Best Customer Success Books You Should Read in 2024

Customer success is the backbone of a successful SaaS business. The way your CS team manages and nurtures customer relationships often determines the size and quality of your customer base and, therefore, affects revenue and growth. 

A smart customer success manager knows very well that customer success is a dynamic and ever-changing field where continuous training, education, and motivation are vital for staying in the game. This is why remaining thirsty for knowledge, new practices, and strategies is crucial. 

Still, it is utterly important to absorb new information from verified sources only, whether we are talking about conferences, blogs, webinars, or books. 

In the following text, we’ll present you with a curated list of the 5 best customer success books written by some of the most recognized and brilliant minds in their field. Let’s go!

Top 5 Customer Success Books You Need to Read

Although CSM books may not be the first place to go to find some innovative and refreshing CS ideas and solutions since we can find anything we need on the internet these days, we assure you that you’ll be surprised. After all, books are still one of the most vital sources of education, regardless of the field. 

The following books cover some of the most crucial topics related to customer success – from inspiring strategies on how to reduce churn and improve ARR (annual recurring revenue) to effective customer onboarding and product adoption practices. Whether you are a customer success manager, chief operating officer, or have just embarked on customer success and wish to grow your career from scratch, we advise you to stay with us as we present you with some of the most exciting and precious books on customer success. 

1. Farm Don’t Hunt
2. The Seven Pillars of Customer Success
3. The Startup’s Guide to Customer Success
4. Practical Customer Success Management
5. Customer Success Mindset

Farm Don’t Hunt: The Definite Guide to Customer Success

The author of this customer success book is Guy Nirpaz, the CEO and founder of Totango, which is one of the leading customer success platforms today. Although the given information is more than enough to encourage you to purchase this book even now, let us intrigue you a bit more and show you what it has to offer. 

Guy Nirpaz of all people knows very well that instead of chasing leads and investing substantially in customer acquisition, one must focus on cultivating lasting and meaningful long-term relationships with customers. The title speaks for itself in this case – “farm don’t hunt,”  but instead, they care for the crops that are already there the best they can, before considering planting new ones. Guy Nirpaz invites you to adopt and cultivate the farming mindset to achieve sustainable growth, improve customer experience and satisfaction, and build a loyal and happy customer base. Within the book, you can find both strategic insights and numerous practical solutions that are applicable to anyone in the SaaS industry.

The Seven Pillars of Customer Success: A Proven Framework to Drive Impactful Client Outcomes for Your Company

This customer success book got a pretty impressive review from one of the leaders of the CS world, Nick Mehta, the CEO of Gainsight, who stated that “everyone in customer success should read this book.”. 

The book is written by Wayne McCulloh, who has over 25 years of experience in the software industry. He decided to share all his expertise in product adoption and customer relationships through the pages of his powerful book, where he provides an effective and well-structured framework for building a solid customer success organization. This is counted as one of the best customer success manager books since inside, you can find actionable tactics and practices for everything from the customer journey, customer segmentation, and customer health to the customer risk framework and customer success plans. Wayne claims that if the organization wishes to foster a culture of customer-centricity, it must adopt a validated framework. When it comes to customer success management, Wayne suggests, that in order to create stronger customer relationships, the team should consider following the next seven pillars of customer success: 

1. Operationalizing customer success
2. Onboarding
3. Adoption
4. Retention
5. Expansion
6. Advocacy
7. Strategic Advisor

The Startup’s Guide to Customer Success: How to Champion the Customer at Your Company

The days when customer success departments were established and developed solely within large companies are long gone. Knowing that a company’s survival can depend on the quality of its customer success initiatives, startups have also adopted customer success as their initial starting point for business growth. 

This is one of those customer success books that keeps you engaged from the first to the last page, especially if you just started a company and are eager to apply as many practical CS strategies as possible. The book is written by Jennifer Chiang, the Head of Customer Success at Seso. It contains valuable insights from leading customer success CEOs and VPs related to growing your first customer success team, reducing churn, deriving maximum value for customers with less work, and time management within the CS initiatives. 

Practical Customer Success Management: A Best Practice Framework for Rapid Generation of Customer Success

As described as “ the complete handbook for CSMs”, this is definitely one of the most important books for customer success managers on our list. 

What we liked about the book is its style, which is concise, clear and abundant with practical solutions needed to become a successful customer success manager. Rick Adams, the author of the book, thoroughly explains each stage of the customer journey and provides guidelines and a toolkit for a CSM to finish each task with as much productivity as possible. 

With its unique and direct yet humorous approach, this CSM book can serve as an invaluable tool for CS professionals of any level. If you wish to build a career as a customer success manager, we certainly advise you to purchase this book, even today. 

Customer Success Mindset

It all starts with a thought. It is a simple thought that you can do better and achieve more to make your customers happy. This book can help you on your way to achieving it. 

Adopting a customer-centric approach and cultivating a customer success mindset are crucial for fostering meaningful and strong customer relationships. Jyo Shukla, an award-winning SaaS leader with vast experience in helping start-ups and large companies build scalable customer journeys, presents you with the two core principles of customer-centricity; humans thrive on shared knowledge and a customer-led growth model. 

The first principle relies on the fact that humans naturally seek to be social and share knowledge. The same rule applies to the business world. We often wish to hear more about the solutions we find attractive and decide whether we want to make a purchase based on the findings. Still, people will only recommend things that they were pleased with in the first place. This book will teach you how to turn each customer into a raving fan who will always spread a good word.

The second principle evolves around the fact that you don’t need to choose between sales-led or product-led growth. It shows you that you can create ties for all the departments and create a unified, harmonious organization. Customer-led growth is based on the fact that the work of all departments is driven by a mutual understanding of the customer’s needs and most desirable outcomes. All this is what makes this book one of the best books on customer success you can purchase today. 

Conclusion

Customer success is an innovative approach in business that has the power to significantly improve customer relationships, improve the overall customer experience and improve business scalability and growth. We recommend you take time to explore and learn from some of the best customer success books we recommended above, as getting fresh perspectives from eminent CS leaders can only be beneficial. If you wish to get some valuable insights online while you wait for the book to arrive, you can always take a look at some of the best customer success blogs online and stay updated about the latest trends and strategies in CS!