Books for choosing ways to reach new customers

A business can make an offer customers value and still struggle to reach them. Paying a distributor, building a direct audience and trying a new channel each require work. The useful question is which reading will help you understand that work before committing more money to it.

Our first recommendation is Infinite Upside for the real contribution a distribution relationship can make. Traction, by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares, investigates customer-acquisition channels. Hacking Growth examines a team approach to testing and improving growth. Choose according to whether you need owner context, channel possibilities or a way for the team to learn.

1. Infinite Upside: giving distribution its full cost

   By Vijay Sheth.

   Chapter 9 of Infinite Upside: Building Wealth With Room to Live considers what a distributor supplies. A broker's share of receipts can look expensive until the operator asks what it would take to reach and persuade the same customers directly.

   Replacing that contribution may require people, advertising and time to establish relationships. The relevant alternative is the one the business could realistically build. Keeping more of each sale before acquisition costs does not establish a better overall result.

   Imagine a fictional specialist-tour operator receiving bookings through an established travel business. The owner wants more direct customers, partly to develop a relationship with them. That can be a worthwhile aim while still leaving questions about the cost and work of attracting those customers.

   Read the memoir first when a channel decision has become a complaint about someone else's fee. It keeps the contribution being purchased visible. You can then bring a clearer question to marketing books: what would this business need to learn or build to create another viable route?

2. Traction: exploring the available channels

   By Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares.

   The Portfolio edition of Traction focuses on building a customer base through different acquisition channels and choosing among them. This is the Weinberg and Mares book, rather than Gino Wickman's book with the same main title.

   Choose it when your current menu of possibilities is narrow. The fictional tour operator may be debating only whether to buy more ads, without considering whether another route better matches how prospective travelers make plans.

   The channel breadth is the reason to investigate this title. Bring the business's actual customer, offer and ability to deliver to the reading, rather than look for a channel that is best in the abstract. A route suitable for acquiring users of a free service may have different economics from one that must produce paid, deliverable bookings.

   Its 2015 publication also matters when a passage concerns a particular platform or tactic. Use the book to investigate channel choice, and verify current mechanics before treating an older operational detail as usable today.

3. Hacking Growth: examining how the company learns

   By Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown.

   Hacking Growth presents cross-functional testing and iteration around acquiring, engaging and retaining customers. Its scope extends beyond finding another advertising outlet.

   Investigate it when the business has ideas for reaching customers but no coherent way for its people to learn from them. In a separate fictional tour company, marketing changes the offer while the booking team changes the follow-up. Neither group can explain which version a traveler encountered.

   For that reader, the marketing question includes how the teams learn together. Ellis and Brown's team-oriented treatment is the reason to choose it over another channel overview. Its wider growth scope may be useful if acquisition is being considered separately from what happens when the customer arrives.

   The fictional example is a reading prompt, not an outcome established by the book. A growth experiment still needs to respect the service the company has promised and the people affected by a change.

Choose the acquisition gap

Choose owner context when you need to understand what a distributor contributes. Choose channel exploration when the alternatives are unclear. Choose the testing perspective when the company needs a more coherent way to learn across functions.

The direct-customer comparison follows the costs in a specific fictional business. The sales-conversation selection addresses what happens once a prospective buyer is talking with you.