Earn Minute Eleven

What makes a customer give you more than the ten minutes they originally promised?

It is not pressure, clever closing techniques or talking faster. It is making the opening conversation relevant, useful and worthwhile.

Earn Minute Eleven is a practical five-lesson sales workbook designed to help salespeople prepare properly, begin conversations confidently, ask better questions, use evidence effectively and agree a sensible next step.

The approach is simple:

Prepare with purpose → Start well → Understand their world → Prove what matters → Earn the next conversation

The five lessons are:

1. Before You Enter
2. Prepare for the meeting, separate facts from assumptions and decide what you genuinely need to understand.
3. The First 90 Seconds
4. Set the right tone, respect the customer’s time and create a clear reason for the conversation to continue.
5. Questions That Earn Time
6. Move beyond surface-level answers and uncover the practical, financial, technical and personal effects of the problem.
7. Prove, Don’t Pitch
8. Connect your evidence to what matters to the customer instead of relying on features, claims and generic presentations.
9. Minute Eleven
10. Recognise genuine interest, stop professionally at the ten-minute point and agree the smallest useful next step.

Throughout the workbook, you will find:

• Practical explanations in plain English
• Realistic customer examples
• Questions you can use in genuine conversations
• Exercises based on your own customers and opportunities
• Checklists and reflection activities
• A next-step commitment card for use before leaving a meeting

This is not a collection of scripts or sales tricks. It is a practical method for creating better-quality customer conversations—particularly in B2B, technical, commercial and consultative selling environments.

The workbook is suitable for salespeople, business-development professionals, account managers, sales managers and anyone whose role involves winning the customer’s confidence before asking them to take another step.

Created by Chris Davies, drawing on more than 30 years of practical experience across sales, business development, account management, leadership and commercial performance.

Downloadable 41-page PDF workbook.