81: Active Listening with Oscar Trimboli

Yo, what's going on, everybody? It's Morgan J. Ingram here. Join me this Thursday, January 10th, for a cold calling webinar to help you build more pipeline and confidence starting out in 2019. See you all there and keep dialing. Good morning, everybody. This is John Barrows. Make it happen Monday. Thanks for joining us. Hopefully you all have a fantastic weekend. I am here with a very interesting guest. He's joining us from Sydney, Oscar Tromboli. Want to say hi to everybody, Oscar, and tell them where you're coming from? Yeah. G'day, John. On a beautiful Friday morning after a huge summer thunderstorm in Sydney last night that knocked out a lot of power and probably lots of trees, I've completely obsessed about the commercial implications of not listening.

That shows up the most when it comes to selling scenarios. So really excited to be speaking with you, John, and more importantly, you who are listening. Yeah, and I appreciate that because you actually authored a book. It's called Deep Listening, right? It's Impact Beyond Words and then the 125-400 rule because I want to dive into that because I'm very curious when I was doing a little bit of prep for this what that rule is. So you want to talk a little bit about why, first of all, you're so fascinated with listening and then what the output has been for you? Yeah, I mean, listening's been a journey through my whole life. There was no one lightning bolt moment or lightning strike moment after last night to think about why I went on this quest to create 100 million deep listeners in the world.

Through my career, I've always been in B2B and occasionally B2C selling marketing and technology and telecommunications organizations. So with Vodafone and Microsoft, what I learned was consistently what I was finding, the difference between good and great sellers was those who were listening beyond the words, those who were listening to the fact that although you might have won with the proposal you've made, great sellers were helping not only to sell the proposal to the team they were working with but to all the other stakeholders in the business because sometimes you're competing against a procurement team that's buying paper towels for the restrooms in the building and if Kimberley Clark can come up with a better offer than what you're selling at and then not even in your market, you may lose or worse still have an opportunity delayed in the pipeline.

So I started to unpick what does listening really mean and through that journey five years ago, I took a complete gamble, went out on my own and started to talk to the world about the commercial impact of not listening. So I work with a lot of sales organizations, do a lot of sales kickoffs and try to get people to understand that the ninja move is not about where the listening literature is, you'll hear these phrases that I'm really frustrated by active listening and paraphrasing and using really deliberate ahas and nonverbal confirmations with them and you're literally faking listening and they can tell. So if you understand the 125-400 rule, you speak at about 125 to 150 words a minute but you can listen to 400 words a minute.

So neurologically, you are programmed to be completely distracted. You fill in the gap with 300 words in your head while they're catching up to you. What's worse for the speaker, they can speak at 125 to 150 words a minute but they got 900 words a minute in their head. They can think at 900 words a minute. So I don't know about you, John, but if you had an 11% chance that a surgery would be successful, you'd probably ask for another opinion. Yet most of us don't listen for the other 900 words that people are thinking about and that's where opportunities are lost in sales. All right. So let's dig into that. How do you listen to those other 900 words that aren't being spoken? And you mentioned a bunch of things, the deliberate active listening things of yes and ahas and I never really bought into those.

But for instance, paraphrasing or summarizing back to me has always been pretty effective for me to be like, hold on, let me make sure I heard you correctly. Is this what you said, right? That's always been a little bit of a, and I don't do that to show you that I'm active listening. I do that to genuinely understand, you know, I was maybe a little unclear of what you said right there. So, so when you're talking about those other 900 words, I'd like to dig into, first of all, why do you think that paraphrasing is not exactly an effective way of doing it? And second of all, if you, if you, if you, if that isn't an effective way, how do you find out, how do you genuinely listen to the other 900 words that aren't being spoken?

Yeah. So your paraphrase about, is this what I heard is a really good example of probably a, a productive question, but not a high yield or powerful question. And the orientation of the question is from you and not from them. Your role to unpick the other 800 words sitting in their head is to help them. It's not to help you. High yield question in that context is, hey, Mr. Prospect, hey, Mrs. Prospect, if you were to explain what we've just talked about to the finance leader in your organization, what would you say to them? And then you can hear how they would say it to somebody else and that will say it differently. And your understanding of that will expand as well. Why it's a high yield question is it's a question that goes into the process of buying rather than you confirming what you actually heard.

It doesn't matter what you hear. What you need to do is get the other 900 words out. That is your role in that process. So too many of us are stuck in our script. We're stuck in ourselves. We're worried that we can't move the sale forward. Level one listening, when we think about the five levels of listening, all the listening literature says, listen to the speaker. That's useful, but it's not productive. The most important person you need to listen to is you. If you've got the last sales call in your head, if you've got the next pipeline scrub with your manager in your head while you're trying to have a conversation with these people, you will fail in listening to what's said and also, more importantly, to what's not said.

So make sure that you're ready for the call. You can't listen to anybody if you've got a whole bunch of jibber-jabber going on in your head about something else other than what's on this call. And a really simple technique for that, the deeper you breathe, the deeper you listen, the more oxygen you can get to the brain, the more productive it would be. But if there was one thing I'd love you all to do, switch off the cell phone. If you're on the call, just be focused on that call. The cell phone's being designed by the slot machine industry to distract you. All the software learnings from the slot machine industry in Las Vegas has all been taken over to the mobile phone to distract you and fry your brain.

Switch it off. Just get in the moment with that person you're talking to. So back to the paraphrasing, John, make sure when you ask that kind of question, ask them to explain it how somebody else would hear it. Might be finance, might be human resources, might be the owner of the business, but we want to get them to create a different perspective in their mind and then they bring out 200 more words, 600 more words, 800 more words. Now, not all questions and all context, if you're going to spend all that time in every question doing that, prospect's going to be really frustrated with you and you're probably not going to create the rapport to be known like and trust to be bought from. So be really specific when you use those high yield questions.

It's typically going to be in the second part of a discovery call rather than right up front as an example when you're trying to unpick what the pain is for an organization. Yeah, it's funny because I went through like early in my career, I went through Sandler, right? And they have the reverse question where it's effectively a layering question, you know, tell me more about that, explain to me, whatever. And I remember going through a role play with one of the Sandler guys and, you know, and I was the customer and, and, and he asked me a question or I asked him a question and he reversed it on me. I was like, okay, you know, and I kind of played along. And then I asked the question again in a different way and he reversed it again on me.

And then I asked the question again and he reversed it. And I was like, answer my fucking question. Like, if you don't answer my question, I'm like, I'm going to get annoyed. So I think there is a certain point where, you know, you're doing it just to do it. And I guess to your point in the moment, look, I'd love to be in the moment. All right. How we had talked before we went live here about the prep that you do to get into a meeting. Okay. So for instance, for, for this conversation, I didn't do a ton of prep. I didn't read your book. I, you know, I didn't do, I looked at the kind of highlights. I looked at your LinkedIn profile and I came up with things and we have a general theme and I'm, I'm just a genuinely curious person about stuff.

Right. So in the moment here, I'm picking up on what you're saying and I'm trying to jot down a few points to it so that I can circle back on those. From a sales rep standpoint, I have two questions. One is pre and one is during. How much preparation should you do when you're walking into a customer so that you can be in the moment, right? Because there's one thing about just being super open and saying, Hey, so let's talk, but that leads to stupid stuff. Like tell me about your business and, and, Oh, give me, you know, why don't you tell me your background, which I think is just personally insulting. If you don't do a bunch, if you don't do some homework on me before we have this conversation and you don't come with some preparation, I actually find that insulting.

Right. So, so what is your recommendation for a rep to walk into a situation? What preparation should they do to a client as far as questions they should think about or, or what they need to do to be in the moment, I guess, is what I'm getting at. Yeah. So in my work with executives, I work by side and sell side in, in my day-to-day consulting. If you understand the biggest currency that people trade in is their time. That is the thing. If you can show them respect around time, and I'll show you quite quickly how you can make meetings shorter and actually get out of there quicker so that they can go, wow, that was a really good use of my time. If, if you don't know the top three issues, the top three problems in their industry, you don't even have the right to be in that room.

Don't turn up without knowing that. That's useful, but let's talk about productive. Productive is knowing the top three issues they're trying to solve for their customers. If you would do any prep, try and understand what they're trying to do for their customers. That's potent. That's powerful. To, to be in the moment, and I'll talk about this through a physical meeting, and then we'll talk about it as a phone call. For a physical meeting, I always talk to my clients about it. From the moment you walk in the lobby of that building to the time you announce yourself into reception or sign into reception, you need to switch off your phone and you need to get into a state and set an intention. And the intention I always set is, it's not about me.

It's not about them. It's about those that they serve. So for most people, that's their customer. But in public sector, it might be about the citizen, the voter, the department head or something like that. And I want to make sure that my intention is, how can I help them discover what matters more than our transaction? What matters more than this business case? And ultimately, why the heck are we doing what we're doing? Because we ain't going through this meeting to transact. There's always a higher context for that conversation. And the best starting place is the customer's customer. So from the time I walk in the building to the time I get into reception and sign in, I become very aware of my breathing.

And I just hold my breathing a little longer. There's a technique called box breathing. It's no secret because it's used by the Navy SEALs. It's used by snipers. It's used by opera singers. It's used by rock stars. It's used by Olympic athletes. And you'll see at the start line of any race, whether they're swimmers or whether they're runners or whether they're doing a high jump, they have this very specific breathing technique that's down for five seconds, across for five seconds and up for five seconds. And in breathing, we just get more oxygen to the brain. I don't want anybody to become a Zen monk before they go into a meeting and breathing that way. It's impractical and impossible. But if we can just practice box breathing, five seconds down, five seconds across and five seconds up, and we do that five times, your state is completely on them and you've cleared out everything in your head.

So if you want to sell like a Navy SEAL, breathe like a Navy SEAL. Pardon my ignorance. Down, across, up. Yeah. So let's just do it now, John. Yeah. Breathe in. Hold for five. Hold again, going across. When you say go across, what do you mean, Wade? Just visualize the breath in your stomach going across. Oh, okay. But you're holding your breath and then let it out. Breathe out deliberately for five seconds. Now you do that five times. You can do that in the lift. No one's going to notice. Yep. And you're ready. So you visualize it going across. You visualize your breath going across your body. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And you can, you can, um, Google box breathing on YouTube and, um, you'll get some really, really good examples of that, but you'll also see some great examples of how people are doing a pre-race.

I haven't been able to get an example of, uh, of a sniper doing it. Um, I guess they don't let us, uh, publish those recordings. Yeah. Cool. So I want to kind of back out for a second and talk too, about, um, so we talked about the prep, you know, you, I like the idea of knowing what those challenges are. When you say, when you ask somebody, instead of paraphrasing, when you say, explain to me how you're going to explain this to my experience doing that in, in let's just, you know, realistically, a lot of reps talk to decision makers, right? They're, they talk to people who are below the power line and obviously want to get above the power line. And I think we get obviously much better answers from people above the power line.

But when you're talking to somebody below the power line and you ask them those types of questions, Hey, how are you going to usually get really vague answers or, or, or, or very basic answers? Oh, well, I'll just tell them that this is how we're going to do this. What's your approach to somebody who is, when you ask that, so how would you present this or how are you going to explain this to, or justify this to so-and-so? And they give you something basic and cause there's two things there. One is that's a red flag that that's, that's probably going to land bad. Two is it's a red flag that they're probably just blowing you off and going through the motions with you. So how, first of all, how do you identify that?

And second of all, what do you do in both of those scenarios? Yeah. So imagine we get the vague answer. Um, um, um, you know, uh, it'll be approved that the monthly whatever. And my follow-up to that will be when other projects like this have been approved, what steps have other people gone through to get there? Okay. So all of a sudden they go, Oh, okay. And they can be honest and they go, I have no idea. And that's great. I just, I just put that in, in a little box on the side and I go, great. So we've got some work to do around that. They're not going to get us any further other than to say, come back to the first scenario where they go. Uh, yeah, that's going to be approved at the monthly meeting.

Oh, great. So in the monthly meeting, what do you need to present and who needs to approve it? That's all I'm going to ask at that stage. It's not my job to drill down on understanding the buyer's journey. Another one of my pet hates about selling is everybody talks about, it's no more about selling. It's now about the buyer's journey. Well, the buyer doesn't know they're on a journey. Nobody's teaching them. I don't know any buyers who go on buy journey training. I don't know any buyers journeys that have been the same. So help them understand what happens in that meeting. The biggest insight you could provide in that case is they don't know, and they're going to go and find out maybe if they don't know, that's okay.

Now, you know, they don't know, but you want to know who's in that meeting. That's a monthly meeting to go and approve these kinds of things. So that's A and B. A, who's in the meeting? What needs to be presented? Or B, hey, when other things like this have been approved, what's happened? I have, you know, stayed on a similar vein with talking to people who are non-decision makers. One of the things that I've always said, my favorite way of, I think one of the hardest things to do in sales in general is to go over somebody's head without pissing them off, right? Like you have a relationship with somebody, you know, you have to get here, but you know, how do you do that without insulting them?

My favorite way I always tell reps is to ask them questions that they don't know the answers to, right? So, and again, not to insult you, but to genuinely understand, and it kind of ties to what you had said earlier about the preparation. If you don't know what the priorities or the challenges of their customers and their industry are, you're going to have a hard time showing value and being relevant in that conversation. And I tell reps, look, if you cannot tie to my priorities, like when your CEO genuinely stood up in the beginning of the year and said, these are the three things that we got to focus on this year to be successful. If I can't tie my solution to one or two of those, good luck selling anything of significance.

So I tend to ask questions that are related to the challenges their customer face, the priorities of the industry, and some of the trends there, because usually people below the power line don't have that insights. And I tell them, the reason I'm asking you that question is because if we can't make that connection. Now, your experience, is that an effective way to open up the conversation, to get other people engaged here? Or what are some other areas that you could kind of give some guidance on to help figure out how to get other people involved that are above the person we're talking to? Yeah. And your approach is effective for sure. Some other approaches you may want to explore with them as well is asking really powerful questions about what's unsaid and understanding the context.

So the context is always asking, have projects like these failed before in the past? Or have projects like this succeeded in the past, succeeded in the past, and then you can ask a series of who questions that intersect with that. Sometimes, depending on how new they are to the organisation, they don't know. And then I simply say, "So if I was in the kitchen with you right now at work, who would we turn to and ask this question?" And all of a sudden, they go, "Oh, we'll talk to Mary, and she's kind of the historical keeper of all the secrets in the organisation." Or we'd talk to John, he's the expert in all the failures that have been done before. And then it's, you just simply play back. So what would, what do you think Mary and John would say right now about this?" And they go, "Wow." Either A, "Gee, I have to ask them," or B, "You know what?

These are the questions they'd be asking right now." And you're helping them to tap into what's unsaid. They're tapping into the context. It's well beyond the 400, 900 words you're listening to. It's helping them listen to the organisation and the culture of the organisation and the way the organisation gets something done. Because it's always in failure, always in the negative, you can find more. I had the opportunity to interview Chris Voss, former FBI hostage negotiator, and one of the things he... Is that his book, Never Split the Difference? Is that him? That's Never Split the Difference. Yeah, it's a great book. And he's got a whole chapter on listening and does a really good job of unpicking it with some great stories.

But he says, "Too often in selling scenarios, you try and always go for the yes, yes, yes." The NLP approach is how do we move people forward and get them into a neurological sequence of saying yes to everything. Chris has the exact opposite approach and says, "If you can talk to them about the negatives, about the failures, you're going to see where the hidden landmines in his language are, to the buying process and the selling process." For a lot of us, we don't ask that because we're too quick to want to get to the purchase order. In exploring the negatives, not only can you get to the purchase order faster, you can get to the purchase order with a larger number of zeros on it because you probably end up solving bigger problems for them.

So be comfortable in going to those places that are uncomfortable about the negatives. Where projects like this failed before is a really potent question. And then who can tell us about those projects. Or who would worry about a failure going forward on a project like this as well. I'm not sure if you come from the positive or negative orientation to selling here, John. But I think in Chris's wisdom there, there's an ability to think about both. A bit of salt and a bit of pepper on that steak rather than just one or the other. I talk a lot about pain and pleasure questioning. I actually think in sales, yes, it's weird because we get told we want to get a lot of yeses, but yet we dig for pain.

So sales reps are dig for pain, dig for pain, dig for pain. And then when we find pain, we get all excited about it. And I always look at kind of above and below the power line. Below the power line, people focused on today or yesterday, which is usually pain. Above the power line is focused on tomorrow, which is usually pleasure. So I tend to frame my questions into opportunities versus challenges. And see, I personally like to start with pleasure to see kind of opportunities and see if I can get the conversation going to effectively raise your temperature level up. So that gets you talking about something you like talking about, because that is where I tend to get people kind of elaborating on certain things that they want to do.

So I can help them tie to that vision and then go to pain to say, okay, well, what would prevent that from happening? Because now that I've painted that picture, now I want to figure out, okay, to your point, all of the things that could get in the way of doing that. And so that tends to be my approach in general. But I think it's tough to focus. You shouldn't focus on one or the other. You got to focus on both. Yeah. The old adage of getting a bunch of yeses and all of a sudden, you know. Yeah. What happens with a bunch of yeses is you have a really big pipeline that doesn't move. That's even more frustrating. Well, because then you get happy ears, right? I call them happy. You know, it's a yes.

Do you buy into that, the NLP stuff? So there's one thing about like getting people in the right mindset, but then there's the other thing about NLP of the different personas, right? So you have visual adopteries and kinesthetics. You know, in that book, I don't know if you've read it. It's called Selling with NLPD on Fair Advantage, which is if I can figure out what type of communicator you are and adjust my style towards yours, you're going to feel a lot more comfortable with me. Do you buy into that type of stuff or have you experienced that type of stuff? Yeah. I've seen it done really well and I've seen it done really poorly. Really poorly. It looks fake. It looks transparent and you kind of go, I know what you're doing.

Stop doing that. Come on. We're all grown ups here. Like the mirroring where you're like, oh, you know, that type of thing. Yeah. Yeah. And without any training, the person who knows you're fake hasn't gone on NLP training, but they're human and they've got a detector that smells that stuff really fast. I think where it's useful is as a primary orientation, all of us will have one of those lenses as a communication style. What you've got to be deliberate about is telling stories, building pictures, having frameworks as well as data sequence and logic so that no matter who you're talking to because, you know, more buying scenarios or group scenarios now, people will be able to access it. So I think, A, being conscious of your own style, but to having flexibility to be able to tell a story about that, not just to say the ROI on this is we're going to save you $25 per widget.

The opposite is true, though, too. People buy you. They buy your convictions. So if you're molding yourself into some caricature that's the opposite or a mirror image of them, they don't like that. They want to buy you the genuine you. And I know, I remember one of my largest sales that I ever did. And I walked into the room, I had lost nearly five kilos in the previous week. I'd eaten something really bad. And I had a meeting on a Friday at 9am. I can still visualize the room I was in. And I was just not in a state of mind to be anything other than myself. I run marathons and I always say, you know who you're running with at the 20 mile mark. There is no place to hide. And the same was for me.

All my defenses were down. And I walked in, CEO, head of human resources, head of finance. And they went blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it was the standard shtick. You know, we're looking to transform our organization through a cultural change. And I said, look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. But I know if I open your email to the CEO, I said this. If I open your email and look at every email you've sent your entire organization, I can tell you everything about you and your leadership and the problems you've got. So let's cut to the chase. Let's open up your email and show me the last three emails you sent to your site. And he went, what? And I said, look, you've spoken about change that hasn't happened for five years.

Why don't I give you five minutes to chat about if you want to work with someone like me or not? But I reckon if we do that, you guys are going to have a breakthrough. So they asked me to wait outside the room. And for 10 minutes felt like an eternity for me. They obviously had a chat amongst each other. The CEO came out and said, well, Oscar, we've come to a decision. Could you come back into the room? And I went, oh, okay. So we went through the emails. And sure enough, I could tell him what was working or what wasn't. And he just went, wow, how did you just do that? I said, I didn't do anything. Listen to your emails and the way you communicate to your staff. I got the assignment. I did a debrief with them a month later and said, what happened when I wasn't in the room?

And they said, they don't know what I'm selling, but they want to buy what I created in that room when I challenged the CEO. And I know that they were looking at a big four consulting organization and some very large national consulting companies. And I was column fodder. I was put in there as a cheap alternative to bid down the price of the two big consulting companies. And if I would have turned up trying to pretend to be like them, I wouldn't have won the business. So being you matters. And a lot of us hide behind our company sometimes because we get the script, but be you. I reckon that's the most important thing you can do to access your listening is listen to yourself so they can listen to themselves.

I agree. So back to the NLP question. If you're doing it in a really shmami way, people smell it. Don't do it. Do it productively. Do it in a way that's helpful for them rather than just helping you. Anyway, if that book was so awesome, everyone would be doing it. I always say just you can go get NLP certified if you want to. I think that's going overboard. Just make sure you hit all three. To your point, recognize yours. And then when you're doing your presentations, make sure you have visual, auditory and kinesthetic things in your presentation so that you can hit on all three. And then it's blatantly obvious that somebody's like, well, slow down there. I need some facts and figures and show me some, you know, and walk me through this.

Okay, then slow down, you know, sit down next to them. But to your point, don't be the fake, hey, I'm going to mirror your body language. I'm going to say the exact same words that you say so I can, you know, all of a sudden control the conversation. That's weird. One last question. Actually, two last questions. One is, could you explain to me what the five levels of listening are? Yeah. Because it's the surface on that. And I think the listeners would be really helpful to understand what the five layers are. Yeah. So let's go on a speed date with the five levels of listening. Level one, listening to yourself. Level two, listening to the content. Level three, listening to the context. Level four, listening for what's unsaid.

The ultimate ninja move of listening. The Yoda move of listening, listening for what's unsaid. And level five, listening for meaning. John, I've done research on 1410 people. It's a panel that I'm working with over three years. And 86% of people struggle with level one listening. The biggest barrier to people listening is the noise in their head, the distractions that they have. And all of them struggle with attention, distraction and staying focused. They're the three most common words that 1410 people use to describe what gets in their way when it comes to listening. So no matter what the modern listening literature says about focus on the speaker and paraphrase and actively listen, 86% of us aren't even ready to listen.

So level one, listen to yourself is the most critical thing you can do. I like it. I like it. And then the last thing is you, before we went live here, you had said something. We are born listeners, right? We listen, you know, we don't talk. We listen to them. As soon as we come out, we hear stuff. We can't verbalize it. So we learn to talk later, but it gets, but it gets beaten out of us. Yeah. And it happens even sooner at 20 weeks in your mother's womb. You can distinguish your mother's voice from any other sound outside the womb. You are genetically programmed to be an awesome listener because it helps you survive. That's where you get fed at 32 weeks. Every two weeks, you can distinguish Bon Jovi from Beethoven in your womb.

And the minute we're born, we come into the world kicking, screaming, and wanting to be noticed. And for the 20th century, we have been trained by a huge industry of people in how to listen. Sorry, in how to speak. And the 21st century, we need to know that a seller is spending up to 70% of their day listening. The average person is spending 55% of their day listening. And an executive is spending 86% of their day listening. So if you want the productivity hack of the 21st century, if you want to be faster than your competition, you've got to learn how to listen. Because meetings are quicker, you hear the most important things, and you can be focused on not repeating yourself over and over again.

Ironically, John, the last thing you lose in your senses when you die is listening. There we go. So I think that's a good way to end it. So perfect. Well, Oscar, it's been a pleasure. We can talk and listen for quite a while now. But tell the audience where they can learn more about you, how they can get in touch with you. What's the best way to get exposed to what you're doing these days? Yeah, great. The simplest thing to do is type OscarTrimboldi.com into Google. That's the easiest way to get in touch. There's only one of me. That'll land you on the website, which will give you access to books and podcasts and things like that. And, yeah, if you want to be part of the future research panel as well to understand what your listening barriers are, that's another opportunity you can interact with us as well.

John, thanks for helping on the quest for 100 million deep listeners in the world. And this podcast is a really exciting opportunity for that. Yeah. No, I appreciate you coming on and some of the insights that you shared there. Hopefully, some people pick up on that. And I think you're spot on. You know, the distractions, you know, at the very least, this little thing right here has prevented us from listening to each other more than almost anything else. So, put the iPhone away, shut the email off when you're talking to people, and just be authentic and genuinely curious. I think that's the big takeaway here. But appreciate everything you're doing, Oscar. And thank you so much for coming on.

All right? All right. Thanks for listening. Yep, everybody. Have a great week. And, yeah, go out there and make somebody happy. Put a smile on somebody's faces. You need more of that in this world of D-Day. And listen to people. Because you know what? At the end of the day, when you really listen to people, you make them happy, right? If they feel heard. So, have a great day, everybody. Thank you all very much. Bye. Bye. Bye.