LEVERAGING LEARNING STYLES
Sales Management | BISM Winter Issue 2010

John is a bank financial advisor (FA) with a great branch, a good personality, and lots of drive—and he's in trouble. His business has stalled, and he's lost five big clients in the past two months. Worst of all, John's clients are leaving without offering any complaints or explanations. They are just having their assets quietly ACAT'd [automated customer account transfer] out. With his monthly numbers dropping, John is trying to bring new customers on board by diligently using the firm's new customer contact software and regularly running branch referral meetings. But he's just not getting the results anyone expects to see with all the hours he's putting in on the phone and in the office.

The work of personal investment sales is, at its core, the work of interpersonal communication.

Sales managers everywhere know a financial advisor like John. Most, if not all, of the issues facing sales managers today point to a need to better understand what makes some financial advisors successful, while others work hard, struggle, and fail. Research over the past 20 years confirms the importance of various FA qualities, such as empathy, trustworthiness, energy, and drive as critical components of success.

The work of personal investment sales is, at its core, the work of interpersonal communication. Therefore listening intently and speaking clearly contribute greatly to the formation of long term buyer-seller relationships. Yet FAs with all of these skills still may not produce at the levels expected. Beyond the use of several robust customer contact systems, little new, practical knowledge has been identified to help sales managers educate their financial advisors on how they can personally improve their sales effectiveness.

Over a three-year period we embarked on a research study involving hundreds of financial advisors from across the country, exploring the critically important question of "What key factors influence financial advisor sales performance?" What we discovered is surprising. It has to do with something incredibly simple. It has to do with how people learn.

How We Learn

Spend 10 minutes with any sales manager talking about successful FAs, and they will tell you about the importance of competence, trustworthiness, and energy. Spend some more time, and you'll hear about customer contact frequency and organizational skills. But it's unlikely that you'll hear about the criticality of a financial advisor's own personal learning style. And yet it is a key factor of their success.

Consider for a moment an example of learning styles. Perhaps you have recently been faced with a "learning" task, such as assembling an unfamiliar product, perhaps a child's tricycle. Having opened the box containing a hundred various components, you ask yourself: What do I do first?

Do you dive in and start building, relying on your personal past knowledge of tricycles? Or do you read the manual cover to cover, carefully categorizing all the nuts and bolts to ensure you have the required pieces? Or perhaps your approach is something in between.

Interestingly, an individual's answer to these and other similar questions has great bearing on that person's ability to be successful in sales.

The desire to dive in and start assembling is an attribute of an accommodating learning style. Learners who prefer this style take a hands-on approach, choosing to interact directly with people and things.

If your preference in this task is to inventory each component part first, then you would be displaying more of an assimilating style, approaching the task logically and deliberately.

There are four basic learning styles, none superior to another, and each offers unique strengths to the learner. But interestingly, individuals' ability to flexibly adjust and adapt their preferred style based on the task at hand, does indeed appear to offer a unique advantage in our business.

If a financial advisor and his client both learn the same way, all is well. But if the advisor and client differ in their natural style, no matter how hard the advisor may try, his efforts to close a sale may not be maximized.

Two major national financial institutions provided access to their financial advisors for the purpose of our research. Two valid testing tools widely used in academic settings, virtually unheard of in our industry, were used: the Learning Style Inventory (LSI) and Adaptive Style Inventory (ASI)¹. These quick, easy self-assessments were designed to evaluate and present the preferred manner in which individuals learn, absorb, and adapt to new information.

This research focused on determining if a specific learning style, or level of adaptive learning flexibility, could be identified as influential to a financial advisor's sales performance.

The Ah-Ha

Research results from more than 400 tests on financial advisors suggest we can actually improve the training of salespeople, positively impact their sales results, and improve firm profitability simply by understanding how an FA learns. By providing financial advisors with insight into how their own learning styles are influencing their customer interactions and their sales performance, we envision that they will be able to suggest and coach subtle, yet powerful positive adaptations in their customer interactions.

Learning about a client's needs, and then subsequently educating a client to fill those needs, is critical to making a sale. And so it follows that the more aware an FA is of their preferred style of absorbing information, as well as their customer's style, the better it will support their sales efforts. An ability to be adaptive in presenting complex information in a way that is most easily comprehended by the client will significantly enhance the development of a long-term successful relationship.

Financial advisors can be successful regardless of which particular learning style they naturally employ. But those FAs who learn flexibility and adaptability with learning styles are able to significantly deliver higher sales production than their peers.

Summary

These findings make sense in light of the fact that relationship sales require active, personal involvement with clients. When the product being sold through a relationship sales process is highly complex and abstract by nature, as is often the case with financial products, relaying that information to clients may prove challenging. If a financial advisor and his client both learn the same way, all is well. But if the advisor and client differ in their natural style, no matter how hard the advisor may try, his efforts to close a sale may not be maximized. Financial advisors attuned to the importance of learning style flexibility will be able to adapt their client presentations, be understood more quickly, and meet their customers' needs more effectively.

The field of relationship sales for financial advisors is highly technical and affected by numerous personal, cognitive, and professional factors. As such, there are many aspects that influence success, such as education, tenure, and work ethic. In grooming top financial advisors in this complex, competitive field, managers may want to also begin an exploration of the unique impacts and effective coaching opportunities of adaptive learning.

¹ Kolb's Learning Style Inventory and Boyatzis and Kolb?s Adaptive Style Inventory, Boston; Hay Group, Hay Resources Direct.

Betty Moon has been a financial advisor, manager, and head of a major bank investment program. Moon is currently a partner in MoonInsights, LLC, a corporate consulting and coaching firm, as well as senior vice president for a division of Bank of America. This article is based on the research she did for her Doctor of Management degree (2008) at Case Western Reserve University. Betty can be reached at moon@mooninsights.com