It's been a busy few days so far at the Schwab IMPACT 2013 Conference held at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Mt. Vernon Square in Washington, D.C.

Here are a few highlights:

Olympia Snowe on Congressional Gridlock

During an afternoon conversation with Schwab's chief investment strategist Liz Ann Sonders, former Republican Senator Olympia Snowe talked about the polarization of the Washington politics and how it has impacted the legislative process.

"The landscape in the senate and congress has dramatically changed," Snowe said. "It doesn't resemble the process of the past."

Snowe argued that "the Senate is a deliberative body designed to promote debate. Now it has become all about the politics. You have no opportunity to work on legislation. It is all about positioning the issues ... for a 30-second soundbite in the next election."

In the past, she said, it was understood that junior Senators would turn their eyes away from campaign issues the year after election so they could focus on their legislative responsibilities.

And these legislative responsibilities included simple concepts like dialogue, compromise, a willingness to work out differences between different parties. Instead, she said, political progress is only made if "you agree with someone 110 percent."

She lamented the breakdown of the communication between the different parties, as well as what she perceived to be the extinction of the "moderate Republican."

"I've been called every animal you can think of. A dinosaur. A dodo," she said. She's even been called a Democrat.

Snowe insisted that both parties have to work much harder to keep the bridges of communication open between the leadership of both sides.

"You have to have communication between the leadership more than just once in a while," she said. "It is very important, it is not just an insider Beltway issue, you have to have the president and bipartisan leadership meet regularly.

She noted that the polarization has gotten so bad that Democrats and Republicans don't even socialize after legislative work, and that attempts last year to host a bipartisan dinner to honor outgoing Senators failed because neither party wanted to eat together.

"They couldn't even agree to have a bipartisan dinner to say goodbye to members of the Senate," she said.

She was blunt about her feelings of the impact of this impasse.

"This dysfunction imperils our future," she said.

Schwab Honors Some of its Best Advisors

During the morning general session Tuesday, Schwab CEO Walt Bettinger and EVP Bernie Clark presented the IMPACT Awards honoring some of the advisor community's best and brightest.

This year's honorees included:

Winner of the PaceSetter award, for an up and coming firm less than 10-years old: Paracle Advisors, Mercer Island, Washington.

Winner of the Best In Business award, for a firm with great business management and outstanding results: Homrich Berg, Atlanta, Georgia.

Winner of the Trailblazer award, honoring a firm's innovation: Evensky & Katz Wealth Management, Coral Gables, Fla.

Daniel Pink Talks About Sales

Author Daniel Pink regaled attendees Tuesday morning with his insights on how sales is evolving thanks to the information revolution.

He argued that sales has become an omnipresent activity, something that most people in business do at least part of the time. Now, Pink used a broad definition of sales, consisting of any efforts to convince someone to part with time, resources, money, what have you, in return for what you have to offer. Given that definition, he presented data indicating that sales takes up perhaps as much as 40 percent of most individual's professional lives.

Indeed, even though many pundits predicted the death of sales in 2000, Pink provided stats showing that the same share of the working populace conducted that activity: one out of every nine professionals in 2000 compared to one out of every nine professionals in 2013.

Successful sales strategies are much different now, though. To make his point, Pink provided a list of the kinds of adjectives people would use to describe sales people. Such words included "pushy," "cheesy," "sleazy," and so on.

Indeed, he argued that successful sales now, given the fact that buyers have at least as much information as sellers do, requires three new principles: attunement, buoyancy and clarity.

Successful sales people now, Pink argued, need to to be attuned to the people they do business with, be able to understand their perspective, at least the way they think. Understanding how they feel also wouldn't hurt.

Sales people also need ways to deal with, in the words of legendary Fuller Brush salesman Norman Hall, "an ocean of rejection." This includes challenging and questioning one's abilities a tad, instead of relentlessly pumping oneself up.

Also, sales people needed to embrace clarity, transparency. He presented the audience a term known as "servant leadership," in which a sales person would aim to help, find a client's problems, offer solutions, in short, better the client as much as possible, before selling. This kind of relationship would generate trust and willingness to do business.

Pink then gave the audience five easy takeaways that they could implement in their businesses immediately:

1. Increase your effectiveness by briefly reducing your feelings of power
2. Imagine what the other side is thinking (Actually you want to understand both feeling and thinking, but if you have to pick one, go with thoughts and interests.)
3. Ambiverts (people who are both extroverted and introverted) have a big advantage in terms of sales success
4. Engage your clients with questions, when the data is clearly on your side, this will encourage them to find reasons to agree with you. If the data doesn't agree — get other data.
5. Always give people an off-ramp. Never force or coerce. Encourage people to go with what you have to offer by presenting it as an easy out, as a way to make things easier for them.

Pink concluded that many of the best sales tactics nowadays dovetail well with the growing movement towards fiduciary standards and responsibility.

"To sell is human," he said. 

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