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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. There are financial advisors out there right now, this very second, who are smarter than you, more credentialed than you. They've got more letters after their names in a bowl of Alphabet soup. They studied harder. They passed harder exams. They can run circles around you on financial planning strategy and Roth conversion sequencing and the fine print of every annuity ever invented. And they ain't got no money. They're broke. It's not because they're bad at the technical aspect of what they do? Absolutely not. A lot of them are excellent at the actual planning part. They're broke for a reason that is so much simpler and so much more uncomfortable than that. Nobody likes them. People don't like them, so people don't hire them, so they don't make money. You can have the cleanest financial plan in the history of the profession sitting in your desk drawer. And if prospects don't like you, then that plan is worth exactly nothing because they'll take their money down the street to some advisor who knows half of what you do and gets twice the clients. Today I'm going to prove to you, and I mean prove with actual research, that being liked beats being the expert. And before you tune out, because it sounds like I'm about to tell you to smile more and kiss everybody's butt, I'm not. There's a right way to do this and a wrong way to do this, and the wrong way actually makes people like you less. I'm living proof of this. Doing it the right way, I should say. Because if you've listened to this show for more than five minutes, you know, I am not running around trying to be everybody's friend. Let's start with the big lie. Because almost every advisor I've ever talked to believes some version of this lie. And I've talked to thousands of them. So I've heard this lie in about a hundred different costumes. And it goes like this. If I just get good enough, the clients will come. If I get one more designation, if I master one more strategy, if I finally nail estate planning or whatever the flavor of the month is, then I'll finally have the confidence, then I'll have the credibility. The dam will break and clients will come pouring in. They'll just flood my business. And I really have sympathy for advisors who believe this. I mean, I get why they believe it, because the entire industry is built to make them believe it. I want you to think about how you came up in the business. Everything was a credential or an exam. You got rewarded your whole career for being smart, one of the smartest people in the room for knowing the answer, that sort of thing. The system trained you to compete on competence, but your prospects cannot evaluate your competence. They literally can't. I want you to think about it. A guy walks into your office or has a zoom meeting with you, however you operate your little deal, he's 61 years old, he's got $1.6 million invested in his portfolio and he's scared about retir hiring. Can he really tell whether your asset allocation philosophy is better than the advisor he met with last Tuesday? No, he can't. Because he doesn't have the training that you do. To him, your spreadsheet and the other guy's spreadsheet look identical or at least very similar. It's just two smart sounding people in nice offices saying smart sounding things. So if he can't judge your competence, what is he judging? He's judging whether he likes you, whether he trusts you and feels okay handing you the thing that represents 30 years of his working life. That is the actual decision being made in the room. And most advisors are sitting there trying to win a competence contest. The prospect can't even score. You're playing some complicated chess match in your head while he's deciding whether he wants to have a drink with you. You are losing. And you don't even know which game you're losing at. And the saddest part is you. The better you get, technically, the worse this can get if you let your competence make you cold. Because the more you know, the easier it is to become the smartest, least warm person in the room. You become the guy who corrects people, who's just waiting for you to. Or the other person to stop talking so you can show what you know. Pure competence with zero warmth actually pushes people away. You can get so good that you talk yourself right out of building your business. So I. I told you I would bring proof for this. So let's bring the proof. Two researchers published a study in the Harvard Business review back in 2005. The title alone tells you where this is going to go. It's called Competent Jerks, Lovable Fools, and the Formation of Social Networks. That's the actual title. You can look it up. You can verify everything. I'm telling you, I'm not just pulling this out of my butt. Like so many coaches and consultants and gurus out there who just tell you stuff to sound cool, here's what they did. They studied people and wanted to figure out how they chose who they wanted to work with, not who they say they want to work with, who they actually pick when there's a job to get done. And they looked at something like 10,000 work relationships across five different organizations, which is pretty robust, I must say. They found that when you size somebody up as a work partner, you're running two evaluations. One, how competent are they? Two, how likable are they? Put those on a grid and you get four types of people. You've got the lovable star. This is the person who has high competence and high likeability. Everybody wants the lovable star. No surprise here. You've got the incompetent jerk, low competence and low likability. Nobody wants that guy. Also no surprise. The interesting boxes, though, are the other two. You've got the competent jerk. So this is the person who is really good at the work, but kind of a pain to be around. And you've got the lovable fool. Not that good at the work, getting stuff done, but a delight to be around. Really fun person. Financial advisors as a group skew hard toward one of those boxes because, let's just keep it 100% real. Your analytical people, your detail people, your people who like being right. That's part of why you're good at financial advice and financial planning. That sort of thing is actually fantastic for financial advice and financial planning, but it is absolutely lethal for likability if. If you're not careful. Because the competent jerk is the easiest box in the world for smart, precise, slightly impatient or really impatient people to fall into without ever meaning to. Very few people actively decide to be competent jerks. They just. They slide into it. It's a slippery slope. They think that being good at what they do can excuse their bad behavior. So they're like, oh, they'll let it slide because I'm the best. They' it slide because I'm really good. So here's the question the entire study hangs on. When people are forced to choose between the competent jerk and the lovable fool, between skill and likability, which one do they pick? Here's what's wild. When the researchers ask people Almost everybody said the same thing. Oh, competence. Obviously, I care about skill. If they're nice on top of that, great. But I just want to get the job done. I want competence. That's what they said. Then the researchers watched what they actually did. They picked the lovable fool almost every time. When people were disliked, it barely mattered how good they were. Other people found a way to go around them. They didn't want their help, but when somebody was liked, when somebody was warm and fun and pleasant to deal with, people went to them over and over, even when there was a more skilled option sitting 10ft away. They ran this study in big organizations, so I imagine there's big offices, people with desks side by side. Somebody could go to the more competent person, literally 10ft away. But likability, one. And I know some of you are bristling right now, you're thinking, not me. I'd pick the competent one. I'm a professional. But that's exactly what the people in the study said. They all thought they were the rational exception. They weren't, and you're probably not either. We are all walking around convinced that we choose on merit when we actually choose on feeling. The prospect in your office is running this calculation on you without knowing he's doing it. Now write this down if you're the type of person who writes stuff down from podcast episodes, because we are going to come back to this later. None of this means you should go become the lovable fool. And you'll see why I'm going to share another piece of research. The fool part matters. I'm not telling you to get dumber and friendlier. There's a much better box to be in. I'm going to show you exactly how we get there. But hold that fault, because I want to build it. This whole thing reminds me of this little restaurant I used to go to. And I want to be clear. The food was okay. I mean, it was truly just okay. Fine, average, however you want to describe it. It was a little Italian place, nothing special. The chicken parm was honestly a little dry. I used to get that a lot. I used to get the stuffed shells. I used to get cannoli all the time. Parking was kind of a nightmare because there were only like five spots. And you can't really park in the street in this area of lower Delaware, so you had to park around back or across the street. And if you parked around back, then there was this dumpster that you had to park by that I'm pretty sure was load bearing for the Entire building. So by every objective measure, there were better restaurants within a mile or a couple of miles. And I went to this little Italian restaurant for years. I don't live there anymore. I don't live in that area anymore. But if I did, then I would continue to go there. Do you know why I went? Because of the owner, the people who work there. The owner. Whenever I walked in, it was always like, james, good to see you. He remembered things that I mentioned. He comped my dessert every so often for no reason. He was just a good guy. Like, he would just give me the cannoli, okay? People ask James, how come you work out all the time and you're still a fat slob? Because your boy loves cannoli, okay? And cannoli is plural. So when I say I get cannoli, I mean multiple, okay? I just shove them right in my mouth. Put the cannoli right in there. So I drove past better restaurants to eat dry chicken parm next to a dumpster because that man made me feel like a king every time I walked in. That guy was not the most competent restaurant owner in town. He was simply the most liked. And likability had my wallet in a chokehold for years. I probably spent. Okay, so let me see. I probably spent $30 a pop and went there, I would say, every two weeks and for years. So that's thousands upon thousands of dollars. And he just did well because he was cool. He was. He was a good guy. Listen up, financial advisors. This is something special I'm doing exclusively for people who listen to this podcast. If you subscribe to the Inner Circle newsletter over@theadvisorcoach.com coaching, I will send you a collection of seven copyright free emails personally written by me that you can use right away to begin getting more clients. I call these my objection busting emails because they're designed to overcome the biggest objections financial advisors face. All you have to do is send me an email letting me know you've subscribed and I will reply back with a link where you can download them for free. I originally offered These in the May 2024 Inner Circle newsletter issue and it was one of the most popular bonuses I've ever given away. Today, these seven objection busting copyright free emails are only available to listeners of this podcast because I'm not mentioning them anywhere else. Go to theadvisorcoach.com coaching to subscribe today. Now back to the show. There's this book called the Like Switch. The Like Switch. L I K E Switch. Not Light like you're turning on the lights. The like switch. Written by a guy named Jack Schaefer. And Jack Schaefer is not some life coach who skimmed a few studies. He's a former FBI agent. So he worked in behavioral analysis. His actual paid government job was figuring out how to get people to like and trust him. And not just normal people either. He was turning foreign agents into American spies. Okay? Getting people to betray their own countries because they liked him. So when this guy tells you how likability works. No, it isn't theory. It is field tested on the highest stakes relationship you can imagine. Schaeffer says likability is not some personality you're born with. It is a formula, which means it is learnable, repeatable, and you can build it on purpose. He calls it the friendship formula. And it has four parts. Proximity, frequency, duration, and intensity. So let me walk you through each one. Proximity is basically how close you are to somebody. Schaeffer found that people start to warm up to each other simply from sharing space. You don't even have to say a word. I mean, this happens all the time. If you get in the elevator, in your apartment, you see the same girl over and over, you start to like her a little bit more. You go to the gym, you see the same guy, you fist bump, you literally don't know this person's name. This happens to me all the time when I go to the gym. I have my home gym, but then I go to a commercial gym for more bodybuilding style training. And I see people all the time, they're like, yo, what's up? How you doing? They give me a head nod. I don't know these people's names. I give them names. Okay, there's a guy that looks like Oliver Anthony who sang the Rich man north of Richmond. If you remember, a few years ago, that song blew up. I call him Oliver Canthony because he looks like he can't do anything. And I know that's kind of mean. I'm sorry, I shouldn't do that. I apologize. But it is what it is. I call him Oliver Cantony. Then there's another guy that comes in, looks like the spitting image of Chris Jericho from the wwe. Now, aew, he legitimately, I'm telling you, this guy looks like Chris Jericho. It might be Chris Jericho for all I know. Chris Jericho comes to my gym, I don't know. But I call him Chris Jericho because that's what he looks like. I don't know his real name. His real name is probably. I don't know Ebenezer or Jedediah or something like that, but he looks like Chris Jericho. Enough. Enough about this. Let's move on frequency. That's how you show or how often you show up. And this, this is the entire reason that I recommend marketing so hard and emailing every day and having automations and posting on social media. Because every time you show up in someone's life, the needle moves a little bit more. Most advisors will just send a newsletter whenever they feel like it, or once a quarter and they wonder why nobody feels connected to them. You cannot build a relationship on four touches a year. You just cannot. Next, you have duration. This is how much time someone spends with you. This is where long form content beats a lot of other marketing strategies. Because a 20 minute podcast where someone has you in your ears for or in their ears for a drive or they're at the gym, that is duration. A physical newsletter that they sit with for 20 minutes, 30 minutes and a cup of coffee, they read it in the morning or your email is longer, or your social media posts draw them in. All of that stuff is duration. Every minute of attention somebody gives you is a minute. The formula is working in your favor. And finally you have intensity. This is the emotional one. How strongly you're meeting some need. They have, whatever that is. If you're making them laugh, making them feel understood, making them feel something. So a boring touch and a memorable touch are not equal. You want to have the memorable one, but there's one more piece and it's the most important one. It is the hinge this whole episode turns on. Shaffer calls it the golden rule of friendship. And it goes like this. If you make people feel good about themselves, they will like you. It does not say if you make people think you're impressive, they'll like you. It says if you make them feel good about themselves, they will like you. The focus is on them, not on you. So the restaurant owner that I talked about from the little Italian restaurant in lower Delaware, golden rule, he didn't spend one second. I mean, I'm sure he did, but in my memory he did not spend one second telling me about his risotto technique or anything like that. He made me feel important. The whole thing was about how I felt, not how good he was. You walk into the meeting and spend the whole time trying to make them think you are great. The prospects don't fall in love with how great you are. They fall in love with how great they feel sitting across from you. One more thing from the FBI Playbook and Jack Schaefer. It's almost insulting how simple this is. Let the other person do most of the talking. Shaffer's rule of thumb is that the other person should be talking about 70% of the time. Most advisors have it inverted. They talk 70, the prospect talks 30. Okay, now we get to the part that I promised you earlier. Does this mean you need to agree with everybody, never push back, Tell all prospects what they want to hear so they like you? No, absolutely not. That is the wrong way. Let me tell you why butt kissing doesn't work. When you kiss up to someone, when you agree with everything, when you never push back, people can tell what you're doing. And here's what it actually communicates. It says you have no spine. It says your approval is worthless because you give it to everyone. I mean, how valuable can your approval and your liking be if you give it to everyone? If you like everything, your liking means nothing. If you say yes to anybody, your yes is worth nothing. This is the same disease, okay, as the whole give value, give value, give, educate, and just help people, that sort of thing. And you've heard these people. It is the dumbest marketing advice ever invented. Just give value until you collapse. Give and give and give, and eventually, somehow, the universe pays you back. It's, please notice how generous I am. Please like me for it. It's still about you. So how do you square this? How are you supposed to be likable and have a spine, and in my case, sometimes be an outright grump and have it work for you? Here is the best piece of research about this. Get ready, because it's going to rock your world. Picture this. It's 1966. A psychologist named Elliot Aronson runs an experiment. He gets this group of college students and he plays them tape recordings someone auditioning for a quiz show, a college quiz bowl. It's a big deal at the time. Quiz bowls. I mean, I participated in a quiz bowl because I'm a nerd like that. I had a great time. One of the coolest things I've ever done. There are four versions of this tape. In the first version, the person is brilliant, answers 92% of these hard questions correctly. This guy's a rock star. In the second version, the person is not a rock star. He's mediocre. He gets about 30%, right? So this is an average performance for a quiz bowl with hard questions. If you just take an average guy off the street, he might get 30% of those questions correctly. Now, here's the Twist. In two of those recordings, right at the end, you hear the person clumsily spill a cup of coffee all over himself. You hear, like, the clatter and the clang and, oh, no, I've spilled coffee all over my new soup. So now there are four recordings. You've got the brilliant guy, no spill. You've got the brilliant guy who spills coffee. The average guy, no spill. Average guy spills coffee. And Aronson asked the students, which of these people do you like the most? Oh. Oh. Oh, no. I spilled my ghost energy drink. Uh, oh, so sorry, guys. Now, where was I? Oh, yeah. The findings this study. The brilliant guy who spilled the coffee was the most liked of everyone, and the average guy who spilled the coffee was the least liked. Spilling the coffee made the competent guy more likable and made the average guy less likable. The blunder helped because it humanized someone who was otherwise a little too perfect, a little too far above you, a little intimidating. Aronson said it himself. A superior person can seem almost superhuman. And that distance makes them hard to like. The blunder closes the distance. It says, oh, he's one of us. He spills stuff, too. Now, I like him and I respect him. But the blunder only worked because the competence was already established. The average guy spilling coffee was just a guy who's not that good and also clumsy. There's nothing really to humanize. The flaw only becomes charming when there's something impressive for it to soften. So here's what that means for you. You earn likability by being genuinely good at what you do and then letting people see that you're just a regular person. You're a human being. So let me bring this all the way back around town. Likability beats expertise. And I need you to hear that, because I am not saying expertise doesn't matter. It absolutely does matter. It matters enormously, based on the Aronson study. Okay? But expertise alone, sitting there by itself with no likability wrapped around it, leads to smart but broke financial advisors. Likability is the thing that gets your expertise used. It is what gets you chosen. The lovable fool study proves this too. People pick who they like, even while swearing up and down that they pick who's competent. So that is it. I hope this helps you. If you like this podcast episode, please share it with someone. I don't care too much about podcast downloads, but it is cool to see the numbers spike every now and then. Thank you so much for listening. As always, I appreciate you and I will catch you next week. This is the podcast factory dot com.