How do agency leaders sustain motivation in their agents and your clients? How does one encourage them to strive to perform, or to pursue their financial goals long after they begin their financial journey with you, even if there is no promise on the outcome at the start? Ms Clarie Kwa of 360F (Singapore) Pte Ltd provided insights into sustained motivation at the inaugural International Training Summit for Life Agents and Financial Advisers.
Acquisition costs can cost up to 30 times as much as retaining a customer. And if you do not manage to retain your agents or clients as a manager, it can also result in a high reputational cost for you, noted Ms Kwa. So it is important to become an irreplaceable advisor or manager, and the way to do it is to understand the motivations of your agents and clients.
This will help you predict their behaviour, engage them in the way they are most comfortable and support them in achieving their goals. This will help you trump the competition as an adviser or manager.
Back to basics
Ms Kwa says that understanding your agents and clients well goes back to asking them these questions, either via detailed questionnaires or conversations:
- Why do we make money?
- How do we define happiness?
These lead to the ultimate question that comes next:
Their answers to these questions, will point you to a person's intrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is the key to self-sustaining motivation, as it drives behaviour, is stable, recurrent and is usually only shaken and changed by a crisis or traumatic experience, she said.
Reiss’ 16 Basic Desires theory
Professor Steven Reiss, an American psychologist identified 16 universal “basic desires”, or human needs, which are goals common to everyone and deeply rooted in human nature. Ms Kwa, a certified Reiss Profile Master, said that using these values as a guide, and sussing out which of them are more important to your client, agent, or even yourself, will help you understand the motivation behind the priorities or actions of these people.
For example, she distilled some of these values which are more applicable for financial planning and agency recruitment, and explained how they could apply in financial planning and agent recruitment.
Motivations in Financial Planning
1.Family to raise own children
2.Idealism to improve society (including altruism, justice)
3.Status for social standing (including desire for attention)
4.Power to influence (including leadership; related to mastery)
5.Independence to be autonomous
6.Physical to exercise muscles
7.Eating to eat
8.Social Contact for peer companionship (desire to play)
Motivations in recruitment and talent grooming
1.Power to influence (including leadership; related to mastery)
2.Independence to be autonomous
3.Social Contact for peer companionship (desire to play)
4.Honor to obey a traditional moral code
5.Vengeance to get even (including desire to compete, to win)
6.Acceptance for approval
Guides to behaviour
Based on the examples, someone with a strong Family value may be motivated to make financial decisions based on his children’s needs, while someone with a high Power value will aim to be influential and lead in his work. The values can also serve as guidance for caution, on the part of the manager, if they do not indicate positive outcomes. Warning bells should ring if someone shows clearly that Vengeance is a key value for him while Honour is not (ie he may just be more likely to succumb to temptations than others) while a new recruit with a high need for Approval may not be able to take the sort of rejection that agents need to be used to. Nonetheless, while taking such motivations as guidelines, a manager with this knowledge should not use it to influence his client's behaviour.
Ms Kwa said that an adviser can also use his/her values to understand his own motivations as it is also important for advisers to look for complementary clients for a good fit--it is not possible for an adviser to keep adapting one's behaviour for a client in the long term, as it will not build a self-sustaining advisory relationship, she said. She added that if desired, an additional step to complement this motivation process would be to go further and do risk profiling, as understanding clients’ aversion to loss and uncertainty will also help to predict their their financial decisions in times of market stress. She also cautioned that those with the benefit of such insights into motivation should avoid “self-hugging”, ie imposing one’s values on others,.
“Take the time to understand your agents, clients, recruits and what drives them in their daily lives and long term goals,” she said.