Oscar Trimboli | The Cost of Not Listening

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 beco