's called the CliftonStrengths, so that ranks your strengths and weaknesses, and that test told me that adaptability was one of my biggest weaknesses. [21:00.8]
I don't think there's a single person in my life who would describe me as spontaneous. People describe me as a machine, a robot, like a tank, doing whatever it takes, no matter what. If there's a wall in front of me, I'll go through it. I'll just keep going. I'll go, I'll go, I'll go, no matter what. I am not flexible. I hate having my routine changed. If you put me in a creative role where I had to stop and turn on a dime, I wouldn't do very well.
Fortunately, I'm in a position where consistency is rewarded. Look at this podcast. Look at my daily emails. Look at my newsletter. This is the seventh year that I've been writing the Inner Circle Newsletter, right? That's consistency. Every single month, that goes out. Every single month, financial advisors will get it and be able to implement it and work from it. I put in the work day in and day out in alignment with my personality, and that has allowed me to attain what little success I've achieved so far. I'm not a bird attempting to swim. I'm a fish and I'm swimming well. Some people are fish. Some people are birds. It doesn't mean one is worse than the other. They just are. [22:01.5]
You also have to pay attention to the combination of personality traits that you and others have. For example, let's say someone has high “H,” which is the honesty-humility, and low conscientiousness, which is the “C.” These people are usually sincere. They're fair. They're modest. That's the low “H.” They're also relaxed and laid back, and they don't pay attention to details very much. That's the low “C.”
Such a person might be very trustworthy and ethical, and would be a good person to just kick back and talk to about all your troubles in your life. But that person may struggle with schedules and planning, and then the stuff that causes the business to run. So, you would likely be attracted to a person in a job interview and you would want to hire that person, but after hiring, you would be disappointed in him or her, because you'd be like, Why can't you just do the work I assigned you? I told you the deadline was 9:00 a.m. on Tuesday. Why can't you meet it? [22:53.2]
Let me give you another example. Let's say someone has high agreeableness, which is “A,” and low emotionality, which is “E.” This person is the textbook example of a fantastic manager or a leader of people, because the high agreeableness is all about being cooperative, forgiving, patient, friendly, all those good things. Then the low emotionality suggests emotional stability, so that person would be able to take all of the dumb stuff that people do and all the mean things that people say, and not take it personally.
That person would be great at managing conflicts and working in teams because of the ability to keep calm under stress and prioritize group harmony. The person would be able to take stuff in stride and keep the team going and working together. So, if you were hiring someone to be a manager, you would want that. You would want high “A,” high agreeableness, and low “E,” low emotionality. If someone came to you with those traits inverted, meaning, low agreeableness and high emotionality, that person would be horrible for the manager role. [23:56.4]
Not understanding this concept is also one of the reasons why when you promote people in an organization internally, sometimes it doesn't work well. There’s something called The Peter Principle, which says that people get promoted to their level of incompetence. I've seen that, but I don't think it explains everything.
So, I would like to coin the Pollard principle, and the Pollard principle goes like this. People get promoted to a mismatch of their personalities, because people might be fantastic in their existing roles, but you cannot take a fish out of the water and expect it to start flying like a bird.
Also, think about this. I want you to imagine that someone with low agreeableness and high emotionality came to you and wanted to be a manager in your organization. You might think, Absolutely not, there's no way I'm hiring you for that. You are not suited for that role. It would seem obvious to you, right? You wouldn't want someone who is not agreeable and who is emotionally not stable to manage other people.
If that's true and it's so obvious, and you get it right away, why don't you get it in your own life? Why do you think you're suited for every marketing and business-building strategy? It's silly. You wouldn't expect that metaphorical fish to start flying, but when it comes to you and your talents, it's like you're taking that fish and you're launching it into the air. Keep your fish in the water. [25:13.7]
I'm going to talk about this concept in next week's episode. I know I said this, but I really want to stress this. I think it's one of the most important things financial advisors can learn. But I'm going to give you a quick rundown of what may or may not be the perfect personality for a financial advisor. Let's go through the HEXACO one by one again.
Do you think a financial advisor should have high or low honesty-humility? I mean, I think financial advisors should have high honesty-humility, meaning they're honest and fair. That's pretty important, because even though being deceitful might get you a short-term advantage, it'll come back to bite you in the long run. I wouldn't want to be deceitful and have to remember all my lies. It just makes life so difficult. [25:54.8]
Do you think financial advisors should have high or low emotionality? It’s a relationship business, right? High scores denote experience, and emotional bonds and empathy, but it also comes with needing emotional support from others and needing validation. They're very dependent. In a relationship, we would call this clingy. In children, we would call it being a Velcro baby.
I think an advisor is best served by being near the middle of this dimension. Yes, the advisor should be able to empathize. Yes, the advisor should be able to create emotional bonds. But the advisor should also not be so dependent on others and validation that the advisor can't do any marketing strategies or any outreach. Rejection would be devastating for that advisor, and rejection just comes with the territory.
Do you think a financial advisor should be extroverted or introverted? I can tell you from firsthand experience that it does not matter. It does not matter, as long as you don't have extremes. You probably shouldn't be so introverted that you can't talk with new people, and you probably shouldn't be so extroverted that you can't sit in a quiet room and do the work and make plans for your business. [27:04.8]
Do you think that financial advisors should be agreeable? I think so. I think advisors should like people and be patient with them, and cooperate with them.
Do you think financial advisors should be conscientious? I think so. Yeah, absolutely. I don't think I would necessarily call anything in the HEXACO a deal breaker, but I think conscientiousness comes really close, because if you have a low score, it means you're not as organized or as diligent as other people. You are already operating at a disadvantage, if that's you. The good news is that you can train yourself to be more conscientious, but that's beyond the scope of this episode. I don't really have the time or the inclination to discuss that right here.
Finally, do you think financial advisors should be open to experience? That's the “O” part of the HEXACO. Advisors who rank high in this are creative. They’re innovative. They appreciate beauty and art. I've seen advisors on both sides of the spectrum and they have both succeeded, but if I were designing the perfect financial advisor, I would probably put that person more on the high side than the low side. I wouldn't max it out either way. I wouldn't go to any extreme. [28:11.4]
I don't think I'd go to the extreme in any of this, except maybe conscientiousness. I'm going to have to think about that more and get back to you next week. But I will put the advisor more on the high side of openness to experience, because I would want an advisor to be creative and run split tests and marketing and not be afraid to go against the crowd.
People who rank low in openness to experience, they tend to be conformists, and by definition, you can't really conform if you want to be in the top 1% of your field. You have to go against the grain because you can't do what most people do and expect to get results that most people don't get.
I know I keep saying this, but this is truly some of the most important stuff I've ever discussed in a podcast episode and I know it's going to help the people who take it seriously. Next week is going to have some mind blowing stuff, because I'm going to take a deep dive into these personality dimensions and break down what I think makes up the perfect financial advisor. Stay tuned, and I'll catch you next week. [29:05.3]
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