Your Slides are Killing Your Deals!

Here's something that should humble every sales leader who's bought the latest tech stack: Aristotle figured out persuasion 2,300 years ago. And his framework still works better than most of what we're teaching today.

I sat down with Frankie Kemp on the Thoughts on Selling podcast to talk about communication—specifically, why most technical people struggle with it and what to do about it. Frankie has an unusual background: acting school, award-winning comedy writing, NLP, and now she coaches technical specialists at major finance, pharma, and energy companies on how to actually connect with other humans.

Her secret weapon? A Greek philosopher and a willingness to tell clients to put their slides away.

The Three Pillars

Aristotle identified three pillars of persuasion: logos, ethos, and pathos.

Logos is your data. Your facts. Your bullet points. This is where most technical people live—and where most of them get stuck.

Ethos is credibility. How much you're believed, liked, and trusted. It's not ethics per se, though ethics plays into it. It's how you come across.

Pathos is emotion. The stories you tell. The feeling you create.

Here's Frankie's observation: "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."

Most technical specialists lean hard on logos—because that's what they value, and because they don't realize the other two pillars even exist. Salespeople, on the other hand, sometimes lean too hard on pathos and skip the substance entirely.

The best communicators use all three. And they do it in "little drops"—not all at once.

 

 Put Your Slides Away, Mikey

Frankie shared a story about a client—let's call him Mikey—who was pitching a massive bank. He'd been flown over eight times. "Show the slides again, Mikey. Show the slides again."

He was exhausted. And nothing was working.

Frankie's advice? "Put your slides away, Mikey. It's you they want to see."

She made three nonverbal adjustments with him. On the next attempt, he closed the deal.

Three adjustments. Multimillion pounds. That's the power of ethos—of how you come across—when the logos has already been established.

Reading Learning Styles in Real Time

One of the most practical frameworks Frankie shared was around learning styles: visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. The insight isn't just about how people learn—it's about how they communicate and what they respond to.

Auditory people say things like "That sounds great," "We're in tune," "That rings a bell." They process through hearing.

Visual people say "I see what you mean," "I get the picture," "That looks fantastic." They process through seeing.

Kinesthetic people say "That feels right," "Let's walk through it," "I need to get my hands on it." They process through doing and feeling.

Here's the magic: if you match their language, you build rapport almost instantly.

Frankie gave an example of a client she was struggling to connect with. The conversation was civil but flat. No dovetailing. Then she realized: this person worked on the phone all day. Auditory dominant.

So Frankie wrote down three phrases—"It sounds like you were having a really tough time," "What you said really chimed with me"—and used them in the first five minutes of their next call.

The client's response: "Oh my gosh. You absolutely get it."

That's all it took.

Improv for Scientists

Frankie has been bringing improv training into technical organizations—including a major pharma company where she worked with MSLs (medical science liaisons) alongside actual scientists.

Why improv? Because it teaches you to be present, to adapt, to take care of your scene partner. And because it gets people out of their heads and into their bodies.

"We felt it," the scientists told her. "It wasn't theory."

That's the difference between knowing something and being able to do it under pressure.

The Real Purpose of Selling

We got into a riff on the purpose of selling. I mentioned Jeff Thull's line—"The purpose of selling is not selling, it's buying"—and how I eventually pushed back on that.

Because nobody says, "I want to buy a car. Great, I bought the car. I'm done." No—you want to drive it to work or take it to the track.

The purpose of selling is to help the buyer achieve an objective. The transaction is a means, not an end.

Frankie put it differently: "The purpose of selling is to recognize a need and then find a way of fulfilling it—and that might not be what you were selling last week."

People come to you with a solution in mind. Your job is to figure out what problem they're actually trying to solve. And then—maybe—take them somewhere better.

The Bottom Line

Communication isn't about being smooth. It's about being adaptable.

Know who you're talking to. Calibrate your message. Use all three pillars—logos, ethos, pathos—but don't try to dump them all in the first meeting.

Match their language. Watch their cues. And when in doubt, put the slides away.

Because at the end of the day, it's you they want to see.

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Listen to the full conversation with Frankie Kemp on the Thoughts on Selling podcast.

Your Buyer Has Already Decided. They're Just Building Their Alibi.

The deal isn't stuck because of the business case.

It's stuck because someone on that buying committee is afraid — and the rep across the table is afraid too.

We've trained an entire generation of sellers to lead with logic. ROI calculators. Total cost of ownership. Payback period. We've handed buyers every rational reason to say yes, then watched deals die in committee anyway. We call it "no decision." We blame the economy. We blame the champion who didn't have enough pull.

We never blame the fear. On either side of the table.

The spreadsheet comes later. The spreadsheet is the alibi.

 

 

Emotion Drives the Decision. Logic Defends It.

Here's what the research tells us — and what the best sales leaders already know in their gut: emotion drives decisions. Logic defends them.

Your buyer isn't evaluating your solution with a spreadsheet. They're evaluating it with everything that has ever happened to them in a job like this one. The failed implementation three years ago. The vendor who overpromised and underdelivered. The career risk of being the person who signed the check on something that didn't work.

That spreadsheet with the 14-month payback period? It's not the decision. It's the alibi. It's what they show the CFO after they've already decided — or decided not to decide. The ROI model doesn't move the deal. It gives someone permission to defend the decision they've already made emotionally.

This isn't a controversial idea in behavioral economics. It's settled science. But most sales organizations are still building their entire go-to-market motion around the spreadsheet — and wondering why qualified deals keep going quiet.

But Here's the Part Nobody Talks About

Your rep is doing exactly the same thing.

They rush to the demo because silence feels like rejection. They pile on slides because they don't trust the relationship to hold without the content propping it up. The buyer goes quiet — and instead of slowing down and asking a harder question, the rep sends another deck. More features. More case studies. More reasons why this is the right decision.

None of which addresses what's actually happening.

The buyer is afraid of making the wrong call. The rep is afraid of losing the deal. Two people at the table, both afraid, neither one saying so. The conversation stays at the surface — features, timelines, pricing — because going deeper feels risky for everyone involved.

Two people at the table, both afraid. Neither one fessing up. That's not a pipeline problem. That's a system problem.

Most sales methodologies treat this as a buyer problem. Get better at objection handling. Build a stronger business case. Increase executive alignment. All useful, all insufficient — because they assume the buyer is the only one who needs to change.

The best sales leaders I know understand something different: when deals stall consistently, it's rarely a talent problem. It's a system problem. The system hasn't given reps the language, the tools, or the psychological safety to have the real conversation.

The Five Reasons Deals Actually Stall

Not all stalled deals are stuck for the same reason. That sounds obvious until you watch a sales organization apply the same fix — more pressure, more activity, an executive call — to every stalled deal in the pipeline regardless of why it stalled.

Sometimes that works. Usually it doesn't. And when it doesn't, the cost isn't just the deal. It's the quarter.

We've identified five distinct reasons deals stall — and each one demands a different response. We call it STUCK™. When you know which of the five it is, you know what your rep needs to do differently. When you don't, you're guessing. And guessing is expensive at enterprise deal sizes.

The diagnostic question isn't "what objection do I need to answer?" It's "where is this buyer stuck, and what does my rep actually need right now?" Those are different questions. They lead to different conversations. And they produce different outcomes.

What the System Looks Like When It's Working

The organizations closing the deals that matter aren't the ones with the most aggressive reps or the most sophisticated comp plans. They're the ones who've built a system that reduces fear on both sides of the table — and gives their leaders the diagnostic tools to know what's actually going on inside a stalled opportunity.

That means pipeline reviews that inspect risk, not just activity. Coaching conversations that address what's happening in the rep's head, not just what's happening in the deal. Discovery that earns the right to go deep before it goes wide. And a shared language between rep and manager that makes it safe to say "I don't know what's actually going on here" without that being a career-limiting admission.

It means leaders who know the difference between a deal that needs more time and a deal that needs a different approach. Who can tell whether a rep is stuck on the mechanics of the deal or stuck in their own head about it. Who inspect outcomes, not optics.

None of this requires firing your bottom third. None of it requires a new CRM or a new comp plan. It requires a different game.

That's not magic. It's methodology.

The Right Game

For most of the history of enterprise sales, we've been playing two games at the same table. The rep is playing the seller's game — activity metrics, stage progression, close plans. The buyer is playing their own game — managing internal risk, building consensus, protecting their career.

Those games don't naturally align. In fact, the more aggressively the rep plays their game, the more threatened the buyer feels playing theirs. Pressure accelerates retreat. More deck, more quiet. More urgency, more committee reviews.

The shift — the one that changes everything — is when the rep stops playing against the buyer and starts playing with them. When the question changes from "how do I move this deal forward?" to "what does this buyer need to make a good decision?" When the rep's success and the buyer's success stop being in tension and start being the same thing.

Together We Win™ isn't a slogan. It's a different operating principle. And building a sales organization around it — from how you hire to how you coach to how you inspect — is what separates the teams that scale from the ones that stall.

 If your pipeline is softer than it should be heading into the back half of the year, let's talk.

If your pipeline is softer than it should be heading into the back half of the year, let’s talk.

We work with Sales and enablement leaders at established and emerging tech and services companies who know something isn’t working but aren’t sure what to fix first. Start with the work we do at aceleragroup.com/services — then book 30 minutes at meet.aceleragroup.com and let’s take a look at what’s stuck.

Lee Levitt

Principal, The Acelera Group

Thoughts on Selling™

meet.aceleragroup.com

That's Interesting, Tell Me More...

Gong research suggests that top reps talk less, ask more questions.

But...it's not the number of questions, it's the question style. Customers spend more time answering these questions.

Top reps don't hop from topic to topic after each answer. They stay on a single thread for three or four turns. They hear something interesting and they pull on it. "Tell me more about that." "What happened next?" "Why do you think that is?" This is what triggers the longer answers -- it forces the buyer to think, not just recite. The rep is demonstrating that they're genuinely engaged, and the buyer responds in kind.

Tim Hurson calls this "staying in the question" -- the discipline of resisting the first adequate answer and continuing to probe. In Think Better, he describes how ideas and insights come in thirds. The first third is obvious, top of mind, what everyone already knows. The second third is more considered, more strained. The third third is where the breakthroughs live -- where you've exhausted the easy answers and are forced to see the problem in an entirely new way. Most reps live in the first third. They get an answer, check the box, and move on. The fifth rep stays. They push into the second third, and then the third. The deepest truths -- the ones that actually determine whether this deal happens -- don't surface until the easy answers are spent.

Questioning is a behavior. Curiosity is the engine that powers it.

You can ask a hundred questions from a checklist without being curious. And prospects can feel the difference. One feels like an interrogation. The other feels like a conversation where someone is actually trying to understand their world.

How do you know that your reps are asking great questions? Inspection? Coaching? Role playing?