With a whole plethora of knowledge literally at our fingertips nowadays, you might ask:
What’s the real value of purchasing books for business knowledge? 🤔
Well, we think it provides a crucial opportunity to disengage from the screen, unwind a little, and upskill in a relaxed environment.
So pour yourself your favorite beverage, find a comfy spot on the sofa…. Recline and recalibrate with these top SaaS books. ☕
1. Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
The author’s core mission behind writing this book: make a handbook for start-up founders—a guide to show them how it's done when you're just starting out. It's the kind of book every newbie craves. Every startup founder wants – above all else – to create a product that really hooks its claws into the psyche of potential customers.
Whether your expertise is in product, marketing, design, or software development, every aspiring SaaS professional is just itching to know how to create a product that becomes a permanent fixture in a customer’s life. This book might just scratch that itch.
You might think that a lot of SaaS books are too fixated on useless theory, but this book is dedicated to providing you with actionable advice and strategies that aim to transform your key business practices in a way that drives positive outcomes. Soak up these insights in the comfort of your home, and witness the tangible results in your place of work.
2. SaaS Sales For Startup Founders
A massive pain point for SaaS startup founders: How do you turn free-trial customers into paying customers? It’s not enough just to have a great idea; you gotta have a great sales pitch.
Luckily, Steli Efti’s book comes with a whole plethora of pitch examples and case studies so that you can get first-hand insight on how to effectively turn your users into buyers.
Although the advice in this book aims to get you to a pro-level of expertise, it's designed to be accessible to novices in the sales game that means minimal jargon, with concrete examples and templates for sales techniques.
3. Behind the Cloud
If you want to learn how to blaze a trail through the SaaS landscape, it’s important that you follow the example of the world-beating brands that came before. Sure, the SaaS world is rapidly evolving – and that’s what we love about it.
But there are still some pretty tried and true principles that we can all live by. And what better place to look for that than in Marc Benioff’s definitive account of growing an idea into a $50 bn cloud business.
But this is no ego trip. This book zooms in closely on the exact strategies that allowed Benioff's business to hit SaaS superstardom in a relatively short space of time so that you can integrate them into your own strategy.
4. Customer Success: How Innovative Companies Are Reducing Churn and Growing Recurring Revenue
It’s safe to say that customer success as a function has pretty much exploded over the last couple of years as a lynchpin of burgeoning SaaS companies. And it’s no wonder, considering an essential tenet of SaaS success is solving customer pain points by offering up tangible solutions.
And in recent history, we’ve become more and more aware that solving customer pain points doesn’t just stop once customers have converted. It forms the basis of a continuous relationship between organization and customer over the whole customer journey.
That’s where the value of customer success really shines: the guiding light that steers your customers toward finding the true value in your product.
This book, from customer success experts, charts the various intricacies and aspects of this growing discipline, clearly outlining how you can leverage it in your growing business.
5. Kicking SaaS: 101 Founders on What it Takes to Launch a Software as a Service
When it comes to launching a SaaS product, no two paths are ever going to be the same. We all come from different backgrounds and disciplines, and that’s part of what makes the SaaS industry so fun! So when you’re looking to find the approach that suits you, it helps to draw insight from many different sources.
Well, this essential resource does just that, providing insights from SaaS founders across multiple different areas of expertise. And this is not just self-aggrandizement, we’re honing in on the mistakes and pitfalls that SaaS experts have faced along the way.
As an aspiring SaaS leader, you’re sure to face hurdles, but with this compilation, you’ll come armed in advance with a solution for clearing them.
6. Crossing the Chasm
Now in its third edition, this book aims to swiftly close the gap between early adopters and late majority customers. It’s no secret: in order to become profitable, SaaS companies need to be looking to scale quickly. You don’t want your product to be a hidden gem or a best-kept secret.
But scaling quickly is no easy feat and there are many who overlook essential steps to growing a viable business in a relentless effort to scale. But this book puts those failures under the microscope so that you can determine exactly what you need to do to ensure that your product is the brand on everyone’s lips in no time at all.
Geoffrey A. Moore’s seminal work was included in Inc Magazine’s top ten marketing books of all time, as well as being a Business Week bestseller.
7. Mastering the Product Experience: How to Deliver a Personalized Experience with a Product-led Strategy
In this age of SaaS revolution, the power is well and truly in the hands of the customers to be extremely selective in terms of the products for their tech stack. As such, the pressure to make customers feel valued is greater than ever.
Many customers will prefer to experience the value of your product first-hand rather than take your word for it. With a product-led experience, the value of your product alone should be self-evident, and customers will be able to see for themselves how your solution is going to positively impact their lives.
With over 12 years experience building and growing SaaS organizations, Mickey Alon is certainly over-qualified to demonstrate how this is possible. Check it out for yourself.
Good Strategy, Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why it Matters
As well as being an Emeritus professor at UCLA and a graduate of Harvard business school, Richard Rumelt, is a distinguished authority when it comes to business strategy.
Many SaaS companies have great products, but unless your go-to-market strategy is up to standard, your product can very easily get lost in the noise of a busy market.
Position your product for success. Give your product the go-to-market strategy it deserves today.
9. Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind
Do you find that traditional advice on marketing doesn't take into account the modern cultural landscape?
In an age of idle screen-scrolling, many consumers have become desensitized to sales pitches and marketing speak, and organizations that are seeking to grab their attention will often find themselves in an uphill battle, especially due to the sheer volume of competition, given the platform that social media provides to innumerable companies.
The good news is there are still ways to break down those barriers. And this book, written by Al Ries, the coiner of the term ‘positioning,’ aims to help you achieve that thing that all modern marketers should aspire to: remaining competitive in the modern business landscape.
10. Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets
What do Uber, Amazon, Ikea, and Salesforce all have in common? Two things. Firstly, they’ve all absolutely crushed it in their respective industries, and secondly, their success stories are all featured in this essential resource.
Want to be able to hang with the biggest heavyweights in the game? Well, first, you need a blow-by-blow account of how they dominated the market, so you can beat your competitors to the punch.
Have any more books in mind that we might have missed? Let us know at anthony@futureofsaas.io.
