Sales books usually arrive padded, and this audiobook is the rare one that refuses. Phil M. Jones gives you one hour and fourteen minutes, reads it himself, and spends every minute on phrasing: which words to use, when to use them, and how to make them count. Lantern Audio published it on December 1, 2017, and it has been quietly selling ever since. Whether that brevity reads as discipline or as a pamphlet with a price attached is the only real question here, and the answer depends entirely on how you plan to use the thing.
A Book You Run Again Before a Meeting
Jones is a trainer rather than an author who happens to work in sales, and the book behaves accordingly. The copy claims more than two million people trained across five continents in what it calls the lost art of spoken communication, and what reaches the recording is the residue of that work: lines, openers, reframes, the specific sentence to deploy when a conversation stalls. No psychology chapter softens the delivery. You get the scripts and the situations they belong to, and nothing else competes for room.
Nic R, twenty years into a sales career and newly landed in precious metals, gives the most useful account of what that feels like from the inside. The complaint in that five-star response is about every other sales book: three layers of filler to wade through before anything usable appears. Wanting more objection handling and closing tools, and tired of successes that felt like luck, is exactly the itch this format was built to scratch.
Seventy-four minutes changes what the purchase means. This is not a book you finish; it is a book you run again before a meeting until the phrases stop sounding borrowed in your own mouth. Judged as a listening experience it is slight, and judged as a rehearsal tool it is efficient in a way that longer and better-argued books never manage. Choose the format for the second reason and it earns its keep. Choose it for the first and you will feel short-changed within a week.
Casting Jones as Trainer Removes a Step
Anthony Carmichael puts the strongest argument in one line from November 2025: tightly focused, and not overly wordy as many are. That is the whole value proposition. A trainer who has spent years watching which sentences work in rooms has an unusual filter, and the discipline to publish only the filtered result is rarer still. Most business books would have wrapped this material in three hundred pages of case studies and lost it somewhere in the middle third. Restraint of that kind is a craft decision, and it explains why this title has outlived a great many louder ones.
Self-narration matters more here than on almost any other title. The subject of the book is spoken phrasing, so putting the author in the reader's chair means the phrases reach you as speech rather than as text a listener has to convert before testing it. A printed copy hands you that conversion to make alone, and the conversion is exactly where most scripts of this kind go wrong. Casting the trainer removes a step that no other decision on this recording could have removed.
Credentials are unusually concrete for this shelf. The description records a 2013 British Excellence in Sales and Marketing Award for Sales Trainer of the Year, with Jones as the youngest recipient, alongside coaching work for global brands and online courses with tens of thousands of members. None of that guarantees the lines work in your industry. It does mean the material was pressure-tested on live audiences long before anyone recorded it.
A Subtitle the Header Never Displays
A bare title is all the listing shows, and the book has a subtitle the page never displays. A November 2023 five-star response names it in full as Exactly What to Say: Your Personal Guide to the Mastery of Magic Words, which is a considerably more informative label than the three words on the header. Magic words tells a buyer what they are getting; Exactly What to Say could be a negotiation manual, a communication theory book or a self-help title. Search the full string if you are comparing editions.
Six Ratings, and a Hidden Third-Star Vote
Publisher copy on this page also argues with itself. Its opening pitch credits Jones with training more than two million people across five continents and over 50 countries; the biography pasted underneath, three sentences later, says five continents and 56 countries. Both numbers sit on the same page. That biography is worth noticing on its own account, since it is a third-person author profile ending with the cities he divides his time between, which means a good share of the description is not about the book at all.
Six ratings is the other oddity. The average shows 4.5, and the five graded entries beneath it come in at five, five, four, five and five. If those five sit among the six, the sixth vote is a three, and the entire visible verdict on an eight-year-old title rests on half a dozen people. Treat the number as noise rather than as a referendum, and read the responses instead.
A Script to Rehearse Rather Than an Hour of Listening
GLPac makes the case for the non-sales reader: highly recommended for people who work with teams, and for anyone who wants to say the right thing at the right moment in the workplace or outside it. That is broader than the marketing category suggests. Anyone who runs meetings, negotiates internally, manages upward or asks for things regularly will find the scripts transfer, because the underlying situations are not particular to selling at all. A request that keeps getting deferred behaves the same way whether the person deferring it is a customer or a colleague two grades above you.
Anyone hoping for the reasoning behind the phrases should look elsewhere. This is a book of what, not of why, and listeners who need to understand the mechanism before they will use a technique tend to find that frustrating rather than efficient. The same objection applies to anyone who reads scripted language as manipulation on principle; nothing here argues that position out of you, because arguing is not what the book does.
The best fit is somebody with a conversation coming up this week that they already know they will handle badly. Short, specific, immediately testable, and cheap in time if it fails: that is a good trade for a professional problem with a deadline attached. Nobody will call this the most intelligent book about persuasion, and nobody serious has ever claimed it was trying to be. Buy it as a script to rehearse rather than as an hour of listening.
Common Questions
What does the audiobook actually give you in an hour and a quarter?
Tactics for spoken communication, phrase by phrase. The copy promises the ability to know what to say, when to say it and how to make it count, and delivers that as usable lines tied to situations rather than as a framework. Expect material to rehearse, not a theory to study.
Who published the audiobook, and how long has it been available?
Lantern Audio released it on December 1, 2017, with Phil M. Jones credited as both author and reader. It has been on sale for eight years, which makes the tiny ratings count on this particular listing more surprising than the content ever is.
Does the audiobook help anyone who is not in sales?
Partly. One four-star response frames the benefit commercially, in terms of the probability of landing a new client, and the examples lean that way. The underlying situations, stalling conversations and unasked requests, are general enough that managers and negotiators can take most of the lines intact.
