What separates the winners from the almosts? What separates ultra high-performers from the standard performers? For the last decade, I've measured over one million professionals, and one of my favorite interviews was with a world-class poker player. He wins million-dollar pots in Vegas. I said to him, "At the highest level of play, what's the difference between the winners and the losers?" The one who takes home the million-dollar pot and the one who goes home empty-handed. He told me something I'll never forget: "At the highest level of play, poker is not a game about luck or skill. Poker is a game of understanding how the other people see you."

Think about branding. A brand doesn't care how the brand sees the consumer, only care the consumer sees the brand. If I go back and look at my clients like Coca-Cola — Coke doesn't care how Coke sees the consumer. Coke only cares how does the consumer sees Coke, and how the consumer sees Coke as being different than Pepsi. To stay at the Top of the Table, you must know: How does your client see you? And how does your client see you as being different?

As humans, we can be afraid of standing out. We become afraid when we have to be putting ourselves out. I have a huge competitive disadvantage with my last name. Imagine growing up with the last name Hogshead. I remember getting beaten up on the playground for my actual legal last name. I remember going into my mother, Mrs. Hogshead, and saying, "Mom, why can't we just have a normal last name like Smith or Jones?" She told me something I'll never forget: "The thing about our name that makes it different will one day make you love it." The thing about you that makes you different makes people love you and admire you and respect you and stay with you and work with you and refer you and bring you all of those things that we need in order to grow our businesses to make a bigger difference.

How does your client see you at your best? What are those qualities that are intensely valuable to your most valuable clients? How are you adding value in these moments? I've measured a million professionals and about 200,000 of them are high-level financial advisors. We asked their best clients: How does the advisor add value?

Three major trends showed up. The first is they're worth more than they are being paid. The second is they over-deliver in the area in which I most need them to come through for me. The third was that when they're adding value, the people are willing to spend more money, be more inconvenienced, and go to great lengths to be able to continue to work with that financial advisor.

I did an experiment in which I gave people two pairs of sunglasses, and those sunglasses were exactly the same. The only difference was one pair had a Chanel logo, and the other one didn't. I said, "How much would you be willing to pay for these glasses?" They were willing to pay 400% more for the pair with the Chanel logo. The glasses were the same. The glasses were the commodity. So when people were buying the glasses, they weren't really buying sunglasses. What they were really buying was an emotional connotation with those sunglasses through the brand.

The same is true for every financial advisor in the world. Clients can perceive any type of trusted advisor as being a commodity, that every company's the same, every advisor is the same. But if you can identify what makes you different, even in a simple but significant way, people have a far greater perception of your market value. It's not rational. Why will people pay 400% more for that logo? As I looked into it, I found that there's a science behind this.

Fascination is the brain's most intense state of neurological focus. In a state of fascination, your client will be focused on what you're saying. They'll be more likely to take action, far more likely to refer you and to stay with you. Do you ever have a situation in which you want a client to take action but they're resistant? Oh, they don't have time. They're kind of freaked out. The market is sketchy. It's really hard when your client is distracted to get them to do much of anything. So fascination is a state of intense focus. In this state, there's a universal human connection to the person who's fascinating you. You have certain qualities that are built to be fascinating, the ones that make you most likely to fascinate.

Think about yourself. What is the equivalent of the Chanel logo for you? What are the most intensely valuable qualities within you? I wanted to see how high performers are adding value. When we first started the study, I thought that it was going to come down to education, reputation, skillset, network, geography, age, industry, level.

But I was wrong. High performers were separated by two things. The first thing that separated them is they focused on a unique benefit. The high performers have identified the way in which they were most likely to over-deliver. So the detail-oriented people, they focused on being really detail oriented. They wanted projects in which they would be able to be meticulous and on target and practical over and over again to build systems, things that could be replicated. So they attracted the clients who wanted detail focus.

In this room, what that would mean is an ideal client for you who wants a lot of information, bullet points, research, consistent communication. The detail-oriented financial advisors were positioning themselves in the market so they had a competitive advantage in that area. And they didn't try to be creative.

On the other hand, the financial advisors who looked at the big picture were visionary and liked to be able to solve problems in a new way and brainstorm for their clients. They focused on attracting the kind of clients who did not want the standard solutions. The one that had a particular challenge. Maybe it was timing, maybe it was life stage, maybe money passing through the family to millennials. So they focused on being creative, being forward-thinking, and they stayed away from detail orientation.

Then the second thing the high performers did differently: They took this benefit and turned it into a specialty. My dad's a retired orthopedic surgeon. He operated on spines. He didn't do internal medicine. He didn't deliver babies, didn't do brain surgery. He focused on the one area where he knew he could over-deliver.