Belief sells. If you think that what you're selling is the hottest thing since sliced bread (now, that's a sales job! does bread need to be pre-sliced?) you're much more likely to convince everyone else that is exactly so. No room for quibbling or diffidence when collecting converts.
I was reminded of this when I read about how Mozilla's Firefox recently reached it's one-billionth download. Keep in mind that Microsoft Internet Explorer was the browser when Firefox came out. But scores of the Firefox faithful took it on themselves to spread the word and stuck with it until it gained momentum and snowballed on its own. While a good (preferably great) product is necessary for good sales, it is not sufficient. You need to evangelize, exalt, exhort and extol with passion and dedication to get others to think, better yet, to believe, that your product is the best for them. Even the free stuff, like Firefox, needs a movement to get market share.
On the surface, Firefox may not seem to be the right story for an entrepreneur - no big exit, open source, etc. etc. But it is an encouraging, even inspiring, story of a grass roots campaign by a veritable army of believers which enabled it to get established in the market and grow to an amazing 31% market share competing with IE, the proverbial 800 lb gorilla in the space. The story outlines an interesting marketing tactic and has good lessons, especially for web apps seeking vast audiences. Firefox is still my favorite browser and I look forward to its continued success and am happy to share the RWW post here.
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