best saas books

20 Best SaaS Books That Every Founder Should Read

Last Updated: 06/03/2024By
Summary

Best Books That Every SaaS Founder Should Read

Saas business takes a lot of work to build and maintain; for a Saas founder, Saas books are the investment for their business success. Reading books can change your business to the next level or skyrocket; the more wisdom you gain, the more profit you earn. If you are a saas business owner wondering about the top saas book, this list of top saas is for you.

Best SaaS Books For Launch Phase: When Starting Up Your SaaS Business

list of top SaaS books for SaaS leaders

#1. The Lean Startup

The Lean Startup

Image Source – Amazon

Author: Eric Ries

Book Review:
Starting up a new business always has a lot of risk factors to face. To avoid that, The Lean Startup is a must-read for start-up stages with new ideas to make the company agile and flexible. The book concentrates on boosting the companies’ capital efficiency and using human creativity to its highest level. It also explains complex concepts like vanity metrics and validates learning with ease. The Lean Startup is a must-read for budding business owners for practical ideas to grow and bloom their businesses.

Key Takeaways:

  • The writer always refers to ‘lean,’ which means with limited resources to build more value for clients.
  • The book provides new ideas and concepts to constantly test, validate, and improve.
  • Study on measuring things that fetch real growth.
  • Focusing only on what is needed for the next step thus avoids wasting effort and time on other aspects.

#2. From Impossible to Inevitable

From Impossible to Inevitable

Image Source – Amazon

Author: Aaron Ross and Jason Lemkin

Book Review:

The book From Impossible to Inevitable by Aaron Ross and Jason Lemkin answers three questions about growth. The book helps you to take challenging goals and turn them into successes for your organization. The authors of the book help to find the ingredients of hyper-growth and follow the proper steps to implement them in your company.

Key Takeaways:

  • The book explains creating predictable pipelines by building specific sales and marketing processes.
  • The book explains how to increase revenue, lower churn rate, and improve marketing; customer success should be at the heart of your SaaS strategy.
  • Stresses business sales scaling by always hiring people for the right job.
  • How to steadily and effectively grow your revenue from small, medium, and large-sized clients is also explained.

#3. Behind the Cloud

Behind the Cloud

Image Source – Amazon

Author: Marc Benioff

Book Review:

The CEO and chairman of Saleforce.com, Marc Benioff, wrote down his journey to building a SaaS-based revolutionary cloud computing company. The real-life story of Benioff will inspire many entrepreneurs of coming generations to innovate and grow their SaaS businesses faster. The book explains how the author and his team created and used new business, technology, and philanthropic models tailored to this time of extraordinary change.

Key Takeaways:

  • The book tells the readers to stick to their worthy idea from the beginning and think about how to expand into a fast-growing company.
  • It inspires budding entrepreneurs to focus on developing a clean SaaS product at a time.
  • It teaches a fantastic lesson for SaaS founders to constantly think about the customer, even if it hurts their business.
  • One section of the book is dedicated to how businesses should respect different cultures when expanding globally.

#4. The Hard Thing About the Hard Things

The Hard Thing About the Hard Things

Image Source – Amazon

Author: Ben Horowitz

Book Review:

The author of the book is Ben Horowitz, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz. He analyzes the daily problems confronting leaders, selling, managing, investing, buying, and sharing the insights he’s gained developing and supervising technology companies. A lifelong rap fanatic, he amplifies business lessons from his favorite songs.

Key Takeaways:

  • The book focuses on three vital traits that most successful CEOs have.
  • The book emphasizes screw-ups that are an inevitable part of running a business instead of focusing on how to do things correctly.
  • The author is funny yet brutally honest and straightforward in penning his wisdom in the book.

#5. Value as a Service Embracing the Coming Disruption

Value as a Service Embracing the Coming Disruption

Author: Rob Bershteyn

Book Review:

The book’s author, Rob Bernshteyn, is confident in making predictions across many industries. Customers will want to understand the exact value they are being provided and want a quantifiable difference as they compare their options. The book examines how businesses rapidly gravitate towards offering customers measurable value.

Key Takeaways:

  • It covers a step-by-step guide on better delivering and measuring client value.
  • The author explains different business areas necessary for providing Value as a Service.
  • It also defines step-by-step how you can provide value as a service.

Best SaaS Books For Selling Phase: To Keep Your Business Running

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

Hacking Sales by Max Altschuler

Image Source – Amazon

Author: Max Altschuler

Book Review:

The author of the book Max Altschuler has helped companies with high-tech sales and efficient strategies to boost more revenue with fewer resources. The book shows you the most effective changes you can make to improve your sales. It helps you transform your company’s sales using the best tools, tactics, and strategies. This book is your roadmap to fast and efficient revenue growth by Building, refining, and enhancing your pipeline over time, closing deals faster, and using the right tools for the job.

Key Takeaways:

  • The book shows how to Identify your Ideal customer and your total addressable market.
  • Appropriately target your campaigns and build massive lead lists
  • Learn effective hacks for social media outreach.
  • Overcome customer objections before they happen.

#7. The SaaS Sales Method: Sales As a Science

The SaaS Sales Method Sales As a Science

Image Source – Amazon

Authors: Jacco Van Dar Kooiji and Fernando Pizzaro

Book Review:

The book’s authors, Jacco Van Der Kooij and Fernando Pizarro, explain the science of sales in its vital elements. Unlike any previous book, The SaaS Sales Method exposes each stage in revenue production, from marketing to sales, to customer success. It also defines how revenue leaders should structure their processes and organizations.

Key Takeaways:

  • The book provides secrets for SaaS marketing scientific framework and to understand and improve sales systems.
  • From marketing to sales and customer success, it provides each stage in revenue production,
  • It also explains how SaaS founders should structure their processes, workflows, and training.

#8. Product Demos That Sell: How to Deliver Winning SaaS Demos

Product Demos That Sell

Image Source – Amazon

Author: Steli Efti

Book Review:

Product Demos That Sell from Steli Efti is one of the most recommended and best SaaS sales books, which explains the essential Product demos for selling SaaS products. Steli presents a no-B.S. guide on effectively delivering winning SaaS product demos by training thousands of SaaS founders, directors, sales reps, and marketers.

Key Takeaways:

  • Ensure prospects attend your demos and discover why your demos fail to close the deal.
  • Customize your demo to your prospects’ needs, ensuring you better differentiate yourself from competitors.
  • Deal with questions and objections during the demo, improving your demo-win rates.

#9. The Science of Selling

The Science of Selling

Image source – Amazon

Author: David Hoffeld

Book Review:

This book by David Hoffeld is a gem of sales tidbits with proven strategies based on social psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics. David Hoffeld, Leading sales trainer and researcher, shows salespeople how to align and sell and how the brain naturally forms buying decisions, dramatically increasing their ability to close the deal. The Science of Selling is an essential resource for all saas marketers looking to stay in this competitive selling environment to advance their business goals and boost their revenue.

Key Takeaways:

  • The book provides research-based, proven selling formulas.
  • It explains how salespeople should sell and how buyers’ brains form purchase decisions.

#10. Social Selling: Techniques to Influence Buyers and Changemakers

Social Selling by Tim Hughes

Image Source – Amazon

Author: Tim Hughes

Book Review:

The author of the book Tim Hughes adopts a clear strategy for social selling, including how to build authority online and gain influence in target communities. Social Selling simplified a practical step-by-step for specific and proven techniques. This book is essential for sales professionals and digital sales directors who want to expand the power of social selling in their businesses.

Key Takeaways:

  • The Book helps to use networks purposefully to build social trust and create a high-quality community.
  • Explain clearly to develop real influence and authority in the subject area and connect.
  • Scale the social selling strategy across an organization.

Best Saas Books On Growth Hacking

#11. Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It… and Why the Rest Don’t

Scaling Up by Verne Harnish

Image Source – Amazon

Author – Verne Harnish

Book Review:

The book’s author is Verne Harnish, the founder, and CEO of Gazelles and Growth Guy syndicated columnist. Throughout the book, he shows the most significant all-time four business decisions area, i.e., People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash. The book contains new one-page tools, an updated strategic plan, and a Rockefeller habits checklist.

Key Takeaways:

  • The book provides a step-by-step process to grow your business 10x in size.
  • It details how to delegate tasks to the right people effectively.
  • Details regarding what systems need to implement for accountability, measurement, rewards, and feedback

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

Hacking Growth by Sean Ellis

Image source – Amazon

Authors: Sean Ellis & Morgan Brown

Book Review:

The book’s authors, Sean Ellis & Morgan Brown, take you on a ride to hack growth by creating and executing your custom strategies. This book helps you to implement your own custom-made growth hacking strategy. It is a must-read for any manager, marketer, or entrepreneur looking to replace wasteful big bets approaches with more cost-effective, consistent, replicable, and data-driven results.

Key Takeaways:

  • The book shares the practical toolkit that teams and companies in all industries can use to increase their customer base and market share.
  • It dives deep into customer acquisition, activation, and retention.

#13. Hypergrowth

Hypergrowth

Image Source – Amazon

Author: David Cancel

Book Review:

Author of the book, David Cancel, serial entrepreneur, and Drift co-founder/CEO, shares a modern approach to building products. The book teaches the Responsive Development (RD) methodology pioneered at Performable, scaled at HubSpot, and now built into products at Drift. The book provides frameworks and practical advice for saas founders to replicate in their businesses.

Key Takeaways:

  • The book gives a new approach to building products that add the customer to the equation.
  • The Three-Person Team is the customer-driven way to structure engineering teams, in which each team consists of a tech lead who manages two other engineers.

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

Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content

Image source – Amazon

Author: Ann Handley

Book Review:

This book by Ann Handley is excellently written, an absolute read for SaaS marketers, and gives expert guidance. The book gives actionable how-to advice designed to get results. It also gives an insight into content creation, production, and publishing processes and strategies. The lessons and rules from the books apply across all your online assets, like web pages, home pages, landing pages, blogs, email, and marketing offers, as well as in social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Ann delivers a practical, deconstructed strategy approach to create compelling and competent content.

Key Takeaways:

  • The book provides methods on how to create effectively, along with inspiration, utility, and empathy.
  • Also, the book teaches how to avoid standard qualifiers that clog up the sentences, which need to be revised.

#15. Content Strategy for the Web

Content Strategy for the Web

Image Source – Amazon

Author: Kristina Halvorson and Melissa Rach

Book Review:

Content Strategy for the Web is a must-read for marketers who want to adopt content-based growth strategies. It explains how to create and deliver valuable, usable content for your online audiences when and where they need it most. It also shares content best practices so you can get your next website redesign right, on time, and budget.

Key Takeaways:

  • Deep understanding of content strategy in the saas industry and its business value.
  • Discover the people behind a successful content strategy.
  • Achievable and more thoughtful decisions about what content to create.

Best Books on SaaS Metrics and Customer Journey

#16. Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster

Lean Analytics

Image Source – Amazon

Author: Alistar Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz

Book Review:

This book tells you how to use one key metric to maximize the growth of your SaaS business. With the help of the book, you can adjust growth plans and other goals based on the data to aim to grow sustainably, from having a comprehensive understanding of SaaS metrics to using them to be data-driven instead of just data-informed.

Key Takeaways:

  • Lean Analytics will guide you with real-life examples through interviews with industry experts and case studies.
  • Lean Analytics to help you build a better and more successful startup faster and through five distinct stages.

#17. Scaling Lean: Mastering the Key Metrics for Startup Growth

Scaling Lean Mastering the Key Metrics

Image Source – Amazon

Author: Ash Maurya

Book Review:

Scaling Lean is one of the best books about SaaS Metrics. The author Ash Maurya allows you to predict the success of your startup with the help of key metrics. Ash Maurya pairs the real-world and makes case studies of other successful venture examples like Tesla, Hubspot, and Airbnb.

Key Takeaways:

  • A start-up has three phases: Problem Solution Fit, Product Market Fit, and Scale. Each step requires a different direction for the company.
  • Establishing repeatability in a business model is an essential requirement for a scalable start-up.
  • The book says that It’s all about getting customers to products to solve their problems and make them happy.

#18. The essential SaaS metrics guide: how to grow your subscription business by measuring it the right way

the essential SaaS metrics

Image Source – Amazon

Author: Leonardo Faria

Book Review:

The book’s author will guide you through measuring and improving what matters to grow your subscription business simply and practically. The book is aimed at helping subscription professionals understand which variables matter and how to measure them and act on the results.

Key Takeaways:

The book has compiled a list of the five most important SaaS metrics that you can track and use for,

  • Growth, Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA)
  • Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC),
  • Customer Lifetime Value (CLV),
  • Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)

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

Customer Success by Nick Mehta

Image source – Amazon

Author: Nick Mehta, Dan Steinman, and Lincoln Murphy

Book Review:

The authors of the books worked in SaaS sales, which will help them to form strategies for correctly utilizing SaaS metrics. The language of the book is accessible even to the freshest people in the SaaS business. The book differentiated between customer success and related terms like customer support or customer experience. The authors’ definition of customer success was simple, and the book says it’s building and cultivating customer loyalty.

Key Takeaways:

  • The customer success book teaches about gaining loyalty from your customers.
  • The book tells us to keep churn less as possible, and empowering our customer success team is the best way.
  • Separate your customers based on their value, but always ensure they are cared for personally through technology.

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

Disrupting Digital Business

Image Source – Amazon

Author: R “Ray” Wang

Book Review:

The author of the book Ray Wang provides a different approach once, insightful and practical. By observing the march of technological progress over the past few decades, Wang analyzes the trends businesses must pay attention to and how they should react. When taken seriously, those trends require a new way of thinking about business.

Key Takeaways:

  • The book begins with why brands must keep their promises to customers.
  • It further provides technology shifts, digital disruptions, and building an intention-driven mindset.
  • The book also gives a glimpse into the future, living in an era of digital business.

Final Thoughts

These are our top 20 list of the best SaaS books, categorized based on different phases of b2b SaaS business and a must-have for a SaaS founder or a CEO. Our top list will help you get all the valuable tips to launch successfully and grow your business.