Post-Acquisition Marketing
By: Shiv Narayanan
I had my doubts about this book when I picked it up for free at a tech conference in Toronto, only to have them grow stronger when I saw the book being distributed for free again at another tech conference in Ottawa. Then, my doubts were confirmed by the time I read the third page after the introduction—it’s the author’s marketing material for his company How to SaaS.
I intended to do a book review but thought the space was better used to help educate my readers on how to identify marketing time-wasters. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t read books by Bill Gates or Barack Obama—those have knowledge value. I’m saying you shouldn’t read books by CEOs of smaller, less well-known companies that are only publishing for the novelty of putting “author of” in conference bios and to generate leads for their business.
There’s no doubt about Narayanan’s ability to help companies turn their marketing strategy around or his knack to increase the return on spend as a consultant. This review is about what went wrong in Narayanan’s journey of self-publishing a professional title and the red flags it presented. He showed me the five steps to turn marketing into data-driven revenue generation in 100 days, I’ll show you the five steps to identifying clickbait in paper form in 100 seconds.
One: It’s not published by a nationally or globally recognized publisher.
Lioncrest Publishing is owned by Scribe and shares an identical website design with Houndstooth Publishing, another Scribe company. Scribe is a self-publishing platform for professional books with titles that sound like they belong in an OutBrain or Taboola ad at the bottom of a listicle. The full title of this book was Post-Acquisition Marketing: How to create enterprise value in the first 100 days. Also take a listen to Scribe company titles like Never Lose a Customer Again: Turn any sale into lifelong loyalty in 100 days, 7 Rules to 7 Figures: The entrepreneur’s playbook to freedom, family & fortune, Financial Freedom Blueprint: 7 steps to accelerate your path to prosperity, and Begin with We: 10 principles for building and sustaining a culture of excellence.
Get the gist of it? All of them promote a quick way with clear steps towards a measurable personal or organizational result.
Two: Blatantly generating leads with their readership
Before Post-Acquisition Marketing even gets into the content, Narayanan tells readers at the end of the introduction that it is the same frame work he has used to consult for other companies. Then, at the end of the conclusion, he reiterates his call for action to a consult and advertises his company’s website. When was the last time you read a good non-fiction book that marketed the author’s professional services? Books should be information and for the benefit to the readers that they are willing to pay for to learn. This brings me to red flag number three.
Three: There’s no suggested retail pricing
I couldn’t find it on the barcode on the back cover, couldn’t find it on the barcode in the back page, and pricing was inconsistent online. Amazon charged $5.95 for the e-book and $25 for paperback, Barnes & Noble charged $10.99 for the e-book and $19.99 for paperback, and Indigo charged $16.22 for the e-book with no paperback offered. I don’t recall ever buying a commercially successful book that didn’t have a price tag printed on the back.
Four: Minimal editing to pass visual muster
The book had a lot of unexplained, industry-insider jargon that made the author sound smart, but showed that he only had a very narrow audience for the book. Words like “demand gen engine” and “MQL” and “top-of-funnel” were thrown around at least every other page with not clear definition on what the terms meant. I could infer what they meant from context, but any good white paper would have a page or two after the introduction that lays out all the terms of reference for a wider range of audiences to follow.
There were no spelling errors, but Narayanan consistently misuses capitalization for special reference terms like “Cost per Lead” or “Marketing and Sales.” I don’t recall the last time a physics textbook capitalized “Miles per Hour” or “Nuclear Fission.” It’s simply unnecessary. It’s likely that an editor went through to check the the book passed a minimum quality check before it got sent to print. The language remained inaccessible to most audiences outside the marketing realm. I didn’t read this book to jump right into a boardroom meeting, I wanted the author to demonstrate mastery in the subject by explaining the topic in clear terms.
Five: The only evidence is anecdotal evidence
Narayanan tells six convincing stories about how he helped those companies turn their marketing operations into much more profitable activities and increasing their return on investment. However, there are neither peer reviewed qualitative conclusions nor survey-backed quantitative results sampled in a manner representative of its population. In jargon terms it’s “content thin.” Narayanan keeps reiterating the importance of data, yet he fails to reveal any data on how well he has performed consulting for “hundreds” of companies. He knows how to convince a board of directors, does he know how to convert readers into product believers?
Addressing my own biases
I have previously given a positive review of Pierre Duhamel’s Cracking the Quebec Code co-authored with Canadian polling company Léger. That book was also provided to me for free by the publisher. However, that book was published by a prominent Quebec printer, did not try to generate leads for a business, has uniform pricing across sales channels, was expertly edited for clarity and readability, and backed up anecdotal evidence with authoritative first-hand data from surveys with sample sizes in the thousands.
I am a self-published author. The difference is that I published without the help of a for-profit self-publication company, did not intend on profiting from the proceeds of the sales, have standard pricing across all channels, did not need editing (because it wasn’t meant to be a commercial success), and was clearly intended to be fiction. I published so I can protect my work with statutory copyright laws that cover all works of art for the life of the author plus 50 years, and the easiest way to do that was to self publish to prove that a work was my intellectual property. I didn’t publish for sales.
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