No one really knows what constitutes "best practices" until a Leading Light takes the time and trouble to do the research and document it for the rest of us.

We've been living and breathing marketing for going on three decades. If you want a vastly accelerated education in the subject, here's your required reading list (presented in no particular order):

Kristin Zhivago

Click to buy this bookKristin has always been way out ahead of most marketing observers because she fuses the "art" of marketing with actual revenue generation.

Her practice bridges what should never have become two worlds to begin with. She's a revenue coach to CEOs and a strategic mentor to VPs of Marketing.

Her latest book, Rivers of Revenue, reflects this fusion in a refreshingly unique way. It's part parable, part thesis and part implementation guide. The best books always cause you to rethink the fundamentals...this is definitely one of those books.

Dr. Theodore Levitt

Click to buy this articleRenowned Harvard Business School professor and author of perhaps the most seminal definition of marketing and its relationship to sales, "Marketing Myopia" (Harvard Business Review, 1960).

Dr. Levitt was the first to describe the proper relationship between sales and marketing: "Selling focuses on the needs of the seller, marketing on the needs of the buyer." He was, in essence, the father of customer-centric markteting thought.

Seth Godin

Click to buy this bookFast-forwarding 40 years, everyone even close to eMarketing has been hugely influenced by Seth's thinking. His first book, Permission Marketing, remains the most pivotal articulation of customer-centric marketing in the Internet age.

Seth not only lays out the conceptual framework, he shows us how to put it into practice. While everyone else was all caught up in all the new possibilities being opened up by the Internet, it was Seth who reminded us that we're dealing with humans. In a way, Permission Marketing might just as well have been called Internet Protocol.

His subsequent works make similarly stimulating reading.

Anne Holland and the entire staff at MarketingSherpa

Visit the SherpaStoreKeeping up with Best Practices is the full-time mission of Anne Holland and all the good folks at MarketingSherpa.

With all due respect to the Leading Lights on this page and elsewhere, if you could only have access to one resource to stay at the top of your game, this is the one.

Why? Because all they present are actual experiences of actual marketers complete with numbers. No opinion pieces and no concept pieces. Their newsletters are well-segmented to specific disciplines and their research reports are invaluable.

You can't really say you know what you're doing unless you devour this information on a very regular basis.

Jim Novo

Click to buy the bookWhen you're ready to really give your left brain an invigorating workout, check out Jim Novo's book Drilling Down.

Jim's genius is for data-driven marketing, which is the smartest way to continually improve marketing ROI and maximize the lifetime value of your customers. He tells us how to truly understanding customers by their behavior, how to track and model that behavior and how to use it to make extremely shrewd marketing moves.

This is brilliant stuff made understandable to those of us without advanced degrees in statistics and behavioral modeling. His site's a trove of knowledge, perfect for reference, but the book lays it all out very cogently. He even includes analytical spreadsheet templates.

Patricia Seybold

Click for more about the bookPatricia takes customer-centrism to a pragmatic new level. The Customer Revolution builds on the foundation she laid out in her first book, Customer.com.

In The Customer Revolution she provides the best strategic and tactical roadmap we've seen to date on curing the ubiquitous malady made famous by Ted Levitt in "Marketing Myopia."