Earlier this year in February, I was invited to be a guest speaker at my alma mater Nanyang Technological University (NTU) HR Alumni Networking night. The theme for the night was How Millennials Can Grow into HR Leaders. Back then I had shared with my fellow HR juniors this simple 3Es Model which I had conceptualised resulting from my own accumulated 11 years of corporate career experience.

On 18th August 2017, I was invited to be a Key Speaker at the Prudential Awards ceremony to share my trajectory success switch from HR to Insurance despite being very new to the insurance industry. Again I shared the 3Es Model, but this time to a full house audience of 300 fellow new Financial Consultants and amongst them, I was honoured to have the presence of the Prudential CEO and many other Senior Management staff as well. I received very positive feedback on this 3Es model and henceforth decided to share here to inspire others.

My strong adherence to this self-defined 3Es model is a strong attestation to my belief that Success Can be Replicated:

Expertise.

Regardless whether you are in HR or sales, in our lives we are simply Marketers pitching our own ideas, thoughts and opinions when sharing with someone. This is even more so for Financial Consultants like us. Expertise and knowledge of our own products is the basic foundational block. As Financial planners, we are not only a Salesperson, we are THE trusted advisers who should be able to plan out well for our clients in terms of protection and wealth needs. Clients entrust their monies with us to ensure that their loved ones and themselves are adequately protected in the event of crisis. If we do not have the expertise or bring value to the table, this leaves a bitter taste in both the client and your mouth. Instead of helping others, you end up jeopardising your own credibility simply because that conversation has manifested into a terrible negative impression of yourself.

Effective Communication.

In communication, we always say that if the other party does not understand what we are saying, this is a failed communication. And in my years of working interactions with different individuals, I noted that many of us have inadvertently and unconsciously fallen prey to this bad habit, including myself:

The biggest communication problem is we do not listen to understand. We listen to reply.

It does take quite an extensive effort to consciously remember that we should always do it the other way instead:

Seek to Understand First Then To be Understood ~Stephen Covey

Essentially this means that we all need to pay extra attention to what the other party is saying, but more importantly the subtle body language behaviours as well in order to suss out the real concerns and address them adequately. Once that is determined, it makes it a lot easier for us to customise our points and pitch them across to the other party to address both the explicit concerns and the latent ones which were not expressed. By doing so, it greatly enhances the level of understanding and therefore increases the effectiveness of the 2-way communication.

Ethics.

This “E” is particularly important and to me the most important compared to the other 2 “Es”. Whilst it may seem that it is self-explanatory and important for all jobs and even how we conduct ourselves within the human society; this is something I must overly-emphasise especially in the Sales Insurance profession. In order to gain credibility, to foster the trust with your prospective client, it is of pinnacle importance that we uphold the strongest grounds of integrity.

As a Financial Consultant, we have direct vested interests in terms of the amount of commission which we make through the recommendation of products to clients. However one golden rule to always remember is that whatever is being suggested to the client, it should NEVER be detrimental to the interests of the client. For I remain convicted to always seek Win-Win and do not compromise the long term future for immediate short term gain. Eventually it is usually not the strongest who survives, but the one who stays the longest will emerge as the ultimate winner.