Reddit reviews Farm Don't Hunt: The Definitive Guide to Customer Success

Up front I should state that my goal isn't a 100 page book per week, but rather a series of 5-10,000 word ebooks on specific GTM topics. That's pretty doable for me - I can generally kick out 3-4k words a day.

I think someone found them below, but I wrote Blueprints for a SaaS Sales Organization and Farm Don't Hunt. Neither was a bestseller! But both sold several thousand copies and were pretty well received in the communities they targeted - tech sales and customer success executives. On each I worked with an expert in the field. In fact FDH was written with the CEO of a Customer Success platform, Totango, which is pretty well known.

On innovation - I had two of my own startups after leaving Yahoo. The first was an augmented reality platform (in 2008 - way early) which I sold - Gametize. It was cool because I came up with the idea of allowing users to mix and match game mechanics (quests, points, characters, leaderboards etc) to create their own online-offline games. We pivoted from a consumer model to a B2B model - the ultimate GTM maneuver (though maybe not that innovative). My second startup was also innovative - though it failed. I built a platform that let multiple people collaborate on making a movie that tells a story (e.g. has a plot, dialogue etc). No one has done that yet. But I got interested in go to market because of a personal experience.

After my second startup failed and I had spent all the cash from my first exit, I became the General Manager of North America for a mobile ad network, Papaya Mobile. Most of my career had been spent doing business development deals - long lead cycles, big amounts, lots of customization. Ad sales, on the other hand, was pure sales - high velocity, replicability, process. And I was not doing well. My team was falling short. My co-author, Jacco, had a business helping companies with their sales teams, and when he put us through his process it was transformative.

The business went from hundreds of dollars a day in net revenue to tens of thousands. I really wanted to write a book with him to capture that knowledge. One of the points in Blueprints, a big one, was that getting the initial close in a SaaS world is pretty easy - but you make most of your money afterwards. That isn't sales, it's Customer Success. So I got interested in that and wrote the second book.