Phil M. Jones Wants His Work to Be More Famous Than He Is

Phil M. Jones has built a career on the idea that a few words, chosen well, can change a decision. He has also spent a surprising amount of energy making sure his audience doesn't need him forever.

Jones grew up in the United Kingdom and now makes his home in New York, according to Forbes. He was the youngest executive ever to win the British Excellence in Sales and Marketing Award, and his book Exactly What to Say had sold more than 250,000 copies by early 2019. In a 2018 Forbes interview, he said he had trained more than 2 million sales professionals.

I.The words at the right time

His core observation came from watching top performers. In that Forbes interview, he explained that "the biggest difference between those that do fine and those that do absolutely awesome is some people know exactly what to say." Product knowledge and aptitude matter, he said, but the people who really win know the right words at the right moment.

That doesn't mean improvising well. Quite the opposite. "The worst time to think about the thing you are going to say is in the moment you are saying it," he told Shep Hyken. And he draws a firm line about how those words get used. "The difference between influence and manipulation is integrity," he told Dan Pontefract in 2023.

II.A conversation in a hallway

In April 2024, Jones sat down with Jim Morris for the IMPACT Effect Podcast between sessions at an event for mortgage and real estate leaders. Asked how he got into this work, he gave the short version of a long story. "I've been obsessed by success my entire life," he said at the top of the episode, describing how he studied successful people and always asked how they did it.

He also talked about preparation. Even after presenting more than 3,500 times, he said, he is in the room before anyone else, walking the space and mapping out how to make the most of the session. Then he widened the point into a warning for anyone in the expert business: many speakers and trainers haven't absorbed the fact that "their success has nothing to do with them." It belongs to the people who go out and change something because of the work.

III.The morning he canceled everything

The most striking story in the episode is one Jones said he rarely tells. Years ago he ran a paid online community with thousands of members, daily videos and a Sunday session he called On the Couch with Phil. Over time he realized members were coming for the content and the community without acting on it. One morning in Hoboken, New Jersey, he walked to a Starbucks as it opened at 5:30 a.m., pulled up his laptop, and, in his words, "I canceled manually every recurring subscription." The next day he went live and graduated everyone.

His reasoning is worth quoting at length. People in his industry talk about "my audience" and "my community," he said, and "if you own them that means they're not owning their own life."

IV.Letting the work travel

That same thinking runs through how he packages his ideas now. Rather than keep delivering a one-day sales workshop to small rooms, Jones partnered with Audible to turn it into a one-man show. Forbes reported that he delivered the six-hour seminar to a standing-room-only audience at the Minetta Lane Theatre in Manhattan, with no notes or PowerPoint, and that it became an Audible audiobook. On the podcast he explained the appeal: "the work gets to be famous and the person doesn't. And I'm happy with that play."

He made a related point to Bruce Weinstein of Forbes about why sales has a bad reputation. Done right, he argued, nobody experiences it as being sold to. His example was a great restaurant server who steers you to the right dish. He then pointed to Rules, a London restaurant he described as the oldest there and in its seventh generation of ownership, as proof of what a long-term approach looks like. "Nobody tried to cash out with a short term view," he said. "They've taken a long-term view."

For leaders, that's the part to borrow. Jones measures his impact by what other people do with the ideas once he's out of the room. It's a demanding standard, and a generous one.

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Phil M. Jones