20 Top SaaS Books for SaaS Marketers to Include in Their Library

“There is no friend as loyal as a book” — a famous quote from Ernest Hemingway.

Reading one good book may change your life and business upside down. This is true especially if you want to start your own software-as-a-service based business. But before you do so, let’s quickly glance over a few stats.

A Deloitte survey published in 2021 found cloud-based As-a-Service model gives 6 out of 10 businesses a competitive edge. Still, 93% of the adopters of this model face many challenges while scaling up.

There are hundreds of books already written for the business world and some specifically for the SaaS niche. Thus, finding top SaaS books is like finding a needle in the biggest haystack possible.

But worry not! 

We have prepared a curated list of bestselling books that most SaaS founders, directors, CEOs, marketers, and sales reps swear by. This list of top SaaS books will guide you from the launching phase to winning customers and everything in between such as sales, growth hacking, and content marketing.

So, without further ado, let’s begin!

Launch Phase: Must-Reads when Starting Up Your SaaS Business

1. The Lean Startup

Author: Eric Ries

The Lean Startup is an absolute must-read for SaaS founders when starting up. This bestseller from Eric Ries goes deeper in explaining all the ins and outs necessary for a lean startup. The book introduces concepts for constant experimentation to test, validate, and improve ideas.

Key Learnings:

• The author stresses always practicing ‘lean’, which refers to creating more value for clients with limited resources.
• Constantly experiment with new ideas and concepts to test, validate, and improve them.
• Learn to measure the things that bring actual growth.
• Stop wasting effort and time on non-vital aspects and focus only on what is needed for the next step.
• Always practice innovation. Continuously!

2. From Impossible to Inevitable

Authors: Aaron Ross and Jason Lemkin

The book is superbly packed with all the bits and pieces needed to achieve hyper-growth as a SaaS founder. Additionally, the authors have included many anecdotes and examples from companies like Salesforce, EchoSign, and many others for SaaS founders to create predictable revenue streams.

Key Learnings:

• The first takeaway from the book is to create predictable pipelines by building specific sales and marketing processes.
• Customer success should be at the heart of your SaaS strategy to lower churn rate, increase revenue, and improve marketing.
• The book stresses on business sales scaling by always hiring the right people for the right job.
• In one of the sections, the authors point out how to steadily & effectively grow your revenue from small, medium, and large-sized clients.

3. Behind the Cloud

Author: Marc Benioff

Marc Benioff, the Chairman, and CEO of Saleforce.com, pens down his journey from a rented apartment to building a SaaS-based revolutionary cloud computing company. The rags to riches story of Benioff will inspire many entrepreneurs of coming generations to innovate and grow their SaaS business faster.

Key Learnings:

• The book starts off by telling readers to stick to their worthy idea and think about how they can expand into a fast-growing company.
• It inspires founders to focus on developing one flawless SaaS product at a time.
• A great lesson for SaaS founders is to always think about the customer even if it hurts your business.
• A section dedicated to how businesses should respect different cultures when expanding globally.

4. Start with Why

Author: Simon Sinek

Simon Sinek is a famous motivational speaker, author, and optimistic with highly watched Ted-Talk shows. In his book Start with Why, he says great inventors and thought leaders in history began their ambitious projects with a ‘Why’, and so should you. A great read for anyone beginning afresh in business.

Key Learnings:

• Simon Sinek brings forth the concept of the Golden Circle that starts with “Why”, then the “How”, and concludes with the “What.”
• He explains what compels and inspires people in the sense that they feel they really need what you are offering.
• The author also deeps down on building trust, taking risks, exploring, experimenting, and advancing.

5. The Hard Thing About the Hard Things

Author: Ben Horowitz

This is a book by one of the most respected & experienced entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. The Hard Thing About Hard Things defines a critical approach on how founders should start and run their businesses. SaaS founders will find much-needed inspiration from this book.

Key Learnings:

• The book sheds light on 3 vital traits that most successful CEOs have.
• Instead of focusing on how to do things correctly, the book emphasizes on screw-ups that are an inevitable part of running a business.
• Horowitz is funny yet brutally honest and straightforward to pen down his wisdom in the book.

6. Value as a Service: Embracing the Coming Disruptions

Author: Rob Bershteyn

Another must-read book in the list of top SaaS books is Value as a Service. Rob Bershteyn — the CEO of Coupa talks about how businesses should embrace the coming disruption and provides much-needed business insights for today’s business leaders.

Key Learnings:

• The book quantifies the value proposition model where value disruption is inevitable.
• It covers a step-by-step guide on how to better deliver and measure the value to clients.
• The author explains different areas of the business necessary for providing Value as a Service.

Selling: A Vital Aspect to Keep Your Business Running

1. Hacking Sales: The Playbook for Building a High-Velocity Sales Machine

Author: Max Altschuler

Selling is the most vital aspect to keep revenue flowing in. Hacking Sales — a book by Max Altschuler is a worthy read for SaaS marketers who want to build a sales machine. The book is helpful to transform your sales processes using next-gen and modern tools, strategies, and tactics.

Key Learning:

• The book includes effective changes that help raise sales performance.
• It also includes modern tools and a roadmap for business marketers for fast and efficient revenue growth.
• The book enlightens the readers with information to set up sales processes from scratch.

2. The SaaS Sales Method: Sales As a Science

Author: Jacco Van Dar Kooiji and Fernando Pizzaro

Another great book that finds its place in top SaaS books is The SaaS Sales Method. It’s a pure value addition from marketers’ point of view to learn sales recreation and revenue generation. The authors break down their sales process in easy to understand elements.

Key Learnings:

• The book provides a scientific framework & secrets for SaaS marketing to understand and improve sales systems.
• It exposes each stage in revenue production from marketing to sales and customer success.
• It also explains how leaders in organizations should structure their processes, workflows, and training.

3. Product Demos That Sell: How to Deliver Winning SaaS Demos

Author: Steli Efti

Product demos are essential for selling SaaS products. This book from Steli Efti is one of the highly recommended and best SaaS sales books to read. From training thousands of SaaS founders, directors, sales reps, and marketers, Steli presents a no B.S guide on how to effectively deliver winning SaaS product demos.

Key Learnings:

• The book teaches you how to ensure prospects attend your product demos, discover why demos fail, and how to differentiate them from the competition.
• Steli has gone lengths to explain how to tailor demos as per customer needs to improve the win rates.
• Also, you’ll learn how to deal with questions and objections during the demo and handle any bug or demo failure.

4. Social Selling: Techniques to Influence Buyers and Changemakers

Author: Tim Hughes

This book by Tim Hughes explains the importance of building relationships with potential clients on social networks. We all know the power social media hold today and this book would be a perfect fit for SaaS startups to leverage this power to their advantage.

Key Learnings:

• The book entails an outline to master social selling skills and techniques.
• It includes building a vibrant community, trust-building, gaining influence and authority.
• How to find and build relationships and communities of influencers and changemakers.
• How to share valuable, curated, and authentic content/ideas to build authority.

5. The Science of Selling

Author: David Hoffeld

Another masterpiece that demystifies the tidbits of sales with proven strategies is a book by David Hoffeld. The author teaches various science and research-based sales techniques that use behavioral economics, social psychology, and neuroscience.

Key Learnings:

• The book delivers on what it says about research-based proven selling formulas.
• It goes deeper in explaining how salespeople should sell and how buyers’ brain forms purchase decisions.
• A conducive and evidence-based approach that includes asking powerful questions, focusing on lifting buyers’ moods, and making sales based on buyers’ actual needs.

Growth Hacking: Effective Marketing Practices to Scale Up

1. Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing and Advertising

Author: Ryan Holiday

Ryan Holiday is one of the bestselling authors of multiple books. If he’s not on your list of business authors to follow, include him immediately. His book Growth Hacker Marketing sheds light on the growth strategies that marketers and founders can take inspiration from.

Key Learnings:

• The book entails how marketing for startups is different today than 20 years ago.
• How startups should pick their target markets and focus on small but a group of early adopters.
• How to make shareable products that go viral, not from your marketing team but from customers.

2. Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make it… and Why the Rest Don’t

Author: Verne Harnish

Another book that should be on your bucket list is Scaling Up by Verne Harnish. The author writes about four key areas and a 4D framework for companies to unlock maximum benefits and grow 10 times.

Key Learnings:

• The book is focused on providing a step-by-step process to grow your business 10x in size.
• It goes on to detail how to effectively delegate tasks to the right people.
• What systems to put in place for measurement, accountability, feedback, and rewards.
• 4D framework: Drivers, Demands, Disciplines, and Decisions for small SaaS businesses to turn into huge profit makers.

3. Hacking Growth: How Today’s Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success

Author: Sean Ellis & Morgan Brown

A must-read in the list of top SaaS books for entrepreneurs, marketers, innovators, and many others who want to grow their company. The author takes you on a ride to hack growth by creating and executing your own custom strategies.

Key Learnings:

• The book instills a growth mindset through building a growth team, determining must-have products, and identifying growth levers.
• Further, it delves deep into customer acquisition, activation, and retention.
• Lastly, it helps business owners continuously monetize their products by mapping user journeys.

4. HYPERGROWTH

Author: David Cancel

Having founded one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies called Drift, David Cancel presents a super impressive piece on how SaaS founders can achieve HYPERGROWTH. The book includes practical advice and frameworks SaaS founders can replicate for their business.

Key Learnings:

• David Cancel shares a modern approach for SaaS product development and management with customer communication at the center.
• The book contains frameworks for becoming customer-driven and growing SaaS your business to achieve Hypergrowth.

Effective Content Production & Marketing

1. Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content

Author: Ann Handley

Generating sales through content marketing is one of the most preferred ways. This book by Ann Handley perfectly dives into how everyone can write effective marketing content. An absolute read for SaaS marketers.

Key Learnings:

• The book presents methods on how to write effective content by including utility, inspiration, and empathy.
• How to avoid common qualifiers that clog up the sentences and aren’t helpful.
• How to frame readers and make them heroes of the story.

2. Content Strategy for the Web

Author: Kristina Halvorson

This book deals with how to create compelling, accurate, and to-the-point content that delivers value to your online audiences. It covers different aspects of producing a useful content strategy for your business. A must-read for marketers who want to adopt content-based growth strategies.

Key Learnings:

• The book delves deep inside creating and delivering useful content for online audiences.
• It explains when and where audiences need meaningful content for conversions.
• How to create compelling, accurate, & to the point content over time and analyze the results.

Customer Journey & Experience

1. Customer Success: How Innovative Companies Are Reducing Churn and Growing Recurring Revenue

Author: Nick Mehta, Dan Steinman, and Lincoln Murphy

Co-authored by three individuals, this book goes on to explain how customer success is vital more than ever and how it works for your business. The book is worth your reading time if you want to kick start the next customer-centric revolution and make the success stick for longer.

Key Learnings:

• The book explains the initial planning to execution stages for customer success.
• It provides a proven and actionable strategy for customer success.
• Implementation stage that deals with tiering customers, structuring the organization, and developing the right cross-functional playbooks.

2. Disrupting Digital Business: Create an Authentic Experience in the Peer-to-Peer Economy

Author: R “Ray” Wang

This book by Ray Wang is an excellent and unmissable read for digital business owners. The book shares insights on how organizations can ride the waves of change to deliver their promise to customers. Do give it a read if you wish to learn more about the peer-to-peer economy for an authentic experience.

Key Learnings:

• The book starts off with why it’s important for brands to keep their promises to customers.
• It further goes on to entail digital disruptions, technology shifts, building an intention-driven mindset, democratizing distributions with P2P.
• The author gives a glimpse into the future, Networked Economies, and living in an era of digital business.

3. Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

Author: Gabriel Weinberg & Justin Mares

Traction by Weinberg and Mares is a beautifully crafted piece of work tailored for startups that can’t get traction during their initial days. It teaches 19 channels using which startups can build their customer base. So, definitely worth giving a read for SaaS founders.

Key Learnings:

• The preface and five chapters in the book give out best practices SaaS or any other business can leverage to grow.
• The authors have provided the “50% Rule” where a team should spend 50% time on product development and the rest 50% on how to get it into customers’ hands.
• A three-step bullseye framework to test different traction channels to find focus-worthy ones.

Over to You

We hope you found some binge-worthy books from this curated list of top Software-as-a-Service books. Sure, you’ll find many others on the internet, but we have covered the most useful ones before you embark on your SaaS startup journey.

Each book is unique on its own and presents a distinct perspective with some of them dwelling a bit on the technical side of the SaaS. Written by industry experts, these books are a must-read to deal with the launch, sales, growth hacking, content marketing, and customer success of your SaaS business.

Do give them a read and let us know which book inspired you the most to take that next leap in the world of SaaS.

Author

Pratik Dholakiya

Pratik Dholakiya is the Founder of Growfusely, a SaaS content marketing agency specializing in content and data-driven SEO.