Library Required reading
Required reading
The research library shows why your volume KPIs keep picking the wrong winner. These 19 books and writers teach the craft underneath it, in marketing, sales and retention. For each one, what you’ll take from it and where it shows up in your numbers.
The summaries are in plain English. Anything in quotation marks is the author’s own words, with the chapter or page. Each page links to the publisher or the author, and to a free copy where the work is in the public domain.
Where it started
The idea that a response can be measured, and that an ad is a salesman whose results can be counted.
Copy that sells
How the people who wrote for a living turned attention into a sale, and tested their way there.
- Eugene M. Schwartz · 1966 Breakthrough Advertising The Desire You Aim At Decides Who Shows Up
- David Ogilvy · 1983 Ogilvy on Advertising The Only Way to Know Which Ad Sells
- Joseph Sugarman · 2007 The Adweek Copywriting Handbook Every Line's Job Is to Get the Next One Read
- Michael Masterson & John Forde · 2011 Great Leads Start From What Your Reader Already Knows
Why people say yes
The shortcuts and stories buyers use to decide, and what that means for the signals you send.
How the best reps sell
What the research on top performers and big deals says about who sells, to whom, and what they get paid for.
- Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson · 2011 The Challenger Sale Your Best Reps Sell Differently, Not Harder
- Neil Rackham · 1988 SPIN Selling Big Deals Need a Different Sale
- Chet Holmes · 2007 The Ultimate Sales Machine Go After the Buyers Who Buy the Most
- Mark Roberge · 2015 The Sales Acceleration Formula Pay Your Reps for the Customers Who Stay
Keeping the right customers
Which customers to keep, what keeping them is worth, and why the average customer is the wrong one to build around.
- Peter Fader · 2011 Customer Centricity Find Your Best Customers and Build Around Them
- Peter Fader, Bruce Hardie & Michael Ross · 2022 The Customer-Base Audit Know How Many Customers Carry Half Your Revenue
- Sunil Gupta & Donald R. Lehmann · 2005 Managing Customers as Investments Spend on Customers the Way You'd Invest in Any Asset
- Larry Selden & Geoff Colvin · 2003 Angel Customers & Demon Customers Run the Business as a Portfolio of Customers
Reading the numbers
Customers as a database, and the outliers that the averages hide.
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The Power Law Performance newsletter puts the research to work on your numbers, where volume KPIs pick the wrong winner and the signals that sort value from volume.