[dradernh]

This thread has got me to thinking. During the earliest days of the internet, I came across an internal document from one of the country's top financial firms, J.P. Morgan & Co. Having worked in the industry, it was clear this document was basic training material for new sales people (aka "Account Executives").

There's a lot of cold calling involved with a job like that, and much of the material was devoted to how to identify what kind of person you're speaking with as early in the conversation as possible. To prepare the document, I had the impression that J.P. Morgan had hired top-quality psychologists.

The bottom line was this: 15% of potential clients were blessed with the foresight necessary to engage in a conversation about how to achieve financial independence and, more importantly, exhibited an ability to follow through over time by sticking to a general plan to which they had agreed. This group was the only one J.P. Morgan was interested in as clients. Another 15% of potential clients were incapable of seeing past the next week or the next $100. A fundamental part of the account executive's job was to quickly and successfully identify people with these traits.

Everyone else fell in-between those two groups and were also not of interest to the firm.