Communication Skills for Sales Excellence: Your Slides are Killing Your Deals

Welcome back to the Thoughts on Selling podcast. Today it is my absolute pleasure to have Frankie Kemp join me from across the pond. Frankie and I have been chatting about all things sales and conversations and communicating, and let's get right into it. Who is Frankie Kemp?

Frankie Kemp: Well, Frankie Kemp is a mélange of acting experience. I'm a bit of a psychological nerd—not psycho nerd. I was going to say that and then realized that could be misinterpreted, and I'm definitely not that.

I run my own business on communication, and I absolutely love it when you give people the tools to communicate so they break down barriers—firstly in themselves and then between other people.

Going back to my own history, I won't give you a whole bio, I'll save everybody from that. But to give you a little bit of context: acting school, gone into improv—which I know we had a great conversation about, Lee, because we were talking about sales and improv. I've written my own comedies for which I've won awards at the Austin Micro Film Festival and various other film festivals. I've written a book on presentation for technical specialists—that is the area in which I specialize: communication for technical specialists.

I've written plays for children at school connected to the national curriculum so they could learn by doing, learn history by doing, because I just adore history. You'll see how I talk about that mix, that wonderful alchemy of performance skills and theater with behavioral science, and how it will really help people to understand how to break down barriers—as I said earlier, both in themselves and between other people. That's part of who I am.

Lee Levitt: Well, that's a lot, Frankie. There's a lot to parse out there. So you and I are in complete agreement that we create our world with our words. You might say it a little bit differently than I do. The intent behind it is we shape what happens with precise attention to our communications.

Absolutely. And I love the fact that you are helping technical people to actually speak coherently and in a way that isn't just information flowing out of their well-trained mouths, but actually is useful in the world.

Frankie Kemp: And I think that's exactly what they pick up on, because everybody has to sell. We know this—to sell is human, as we know.

Lee Levitt: I've heard that before.

Frankie Kemp: When you give people who are technical specialists the frameworks to be able to do that, you give them confidence. And confidence works two ways. Firstly, it works intrinsically. And secondly, it works by giving people certain skills and demystifying what are these elusive talents that just belong to salespeople.

Everybody has to sell. You need to sell your skills up, down, and sideways. And of course, what ends up happening is the sales teams go, "Well, actually, you know what? We need to hone our skills a little bit more. Come in and help us, because there's a few things which are missing"—especially I think internally, when they need to speak off the cuff, because people tend to panic.

And I think that you're taking the panic out of communication. You're demystifying it, and you are helping them get their ideas across, giving people autonomy back.

Lee Levitt: In my experience—and I've hung out with top salespeople and top sales engineers over many years—it strikes me that there's a fundamental difference between the two. Salespeople are typically pretty good at talking the language of the customer and understanding the room, seeing the room. And by and large, technical people want to share information, want to show how smart they are, because their heads are full of information.

Frankie Kemp: Oh, yes. Absolutely. Technical people absolutely value that information. And you don't want to take that away from them because they still need the data.

Lee Levitt: You say "they"—who's "they" referring to?

Frankie Kemp: "They" would be technical specialists. So I'm talking about the people I work with in finance, engineering. I'm working with people who are doing marvelous stuff in AI and energy. I work with these people around the world—big energy companies, finance companies, et cetera, as well as smaller companies.

You need the data, absolutely. But they rely on the data, partly because they don't understand the benefits of other techniques.

Now, Aristotle talked about three pillars of persuasion, of rhetoric. These are logos, which is your data, your information. There's the ethos, which is not ethics per se, although ethics becomes part of it—it is the way you come across. How much you are believed, liked, and trusted—which I know other people have spoken about on your podcast before.

Lee Levitt: To that point, Gerhard Gschwandtner had Aristotle on his podcast and interviewed him on exactly this topic.

Frankie Kemp: There's so many questions that I have there, Lee, but I'll park those for now and come onto the third pillar, which is pathos.

I remember I was in a workshop and I was saying to people, "So what do you think pathos means?" And they went, "Pathetic." I went, "Now, being pathetic is definitely one way to be remembered, but it doesn't mean that." It means emotion.

So the stories you tell—I'll never remember your bullet points. I'll never remember those bullet points. But if you just switch the slides off for a minute and tell a story that I can relate to, that's what I'm gonna walk out the room with.

Lee Levitt: Right. So this creates a really interesting challenge. Salespeople want to be remembered and liked, and so it's easy for them to focus on the pathos and not cover too much of the facts.

On the other hand, the sales engineer or the technical person does want to impart information, and virtually all of that information is nearly immediately forgotten. And that's not how people make decisions anyway.

In the enterprise world, people mostly make decisions based on emotion, and then they back it up with spreadsheets. "This is why I made this choice"—but not really. "This is why I made this choice, and I made this choice because of fear, and I'm using the spreadsheet to justify it."

Let's get back to your work. I had a guest on about a year and a half ago, Jeff Thull.

Frankie Kemp: Oh, right, yeah.

Lee Levitt: And he said the purpose of selling is not selling. And I said, "Wait, what?" He said, "The purpose of selling is buying—focus on the buyer."

And I sat with that for about a year, and then I said, "Hey Jeff, that's bullshit. The purpose of selling is not even buying." Because nobody goes out and says, "I want to go out and buy a car. Now that I've bought the car, I'm done." No—I want to drive it to work, or I want to drive it to the track.

The purpose of selling is not selling. The purpose of selling is not buying. The purpose of selling is to help the buyer achieve certain objectives, whether it's improved productivity or having a nice car to drive to work or cooling the house if you're buying an air conditioning system. But the purpose is to get to that end goal of whatever metrics I'm using to gauge success. And it's not the transaction.

So communication gets very strongly into that. We need—as the sellers—we need the buyer to see that we're actually on their side of the table. Otherwise they won't trust us. They won't take our guidance. Then we can't do what they need us to do for them. Are you seeing that in your work?

Frankie Kemp: So what I'm seeing is something very similar, and actually what I've experienced myself.

You have something—a product or service—and you want to sell it. Now, if that's how you are seeing it, in a world that is changing really, really fast, you are going to severely limit yourself. Because the purpose of selling is to recognize a need and then find a way of fulfilling it, and that might not be anymore what you were selling last week.

So when I'm speaking to clients—say they come up to me, prospects will come up to me and ask about, say, communication—but then I'm asking a lot of questions. Much of the time, I'll get people—head of L&D or managers—and they go, "Oh, this is like therapy." Because then I'm writing a program which is not what I expected to write, because that's not what they originally came to me for.

People often come to you with the solution. And I think this is always in sales—"I want this thing." Your job in sales is to ask them—without asking why, because of course that makes people feel defensive—is to recognize what led up to that requirement. What problem are they trying to solve? And then your job is to take them back and go, "Well, this will be better for you." And it might be that you have to go away and make that happen because it's actually not on the shelf at the moment.

Lee Levitt: Yeah, I'm with you. I'm completely with you. The role of the seller is to help the buyer identify what is strategically important and perhaps reprioritize that.

Sometimes it's obvious—50% of manufacturing items are defective. Sometimes it's not obvious.

I worked with a CIO at a Fortune 50 company where the organization was divesting a whole piece of the business. And I said to him, "Have you thought about how you're gonna arrange your assets, your technical entitlements?" And he said, "No. Why?"

I said, "Because your CFO is gonna come to you in the next three months and ask you, 'Are you ready for the divestiture?'"

And he looked at me and said, "Oh."

And interestingly, there wasn't a substantial amount of revenue opportunity in it for us as a significant vendor. He appreciated help seeing around the corner because that saved him from getting his ass fired in three months by not having that plan.

And so sometimes we sell something that is strategic. Sometimes we help a customer see things a different way that might not represent any transaction for us in the short term, but it instead is a deposit in the relationship bank account.

Frankie Kemp: So that's your ethos, right? So you've now got credits in his bank because it's like you're not trying to sell anything. It shows that you know how his business works. It ups your trust. Because we ain't gonna do any business—we're not even gonna have a friendship—with people that we don't trust. That's your baseline.

And that is huge—to be able to offer that help without any financial incentive and show that you know their industry.

Lee Levitt: Yep. So what makes a great communicator, Frankie?

Frankie Kemp: There is an adaptability that is required when you communicate. It's knowing who you are speaking to and being able to calibrate that with your message.

So I'm not gonna say, "Oh, you need to do this A, B, and C." It also depends on culture.

For example, I've worked with senior leaders in India who want to change their leadership communication. I can't give them the same advice as I would to someone in New York. New York—like that. Brief. Brief to the point. Get to the point, say what you want to say. What's your message?

Lee Levitt: That's right.

Frankie Kemp: But in India, it's very much that the amount that you talk shows your status. It's quite different depending on where you are.

I've helped people get multimillion-pound deals in Saudi. But I said, "I'm afraid that I'm gonna knock the Midwest out of you, because I love it. But when you speak so quietly in that restaurant, they'll think that you are lying or trying to hide something."

Lee Levitt: Yeah. Midwest nice does not fly.

Frankie Kemp: In that situation when you're talking about your business. Right. And they were like—well, for this particular client, it was three nonverbal adjustments that we made that got the business past the line. And he only saw me on the eighth attempt. It was a massive bank that kept on flying him over. "Go show the slides again, Mikey. Show the slides again. Show the slides again."

And he was like, "Oh my God, I'm so sick of showing these slides."

And I went, "Ha ha. Put your slides away, Mikey. It's you they want to see."

And he was like, "Oh, thank God for that."

And so then I gave him some advice. It is about being adaptable. You've got to know: What's the message? What are they expecting from you? Not that you always have to give what they expect—no. You need to know that as your starting point. What level? What's their history? What's their baggage? That kind of thing.

Lee Levitt: Yeah. You have to show up with a perspective.

Frankie Kemp: I think you have to show up with a perspective, and you have to show up willing to be adaptable. And I think that's what you get from improv.

So one minute you are walking on as this character in a Midwest saloon, and the next minute you are a talking dustbin. I mean, if that's not adaptable, I don't know what is.

Lee Levitt: Yeah. You and I talked about this before—good improv is a fabulous training ground for people in sales. It teaches you presence, it teaches you adaptability, it teaches you the pivot. It teaches you taking care of your partner.

Frankie Kemp: I would even go beyond sales into just anyone.

The weird thing is, when I do improv, I find that there's a lot of techies who do improv. And I think it's because what you also learn is like a social grounding. So there are people who haven't quite got it instinctively. The whole listening process and the matching—the basis of some communication techniques—they love it because they learn by doing.

But I worked in pharma in the States last year on a big project, and I hired improvisers. I wrote an improvisation plus behavioral science program. We put them together. We had scientists working by the side of us. And we used improv to help these MSLs—so these are basically the scientific consultants who were working with all the stakeholders.

We worked in this very 360 way using improv, and they loved it because they said, "We felt it. It wasn't theory."

Lee Levitt: Right? It wasn't noise banging around in their heads. It wasn't facts banging around in their heads. Improv is something you feel in your gut.

Frankie Kemp: And I think ultimately, people talk about learning styles. So there's various ways of looking at learning styles—like the kinesthetic, learn by doing, learn by hearing, learn by seeing. Ultimately, all of this is doorways into learning by doing.

Lee Levitt: Say more about that, Frankie. And then I want to go back to the three learning styles.

Frankie Kemp: So unless you are walking the walk, it's theory. Now, I get some people can read an instruction book and then do it.

Lee Levitt: It doesn't really work that well if you're trying to learn how to ride a bicycle.

Frankie Kemp: Exactly. And I do think with communication, people might think, "Oh, it's simple." But it's not easy.

You've got to do it when the emotions are swirling away as well—to communicate in high-pressure situations. We are working with behavioral science as well. So how not to get yourself pulled into the swell, to push back. And there are ways that you can do this in an instant. And it's magical when I see people do this, because it gives them their power back.

Because fundamentally, you might have the most amazing communication skills, but unless you feel comfortable using them, you're not gonna use them.

When I'm working with people at whatever level—from apprentices right up to CEOs—I have to find the "no." You know, we talk about the Harvard school, find the "yes" in sales. But I think it's also your job to find the "no." And it's also important to do that in sales. Like, why wouldn't you? And that's not rhetorical.

Lee Levitt: Absolutely. We were closing a big deal with an enterprise customer, and as we were getting towards the final agreement on how we were gonna move forward, my CEO stepped in and said, "So what would cause us to fail?"

And it's like, "Dude, why are you interrupting my sales flow?"

And he looked at me and said, "We get paid on success. We don't get paid on the transaction. We have to make sure we are set up for success and our customer's set up for success. That is a necessary and required conversation to have before we agree to the deal."

It's like—you're right.

Frankie Kemp: And it's like having an engineer's mind, because engineers will try and break a machine to understand it. So you need to understand where it will break so you can guarantee the success.

Lee Levitt: Yeah. Now let's go back to the three styles of learning, Frankie. The visual, the listening, and the kinesthetic. Why is that important for a communicator to know?

Frankie Kemp: I think it's how we—it's definitely important in learning, to recognize how you best learn. If you recognize how you best learn, then that affects your life.

Lee Levitt: I want to pose a question from the other side, because it's sales leaders that are listening to this. Why would a sales leader care about the preferred learning style of someone they're talking with?

Frankie Kemp: Okay. Firstly, it's not just learning—it's what they'll pick up on.

So I'm just gonna give you the differentiators between the three learning styles, and an example of how it worked with me when I used a style which was not my organic dominant style.

Lee Levitt: This was the one time it was less than perfect in your entire career.

Frankie Kemp: The one time, yeah. Just the one time, Lee.

So one of them is hearing. Some people are very auditory. These are the people who can listen to a tune and then they remember the words. They hum it. My friend's a guitarist—he can just listen to a tune on the radio, and he's always been able to do this, and he can just play. Mind-blowing for me.

The words—and this is really important in sales—listen to the words that he might use. "Oh, that sounds great." I would never say that. I hardly ever say it. You could say something and I'll go, "Oh, fab." Or, "That feels great." So I'm already preempting what's gonna come.

"We are in tune." Or, "We're in harmony." Or, "That rings a bell." So their language even affects them.

Lee Levitt: The language someone uses is a strong indicator of their primary learning style.

Frankie Kemp: Absolutely. This is it.

If we go on to visual: "Oh, I see what you mean." "See what you mean." "I get the picture." "Oh, that looks fantastic." Not "that is fantastic"—"that looks fantastic." So the language will be more visual.

These are the people who you tell them—like giving them directions—and they'll look at you, their eyes misted over like a tray of donuts. And then you show them a map and they go, "Oh, right, okay."

Now that doesn't work with me, because usually I get the map the wrong way round. And I'm a kinesthetic learner. I was one of those people when Google came out and you remember when it started to have the blue dot that went where you went? So you could always tell kinesthetic people because they were standing on street corners with their phone doing this. "Oh, okay. Now it's slightly confusing because that blue dot's doing something strange."

So what you have to do is you walk down the road and then you reverse.

Lee Levitt: Pro tip—big pro tip. Four steps forward, turn around.

Frankie Kemp: Yeah. I can't be bothered to work out the north, south, east, west. I hate Lonely Planet with its "Go southeast and head for the square in Castile region" or whatever. You're like, "I'm not gonna know that. I've got to do it."

It takes longer to learn, but once we learn it, once we get it, it is in the bones. And we're showing everybody else.

So kinesthetic is "it feels great." You are more emotional. You tend to respond more emotionally, more physically as well. They tend to be slightly more physical.

My friend's son—she said, "I think he's got ADHD." I said, "What makes you think he's got ADHD?" She says, "Because as he's learning, he's just moving everywhere."

I went, "He could be a kinesthetic learner."

And I spoke to special needs teachers and I said, "Don't you think a lot of those children in these special needs classes—they're just kinesthetic learners? And there's nothing wrong with them." They learn by doing and they get impatient in a class of 30 kids. They want to get out and do. That's how they learn.

But we talked about how you learn and the communication style. So that's what you are listening for. Now, if you match that language, that will definitely build rapport.

So the example that I promised earlier: I was guided to a person who worked for a charity who wanted help with how she was raising funds for the charity. And there was something about the interaction—you know, like it's very civil, it seems that you understand each other, but there's a slight connection which isn't there.

You know when you walk away and you're like, you haven't exactly disagreed with each other at all, there's no disagreement, but there didn't seem to be that dovetailing that you feel with certain people?

And I walked away and I thought, "What do I already know about communication that would help me?" And I thought, "Well, what do I know about her? I know that she works on the phone, so she's very auditory."

Lee Levitt: Well, likely. Sometimes we end up in roles that don't work with our communication strength. And it's not that someone is 100% auditory. We usually have a mix of all three, but one is dominant.

Frankie Kemp: Now I'm gonna talk about the plasticity of it, and then what happens if you are in sales and you're doing a presentation. Because you're not gonna give everybody a survey and go, "How do you learn? I'm gonna adapt to all of you during this one-hour talk." You're not gonna do that.

So back to this particular client. What I did—because I'm quite visual, I'm visual and very kinesthetic—I wrote down a couple of words like, "It sounds like you were having a really tough time." "What you said really chimed with me because it reminded me of such and such."

I only wrote down three of those words. Within the first five minutes—and also I did the conversation on the telephone—and I heard her within the first few minutes go, "Oh my gosh. You absolutely get it."

Okay, great. Really, it doesn't actually take that much, which you'll all be very relieved to know.

Now, if I worked on the phones as well, my dominant would probably change. We are not stone—we are clay.

For example, anybody that's ever done MBTI—I remember I was speaking to somebody who said he was highly sensory, but when he had children, he became more feeling-focused because he had to be.

Lee Levitt: For the listeners, what is MBTI?

Frankie Kemp: So MBTI is a psychometric measurement. All of them are based on Jung, and they look at how you relate to other people, how you look at the world. For example, do you relate through feeling or through more like logic? I won't do a whole breakdown of MBTI, but many people in sales do things like DISC, the Jung—they go back to the basics with Jung, MBTI. All of those are psychometric tests to look at how you interact, and they'll all come out with different sorts of results, but many of them will actually overlap.

Lee Levitt: I did a quick DISC profile. In fact, it wasn't DISC, it was Erikson's book, I'm Surrounded by Idiots, which loosely maps to DISC.

Frankie Kemp: That book is fantastic.

Lee Levitt: I'm a bottom-line, let's-just-do-it type.

Frankie Kemp: So yeah, we're talking about learning styles and communication.

Oh, so I've got to talk about how this works in a group. Obviously, if you are doing a presentation or a sales talk, you don't necessarily know who you have in front of you. So you want to hedge your bets.

Firstly, when you ask questions, that gives you time to work out what's happening. You know that you'll be able to work people out—undoubtedly. So you give yourself time.

But in a presentation, if you mix up a little bit of getting people to do something, getting people to see something, and of course they're hearing you—that as a bottom line is totally achievable.

And then if you want to also think of the language that you use about the feeling, and then you've got your hard facts, and you've got your ways of showing—which doesn't necessarily have to be a slide. It could be just a very visual story where we can see the scenario in front of us. That can be extremely effective.

You are engaging all three. But if you are just doing slides and talking completely hypothetical and about numbers, you are going to disengage a hell of a lot of people.

And especially the people at the top can often be, funnily enough, very kinesthetic. Because kinesthetic people tend to thrive both ends of an organization and outside of an organization. It is worth mixing it up.

Going back to that Aristotle three pillars—you will mix it up if you have the logos, the ethos, and the pathos. You will do that when you are communicating with a client or a prospect.

You can do all of that over a period of time. Don't think that you need to prove you've got the facts right in the first meeting. It's like little drops. Little drops. You know, you won't have all your spices at the beginning of a three-course meal. You don't have to do that. It's a few drops here throughout the extent of that interaction that you have—which might be days, it might be months, it could be years.

Lee Levitt: Yeah. So Frankie, that's absolutely fabulous. I think we're gonna move to dessert now after that three-course meal.

You mentioned books, you mentioned some other resources. Where can people find those?

Frankie Kemp: If you go to frankiekemp.com, you will find a link to my YouTube channel. And I'd like to say, by the way, we are all very busy, so I keep these YouTube videos down to—I think the maximum is probably seven minutes. And I have got blogs, my blog, easy to read, downloadable visuals, a visual library. Everything is on there. Great starting point. Go there.

Lee Levitt: Frankiekemp.com. And it sounds like you practice what you preach.

Frankie Kemp: One would hope so. One would hope so. I feel that I'm not the judge, though.

Lee Levitt: What does a great client look like for you? Who should call you and say, "Frankie, we need help"? Who should reach out and talk to you about working with you so that they can improve their communication skills and business results?

Frankie Kemp: People who value learning, know that it's going to increase their personal development, but want to have fun doing it. And if you are in for all of that, then please contact me.

Lee Levitt: So Frankie, this has been a fabulous conversation as always. We've touched a number of things. I've seen some stuff, I've heard some things, I've really felt how you connect with an audience. How do you like that for the three learning styles?

Frankie Kemp: It's now imbued. Your message has gone right in.

Lee Levitt: We've talked about communication as a way of connecting with people, because the purpose of communication is not to throw words at people—it's to enroll people in doing things differently, to enroll them in a cause or enroll them in a purpose, or to help them see a different way of being.

And the better we are at communicating, the more effectively we can help others in that path or transformation.

Frankie, where can people find you?

Frankie Kemp: Frankiekemp.com. So Frankie is with an "ie." I'm also present on LinkedIn. If you want to speak to me, I have a 15-minute discovery call. No strings attached, absolutely free. Just go into the contact on the website.

Lee Levitt: Brilliant. Frankie, thank you so much. This has been a pleasure as always.

Lee Levitt: Another deep dive into the topic of sales excellence and the performance mindset. If you found this conversation interesting, I would appreciate it if you would share the podcast with a coworker or two. And to explore this topic in more depth, send me a note via the contact form at podcast.thoughtsonselling.com or find some time for us to talk at meetasellergroup.com. Thanks.

YOUTUBE ASSETS

YouTube Show Notes / Description

🎯 Your slides might be the reason you're not closing. Frankie Kemp explains why—and what actually works.

In this episode of Thoughts on Selling, communication coach Frankie Kemp breaks down what actually makes someone persuasive. Spoiler: it's not the slides. We explore Aristotle's three pillars (logos, ethos, pathos), why technical people over-rely on data, and how to read someone's learning style just by listening to the words they use.

📌 KEY MOMENTS: 00:00 - Introduction: Who is Frankie Kemp? 02:30 - Why everybody has to sell—including technical specialists 04:45 - Aristotle's three pillars: logos, ethos, and pathos 07:20 - "I'll never remember your bullet points"—the power of story 10:00 - The purpose of selling is not selling (or even buying) 13:30 - "Put your slides away, Mikey. It's you they want to see." 16:15 - Three nonverbal adjustments that closed a multimillion-pound deal 18:40 - Improv training for scientists and salespeople 21:00 - Visual, auditory, kinesthetic: reading learning styles 25:30 - How to match language to build instant rapport 28:00 - Mixing it up in group presentations

💡 KEY QUOTE: "People often come to you with the solution. Your job in sales is to recognize what led up to that requirement—what problem are they trying to solve? Then take them back and go, 'This will be better for you.'"

🔗 CONNECT WITH FRANKIE: Website: https://frankiekemp.com LinkedIn: Frankie Kemp Free 15-minute discovery call on her site

🔗 CONNECT WITH LEE: Website: https://thoughtsonselling.com Book a call: https://meet.aceleragroup.com

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