Quarterly customer marketing recommended reading [part 3]

Posted by: Nick Venturella

A quarterly list of 3 books to read to help improve your B2B customer marketing knowledge and skills.

Here are last quarter's recommended books, in case you missed them.

Here's how it works:

• Three books listed at a time (read one a month)
• The books are shared in a particular order to help you build upon the concepts of the previous book
• Read the books, take notes, highlight useful passages, apply what you've learned in your customer marketing work and analyze what is working and not for your organization - tweak and repeat.

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Carol S. Dweck's, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success is useful especially if you've never fully examined fixed vs. growth mindsets. As you read this book, in some ways its concepts may seem like common sense, but keep in mind these concepts are often overlooked, and unless the negative, fixed mindset habit is reset with a more positive growth mindset, customer marketing will be an uphill battle to wrap your head around.  Author, Dweck, is a world-renowned Stanford University psychologist who explores how and why what we think has a dramatic influence on the outcomes of what we do.

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Nick Mehta, Dan Steinman, and Lincoln Murphy, the pioneers of the modern Customer Success department in software organizations wrote, Customer Success: How Innovative Companies Are Reducing Churn and Growing Recurring Revenue. This is an important book because customer marketers need to understand how customer success departments operate and help drive another aspect of the relationship an organization has with it customers. This will help you understand how to better engage customers, partner with them, and leverage their advocacy for your organization's and the customer's mutual benefit.

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​The Messenger is the Message: How to Mobilize Customers and Unleash the Power of Advocate Marketing by Mark Organ, founder of the advocate marketing software platform, Influitive, and Deena Zenyk a former Influitive employee and one of the original advocate marketing practitioner pioneers. Zenyk now runs her own firm Captivate Collective. This book essentially gives you the basics around how, at scale, you can cultivate your customers into a community of advocates who will help to expand your brand's marketing reach and influence towards more credibly voice-of-the-customer (VoC) marketing, more sales, less churn, less support burden, more VoC influence on product roadmaps, and more.

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​Happy reading!  Tune in next time for another set of book recommendations!