B2B Sales and Marketing Recommended Reading

Looking for inspiration? Or a practical guide to improving an important aspect of your B2B sales and marketing performance? We'd like to share some of our favourite books here, together with the relevant links to the Amazon UK website should you want to purchase your own copy.

	Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Technology Products to Mainstream Customers by Geoffrey A Moore For the past 20 years, Crossing the Chasm has consistently been at the top of "must read" lists for B2B technology marketers. The latest edition has been updated to reflect the impact of the internet, but the core principles remain timeless, and are as relevant today as they ever were.
	Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur We apply the core principles articulated in Osterwalder and Pigneur's to almost every client assignment. Their simple one-page approach to creating business models cuts through the clutter and focuses on the essence of what sets companies apart.
	Conversations That Win the Complex Sale: Using Power Messaging to Create More Opportunities, Differentiate your Solutions, and Close More Deals by Erik Peterson and Tim Reisterer Erik Peterson and Tim Riesterer have been developing and honing their Power Messaging sales technique for more than 20 years. We've found their methods to be incredibly powerful in helping our clients to reframe their sales messages and differentiate themselves from the competition.
	The Leaky Funnel by Hugh Macfarlane In "The Leaky Funnel" Hugh Macfarlane brings a fresh perspective to managing the B2B sales cycle - he shows us how to focus on facilitating our prospect's buying cycle. Every sales funnel leaks, and Hugh's approach is tremendously helpful in getting more of the right sort of opportunities into the funnel in the first place, accurately determining where the buyer is in their decision-making process, and tracking progress through the funnel by paying careful attention to how long opportunities take to move from stage to stage, how and why they stall or fall out of the process, and what to do about it.
	Let's Get Real or Let's Not Play: Transforming the Buyer/Seller Relationship by Mahan Khalsa and Randy Illig According to Khalsa and Illig, fear stalks the the B2B sales process. Customers are afraid they will be talked into making a mistake and salespeople dread being unable to make the deal and make their quotas, leaving no one happy. I really like this book's fresh and highly actionable approach to transforming sales culture through clarity, authenticity and emotional intelligence.
	The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Stephen Gary Blank Stephen Gary Blank has created what is probably the most complete and compelling guide to the customer development model for start-up organisations - but his structured approach to Customer Discovery, Customer Validation, Customer Creation and Company Building is relevant to growth-orientated companies of any size.