[robinhoode]

What books can I read to, at the very least, attempt address the questions in your 3rd paragraph, given how unique every business is? Isn't anything you find a book on sales or marketing so abstract that it's 2 or 3 layers of assumptions before you can talk about projections? How does one begin a career in SaaS sales / marketing? What makes for a good "portfolio piece" in that domain?

[kasey_junk]

One of the things that has made Patrick a "tech. celebrity" is that he has written extensively and openly about this very topic. In particular his brand of uniqueness was to take a lot of things that engineers don't like and then turn it into an engineering problem. He didn't guess, he tested.

Here is the amazing thing, he also did all of us a huge service and wrote it up and put it on the internet for everyone to find!

If you haven't yet, spend as much time as you can diving in his blog. Every post he's written is worth the price of admission, but you could definitely limit your search to the ones that focus on the SaaS sales and marketing aspects.

[galfarragem]

I wouldn't call Patrick a 'tech celebrity', I would call him a 'marketing celebrity' in tech. His writings on how to market yourself are without doubt the best essays I've ever read on the subject.

[tptacek]

See you guys only put it like this because you haven't heard him sing along to TLC. He's really just a straight-up celebrity.

[cpach]

Some starting points:

http://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits/

http://www.hyperink.com/Sell-More-Software-Website-Conversio...