Our short business book reviews will help you hone your reading list to become a B2B expert.
B2B changes quickly and waits for no one. While conventional wisdom is valuable, you’ll be left behind unless you can stay on top of fresh new insights. Whether you graduated two weeks ago or two decades ago, it’s always a good idea to hit the books.
Here are some of the best classic and recent books on B2B – and a few we don’t think are worth your time.
This list is updated as we cross more books off our reading lists. Is there a book you’d like to see us review? Let us know.
“It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.” – Oscar Wilde
Books you should read
| Title | Why Read It? |
|---|---|
| Agile Selling: Get Up to Speed Quickly in Today's Ever-Changing Sales World | Author Jill Konrath has a been a B2B sales rockstar for years, and she proves it yet again with this book. |
| Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions | From "How many people should you interview before you choose someone?” to "How should you organize your closet?,” computer scientists have the optimal strategies. |
| Analysis Without Paralysis: 12 Tools to Make Better Strategic Decisions | This book is a nice summation of some of the authors' (Babette E. Bensoussan and Craig S. Fleisher) earlier work. |
| The Analytical Marketer: How to Transform Your Marketing Organization | An excellent view into data-driven marketing approaches at enterprise scale. |
| B2B Data-Driven Marketing: Sources, Uses, Results | A comprehensive look at B2B marketing data and how caring for it can keep your business running smoothly. See our interview with author Ruth Stevens. |
| B4B: How Technology and Big Data Are Reinventing the Customer-Supplier Relationship | Bad title, but a great book on B2B. |
| Big Bang Disruption: Strategy in the Age of Devastating Innovation | This book is a solid extension of Geoffrey Moore's work over the last 20 years. |
| Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant | This book earns its status as a classic, though it could have lost 100 pages and still been great. |
| Business and Competitive Analysis: Effective Application of New and Classic Methods | We have high praise for this classic on business frameworks. |
| Business War Games: How Large, Small, and New Companies Can Vastly Improve Their Strategies and Outmaneuver the Competition | A solid take on wargaming. |
| Buyer Personas: How to Gain Insight into your Customer's Expectations, Align your Marketing Strategies, and Win More Business | There isn't a better book on buyer personas out there today. See our interview with author Adele Revella. |
| Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice | You have to understand “jobs to be done” before you can adequately measure your success and prepare against disruption. See our in-depth review. |
| The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business | Read this to understand the world of content marketing today and tomorrow. |
| Co-Opetition | There doesn't have to be a loser in order to have a winner. |
| Cracking the PM Interview: How to Land a Product Manager Job in Technology | Even beyond getting a job, this book is a great primer on the world of the product manager. |
| Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers (3rd edition) | Like every other edition, this one is a must read. |
| Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Startup Bubble | Some startups can be more "candy wall" than reality. See our in-depth review. |
| Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy Seals Lead and Win. | A great set of principles any business leader can leverage. See our in-depth review. |
| The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts | AI is about to replace the need for human brilliance in many professions, but there are ways to adapt. See our in-depth review. |
| Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance | When it comes to B2B, talent is important, but grit matters too. |
| Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow | Our AI overlords already decide who people mate with, we’re losing the ability to get from here to there without them, and it’s only going to get worse. |
| The Industries of the Future | This book is basically CliffsNotes for future technology growth areas such as robotics. See our in-depth review. |
| The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail | If you don't read this, you're sure to face a real-world dilemma. |
| The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses | This book details the benefits of planning less and iterating more. |
| Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence | Rather than speculating what an AI future will be like, the author asks what we want it to be like. |
| The Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World | After reading this great book, you may never shake the hand of a management consultant again. |
| Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die | This is a must-read for all product managers who want long-term users. |
| Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives | Disorder is a creativity catalyst. |
| More Sales, Less Time: Surprisingly Simple Strategies for Today's Crazy-Busy Sellers | Productivity Hacks that everyone, not just sellers can use. |
| Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World | A very original work that just might make you an original too. See our in-depth review. |
| Pinpoint: How GPS Is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds | An excellent in-depth analysis of how a blue dot on a map has transformed our identity and the world we navigate. |
| Pitch Anything: An Innovative Method for Presenting, Persuading, and Winning the Deal | Even if you don't do sales, this book has great techniques to get and hold people's attention. |
| The Primes: How Any Group Can Solve Any Problem | Full of a great set of problem-solving frameworks that are both simple and elegant in design. |
| Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World | A must-read for managers in multi-national companies. |
| Rising to Power: The Journey of Exceptional Executives | If an instruction manual for executives exists, this is it. See our interview with author Ron Carucci. |
| Selling to the C-Suite: What Every Executive Wants You to Know About Successfully Selling to the Top | Get inside the heads of executive stakeholders. See our interview with author Nic Read. |
| SEO for Growth: The Ultimate Guide for Marketers, Web Designers & Entrepreneurs | Practical, informed, and as up to date as a Google Search. |
| Stall Points: Most Companies Stop Growing- Yours Doesn't Have To | Though it didn't get as much fanfare as it deserved on its release, this is one of the most important books on the list. See our interview with coauthor Derek van Bever. |
| Superbosses: How Exceptional Leaders Master the Flow of Talent | 10 years of research and over 200 interviews reveals an intimate understanding of how the best leaders operate. See our interview with author Sydney Finkelstein. |
| Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else | If someone seems like a natural at something, they have probably just practiced it a lot more and a lot better. |
| Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations | Tools for how to surf the aftershock of a tech supernova. |
| The Thinker's Toolkit: 14 Powerful Techniques for Problem Solving | This book gives an excellent set of tools and techniques for looking at the world just a bit differently. |
| The Transparency Sale: How Unexpected Honesty and Understanding the Buying Brain Can Transform Your Results | A refreshing look at transparency and honesty in the sales process, and how gaining a buyer’s trust makes their life easier. See our interview with author Todd Caponi. |
| Unleash Possible: A Marketing Playbook That Drives B2B Sales | Why chasing the C-Suite isn't always a good move and many other practical tips. |
| Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy | It has never been more important to use math responsibly. See our in-depth review. |
| 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy | Great insights and formulas galore from an economist's perspective. |
Books you should avoid
| Book Title | Why you should walk on by... |
|---|---|
| Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder | This book is full of fragile observations that are really just common sense. |
| The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life | Game theory for academics, not business people. |
| Beyond the Obvious: Killer Questions That Spark Game-Changing Innovation | Unfortunately, the book's points were obvious too. |
| Competitive Intelligence Advantage: How to Minimize Risk, Avoid Surprises, and Grow Your Business in a Changing World | Too much shilling, not enough informing. |
| The Content Trap: A Strategist's Guide to Digital Change | Don't get trapped into reading this. |
| Controversies in Competitive Intelligence: The Enduring Issues | Great if you're a professor, not so much if you're not. |
| Fascinate: Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation | This book was repetitive, it should have been a single Harvard Business Review article instead. |
| Hacking Marketing: Agile Practices to Make Marketing Smarter, Faster, and More Innovative | There is not enough here to warrant a whole book, a few blog posts would have been better. |
| Hacking Sales: The Playbook for Building a High-Velocity Sales Machine | One of those books where each chapter could have been a bulleted list. |
| Handbook of Business-to-Business Marketing | Academic, awful, and not actionable. |
| The Handbook of Online and Social Media Research: Tools and Techniques for Market Researchers | Not bad, but already dated. |
| How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business | Too much on why you should measure, not enough on how to measure. |
| Jumping the S-Curve: How to Beat the Growth Cycle, Get on Top, and Stay There | Great when it's talking about the importance of talent, but you're better off reading Paul's other book - Big Bang Disruption. |
| Meaningful: The Story of Ideas | Only the first 75 pages or so were meaningful. |
| The New Rules of Sales and Service: How to Use Agile Selling, Real-Time Customer Engagement, Big Data, Content, and Storytelling to Grow Your Business | A Google News search on modern sales and service trends would be a better use of your time. |
| Open Business Models: How To Thrive In The New Innovation Landscape | Chapter 5 on 6 types of business models is solid , but you can skip the rest. |
| The Search for Survival: Lessons from Disruptive Technologies | The Innovator's Dilemma does a better job of covering this subject. |
| The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs | Full of chapters that are more self-help than insight like "Begin with Purpose" & "Keep it Vibrant." |
| Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction | The key point is made within the first 50 pages and the rest is fluff. |
| To Sell is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others | The book's main theme is solid, but the research is a run-on sentence. |
B2B Revealed Podcast
B2B is a complex and challenging field, but most of all, it is fascinating. Join Sean Campbell, CEO of Cascade Insights, as he shares over 20 years of experience in the B2B market.