Selling is hard work. It sucks time and energy from both seller and buyer. Both engage begrudgingly in the act to fulfill a need. If you've been reading SEOmoz for a while, you can probably feel my personal allergy to "sales" as a process and to "selling," even when that's what I'm supposed to do. It causes discomfort to be on the pushing or receiving side of sales and over the last two decades, we, as a generation have been drifting further and further away from it. Door-to-door salesmen are nearly gone. The effectiveness of brand advertising, direct mail, trade show marketing and cold calling sales have all diminished rapidly in favor of a new set of channels we all use to buy - nearly all of which center around the web.

Just look at what marketers themselves have to say about where they'll be spending their dollars over the next few years:

The trend is quite clear - this new bundle of marketing channels that consumers pursue themselves (social media, blogs, SEO, email marketing, etc.) is the future. Traditional marketing tactics may not die, but they're not going to be where businesses invest nor where ROI is going to see dramatic rises. We're living at the beginning of the new era (and if you've been reading SEOmoz, you're likely part of the revolution).

I recently read through and provided some feedback for a book on precisely this topic - Inbound Marketing by Brian Halligan & Dharmesh Shah:

Although the book's contents are likely to be relatively basic for most of us who engage heavily in the SEO and social media worlds, it's precisely the volume you need to give your CEO, VP, director, client, partner who hasn't yet grasped why these channels are so much more valuable than their traditional marketing predecessors.

Here's an excerpt: 

Megaphone vs. Hub
If your website is like most others, it is a one‐to‐many broadcast tool – think megaphone. The web was originally built to be a collaboration platform by Tim Berners‐Lee in the 1980’s. It has taken a couple of decades to get there, but the web is now truly collaborative. If you look at the top ranked websites on the web, they are not broadcasting to their users with a megaphone, they are creating communities where like‐minded people can connect with each other. We need to rethink our websites to take full advantage of the collaborative power of the web – think hub.

If your website is like most others, people visit it once, click around and never return because they heard your sales message and moved on. What we want to do is change the mode of your website from a one way sales message to a collaborative, living, breathing hub on the internet for your marketplace.

It’s Not What You Say – It’s What Others Say About You
If your company is like most others, you put all your web energy on your site. In fact 75% of your focus should be on what is happening off your website about your brand, about your industry, about your competitors, creating communities off your site for people to connect with you and your products, and ultimately driving people back on your site.

One of the reasons I like this book so much is because it distills the somewhat complex, hard-to-explain phenomenon of consumers moving away from a "being sold to" culture to a "finding things for themselves using the web" ecosystem. Grab a few copies, put them on your shelf and hand them out to those you need to convert. Like one of my favorite web volumes of all time, Don't Make Me Think, Inbound Marketing leverages cartoons, illustrations, simple writing and a direct actions to drive understanding and readability.

p.s. A quick note - Inbound Marketing is from the guys who run Hubspot (which is a company I very much admire), so there's some directional recommendation to use their tools, including the grader.com properties. The section on SEO itself isn't hugely robust, but it's a solid overview (I did my best to provide feedback when reviewing to help make it more accurate) and this book isn't meant to be a tome of all human knowledge on these subjects.