Every advisor alive today carries the residue of a century-old sales culture. It still shows up in discovery meetings, often without awareness. These instincts feel natural because they were built into the profession long before any of us, or even our grandparents, were born.
To understand why discovery often tilts toward advisor dominance, it helps to look back at a moment when American persuasion took shape. The year is 1885. The architect is Mark Twain. The product is Ulysses S. Grant’s autobiography.
Some years after leaving the White House in 1877, Grant was dying of throat cancer and racing the clock to finish his memoirs. His friend Mark Twain stepped in, offered him a publishing deal, and took personal responsibility for making the book a success. Twain didn’t rely on bookstores. He built a national sales army.
The campaign that hard-wired an industry
When Twain decided to publish Grant’s memoirs, he didn’t simply hope for sales. He built a machine. He assembled 10,000 sales agents and trained them with precision. Each received a script. Each learned a pitch. Each practiced the same opening line: “I called to give you an opportunity to see General Grant’s book, of which so much has been said in the papers.”
That single sentence carried the building blocks of modern persuasion. Authority. Social proof. Urgency. It positioned the agent as gatekeeper and cast the prospect in a responsive role. This was more than a book launch. It was the prototype for American selling: a door-to-door model of controlled conversation that rewarded confidence, celebrated verbal dominance, and placed the seller squarely at the center of the interaction.
Twain’s campaign wasn’t an isolated success. It matched a broader American pattern: turning selling into a system. Other countries had peddlers and merchants, but the United States scaled persuasion into a national enterprise and built entire professions around it. That mindset still echoes in advisor behavior today.
The campaign worked. It became one of the most successful publishing efforts in history. It also introduced something else into the culture: a belief that the best conversations are the ones you control.
It’s what might be called “the reflex.”
The reflex didn’t fade as the century turned. It passed from Twain’s agents into the traveling salesmen, from them into the insurance men, and from them into the telephone brokers of the 1970s and 80s. The persuasion playbook stayed the same: Lead the conversation, overcome hesitation, keep the prospect moving. The result is simple. The industry that financial advisors inherited was already steeped in scripts and dominance long before planning software or fiduciary standards existed.
My early years inside the reflex
When I entered the field in 1981, the phone was the battlefield. We stood over call sheets like workers in a factory line. Smile and dial. Every call was a small contest. Win the objection. Land the meeting. Control the narrative. That was the oxygen of the business.
Discovery asks for a different skill. It asks for patience. It asks for curiosity.
The method worked often enough to reward itself. I met million-dollar clients through that system. But the cost was high. Every day required a performance. Every pitch demanded verbal strength. Every hesitation felt like a threat to be pressed through. I did not realize it at the time, but the culture I had stepped into was repeating rituals originally forged by Twain’s book agents. We were operating inside a legacy of persuasion that measured value by verbal control.
That culture never fully left the advisory profession. It simply changed its clothes. Advisors stopped cold-calling and started planning. They earned designations. They advanced into coaching-like relationships. Yet the instinct to talk, steer, and shape the narrative remained. This is why discovery meetings still tilt away from discovery and toward performance. The reflex is still there, running in the background like an old operating system that never got deleted.
The modern fossil record of an old reflex
The Horsesmouth Discovery Lab has observed that advisors talk 70% of the time in discovery meetings. Closed questions dominated the conversations. Follow-up questions appeared so infrequently they might as well have been rare bird sightings.
Advisors often treat the first meeting like a polite sales pitch disguised as Q&A. They gather data. They prescribe solutions. They speak early and speak often. They lead with explanations rather than exploration.
None of this happens because advisors are careless. It happens because a century of sales culture sits under the surface. Even after advisors embrace planning, the reflex remains. It shows up in the impulse to fill silence. It shows up in the drive to prove value. It shows up in the instinct to move the prospect toward the advisor’s agenda even when the advisor believes they are being collaborative. Advisors sometimes assume that these behaviors are modern problems. They are not modern. They are historical. They are inherited.
Why discovery feels harder than it should
Discovery asks for a different skill. It asks for patience. It asks for curiosity. It asks for silence. It asks for trust in the client’s story instead of the advisor’s agenda. That feels simple on paper. The reality is more complicated. Discovery challenges both the inherited script and the biological drive toward control. It is not just a new technique. It is a new identity for the advisor.
The modern discovery meeting is one of the few spaces in financial services where talking less produces more impact. The client does the heavy lifting. The client reveals the meaning behind the numbers. The client sets the emotional direction. The advisor tracks, listens, invites, and follows the arc of the story.
The shift is mental. It is emotional. It is physiological. The advisor must sit inside silence without trying to fix it. The advisor must allow uncertainty without rushing to contain it. The advisor must slow down the fast brain and give the client’s reasoning room to emerge. This is discovery. It is not a performance. It is a neurological reset.
The new operating system: Collaboration
The old reflex shows itself in the way advisors slip into control. A quiet instinct to dominate shapes the conversation. Habits that often stay invisible finally come into view. What emerges is a path toward genuine collaboration, where partnership is practiced in real time instead of treated as a figure of speech.
In this modern archetype, the client and advisor build the first plan together. They shape understanding together. They create the frame for future decisions together. Discovery becomes a shared act of authorship rather than a guided tour controlled by the advisor. This matters because collaboration produces trust. It produces emotional safety. It produces referrals. It produces clients who feel seen rather than assessed. It produces meetings where clients actually tell the truth.
In an eMoney survey, 78% of investors said they wanted to be actively involved in the planning process. Ninety-three percent of highly collaborative advisors received referrals. That is not a coincidence. Collaboration creates moments that clients want to share, because the experience itself is the value.
Breaking the habit and building a future
The sales reflex served its purpose. It built industries. It gave people income in the decades when options were limited. It created a sense of professional identity.
But advanced discovery behaviors require something different. Something more human. Something more sustainable. To lead authentically now, advisors must retrain themselves. They must put down the scripts that Twain handed out. They must exit the performance mindset. They must listen long enough for the client’s real story to surface.
The change is not cosmetic. It is structural. When advisors move from persuasion to collaboration, they shift the entire emotional posture of the meeting. They create equality. They create trust. They create belonging. They create the kind of environment where clients speak freely because they feel safe.
Clients want to be part of their own plan. They want to talk through their thinking. They want space to explore without being steered. Discovery gives them that path. Collaboration makes it real. The sales reflex had a long run. One hundred and forty years. It shaped conversations across generations. This is the moment to retire it. Not with criticism. With gratitude. And with a better path forward.
The persuasion habits that started in Twain’s era influenced the industry for generations. They’re still in the room today. The co-created model makes it possible to move beyond those habits without losing confidence or clarity.
The future belongs to advisors who listen, collaborate, and help clients bring meaning to their financial decisions. And this is the shift the profession has been edging toward for years.
Thoughts to carry forward
- Twain’s 10,000-agent sales machine still echoes in advisor talk-time today.
- Discovery struggles come from an inherited reflex to control the conversation.
- The future belongs to advisors who co-create instead of perform.