Speaker 1:               You're listening to the Sales Process Excellence podcast with Michael Webb.

Michael Webb:     B2B sales and marketing works to find the highest quality prospects, reach decision makers, and sell value. Operational excellence uses data and systems thinking to make changes that cause improvement and eliminate waste. My name is Michael Webb and this is the Sales Process Excellence podcast. In the next 30 to 40 minutes, we're going to destroy the myth that these two groups conflict and show you how to bring both strategies together to create more wealth for your company and your customers.

Hello, this is Michael Webb and I'm delighted today to introduce you to a fellow I just learned about about two weeks ago with a fascinating background and a very fascinating and important topic. His name is Oscar Trimboli. Oscar, welcome to the podcast.

Oscar Trimboli:      Good day, Michael. I'm looking forward to speaking to you and listening to you as well.

Michael Webb:     Oscar, if you can't tell from that little snippet of his voice, he is currently speaking from Sydney, Australia. And so it's in the morning his time; in the afternoon, my time. And our topic today is going to be listening. Everybody knows in business to business, listening is a crucial topic, not just interpersonally but inter-organizationally. So Oscar, please give us a little background about your career and how you got into this fascinating topic.

Oscar Trimboli:      Michael, I'm on a quest to create 100 million deep listeners before I leave this planet. I think I'm obsessed with the commercial cost of not listening. Every employee that's ever left an organization, every customer you've lost to a competitor, every supplier that's not giving you their best, has all come about through a lack of listening. Every project that's run over schedule and every pipeline that's blocked in the middle, like a plumbing system where the surges is backed all the way back up, it's all a result of not listening.

A lot of us think that our pipeline should have this mythical shape that's a beautiful wide funnel at the top and it comes narrow towards the end. And then these crazy people, the customers, get in the way. And the reason most of us have this really wide funnel right in the middle where it should be narrowing is because we're not listening.

And the most important thing we're not listening to is what's not said. Too many of us are listening to what is said and not enough of us spend time exploring what isn't said. So if you take one thing away from today, it's the 125-900 rule. I speak at 125 words a minute, but I can think up to 900 words a minute. So that means the first thing out of my mouth, there's an 11% chance that what I'm saying is what I'm meaning. And for most people in sales, what they do is they only listen to what's said. Great sales leaders, great sounds professionals, listen for what's unsaid.

Michael Webb:     You have a background in B2B you were mentioning before, run through that for us. I think my audience would... It would help them understand where you're coming from.

Oscar Trimboli:      I started off as an audit clerk in an accounting firm. And six weeks in, we were working on manual spreadsheets in those days. A3 pieces of paper with pencil, so I'm dating myself here. And my manager discovered six weeks in that I had this thing called dyscalculus, which meant I transposed all my numbers, which kind of ended my career in accounting very, very quickly. And as a result, I was kind of on a cadet ship where they would pay for my books while I was studying and working full-time. And I was completely devastated because my dad had always said to me, "There's one job that will never get done awy with... You'll always have to have accountants. So become an accountant."

And my managing partner of the accounting firm came up to me and says, "Well, Oscar, what do you know about computers?" And I said, "Well, Bill, I know absolutely nothing." And he said, "That's fantastic. We'll never lie to each other going forward. You will now install the accounting software in this organization or you'll need to leave. So the choice is completely up to you." So that started a journey of installing, implementing, and selling, doing the professional services and installations and implementations, training beyond in accounting software, whether that's sort of small accounting practices or large corporations. And I spent two decades doing that.

Then I went into work in product management inside a big telecommunications company and spent a lot of time intersecting between engineering, marketing, and the sales organization. And then finally 11 years at Microsoft doing a range of roles from sales, product management, operations. And even rebuilt the graduate program while I was doing my day job there as well. So most of my life has been stepping into lobbies inside buildings, going and visiting reception, and having conversations with customers who want to buy software of some kind.

Michael Webb:     Okay. So now you speak and you consult about listening, which is the Jack of all trades tool that you need to have in your pocket if you're trying to deal with and influence people. So what experience did you have that caused you to make this big transition from being part of an organization and helping them succeed to an independent person helping people with this tool or method? What experience was it or trials caused you to do that?

Oscar Trimboli:      Michael, many people often said to me, "Could you teach me how to do that?" And often I'd say, "What do you mean 'do that'?" And they said, "The way you listen, you hear things that no one else in the room is hearing." And I kind of often brushed it off, but then a vice president at Microsoft said to me after a very tense negotiation we had, at about the 20-minute mark, I asked a question, which was simply, "What assumptions are we really holding tightly that could be completely false?"

The room shifted, the change in dynamic was very noticeable, and at the end of the meeting the vice president said, "Can you stay behind?" That's kind of like when your wife says to you, "We need to talk." It's not a good moment. All I was doing in my head was calculating how many weeks of salary I had left in my bank account. And Tracy said something that stayed with me for the rest of my life. She said, "Oscar, you didn't notice what happened at the 20-minute mark, but if you could code how you listen, you could change the world." And all I could say out of my mouth at that time, Michael was, "Do you mean code or code code?" And she said, "No, I mean code code," which is turn what I know into software, which eventually I guess I'll do. Code just meant make it into a methodology and put it out in steps like we've done with a book and like we've done with the playing cards and the jigsaw puzzles and all these other things we use to teach leaders how to listen.

And during that time I came across a really interesting statistic. By the third decade of a corporate career, you will have had up to 15 training courses in how to speak, yet no training whatsoever in how to listen. Now, if we believe that communication is 50% speaking and 50% listening, with only 2% of us having any training in how to listen, I think that's one of the big productivity hacks of the 21st century. If you want to stop doing back-to-back meetings, if you want to stop having conversations about opportunities that are slowing down, I think it's listening ...