Book Recommendations

I want to talk about some business books that I have found especially useful over the last few years.

1. Cracking The Sales Management Code.  A few years ago, I found myself doing sales operations. There are thousands of books about selling. But only a handful are about how sales functions actually work. How you structure them from a process perspective and how you measure their success. Cracking The Sales Management Code was a book that brought structure to the messy, chaotic world of sales. The key takeaways for me were:

·         Territory, account, opportunity, and call management are different processes and should be handled differently. Many sales methods mix them (often opportunity and call) indiscriminately.

·         Sales activity metrics (# of calls, # new leads, % closed) are as important as ultimate numbers like revenue.

·         A CRM system is a fitbit not a whip.

2. Crossing The Chasm and Inside The Tornado. No one has described better the dynamics of technological growth and the implications for tech company operations than Geoffrey Moore. Anyone who works in tech should read these books. Both of them – for they are very much a pair. Have they dated? Yes, a bit. Are they occasionally unclear? Yes. Are they schematic? Yes. But. They are still great and Moore (an ex-English professor) is a great writer who makes the complex simple and digestible. While people tend to focus on the specifics (e.g. the chasm crossing marketing strategy), the bigger messages from these books are crucial.

·         The maturity of the market that you are in constrains your possible outcomes and your behaviour.

·         The presence and activities of competitors in that market constrains your behaviour.

·         These factors shape how you structure your business; how you operate in marketing, sales, finance and product; and who you recruit.

·         However you still have scope for much creativity within these constraints.

3. A few years ago, I found myself managing a services team in a SaaS product business. I tried to find a book on how to do this and came up short. Sure, I had David Maister’s classics on professional services businesses (which hold up very well 40 years later) but much of them were not relevant to my situation. I even entertained writing one myself. One day, I asked Geoffrey Moore to participate in a podcast that I was running and he politely turned me down. But he did suggest Thomas Lah. And Lah has written a book on this topic. Three actually. And he’s gone on to co-found an industry association called TSIA. Their Technology-as-a-service Playbook is a great book about running a SaaS business profitably or running a traditional tech business in the SaaS world. It has some proprietary data in and plenty of sharp observations that make it a must for anyone with a leadership role in a tech company.

5. Finally, there is a lot of talk in the tech world about venture capital and funding. Arcane terms such as Series A, Pre-money, Dilution. The final book I want to recommend Venture Deals. Conversational, funny, insightful, it explains the whole venture capital ecosystem and fund raising process with plenty of worked examples.