Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of Evangelism

Discover how to find, be found by, or create a cause to evangelize, and learn the tactics that make a great cause compelling.

A cause is the starting point of evangelism—a product, service, or belief that generates passion, attracts others, embodies a vision, and makes people better.

Select a cause you’ve been considering and apply the five qualities as an acid test, assessing whether your product, service, or idea embodies them to succeed as an evangelist.

Create a cause by anticipating a need, improving an existing need, filling a need, piggybacking on another cause, or applying the Steve Jobs method.

Apply the dicee framework—depth, intelligence, complete, empowering, elegance—to craft great products and services. Learn curve jumping through ice industry examples and iconic innovations to avoid mediocrity.

Explore six motivations for joining causes—doing the right thing, feeling good, contributing to society, proving oneself, joining a social group, and enriching life—while money remains secondary.

Explore why people join your cause by examining six motives, reality checks, benefits, and peer feedback to ensure others believe in the dream.

Pursue innovation by either seeking change without permission, asking for forgiveness, or quitting to start anew, because changing the world matters more than money; make everyone in the company evangelistic.

Develop a plan of action and a framework for your evangelism by defining a two- to three-word mantra, setting goals, and outlining tactics to reach them.

Define your mantra by choosing two to three flexible, distinctive words that express why you exist, avoiding long mission statements and aligning every stakeholder around a shared purpose.

Craft a mantra of two to three words that states why your cause exists, using clear examples such as peace of mind, authentic athletic performance, or democratize knowledge.

Establish clear, ambitious goals that empower people and ship real outcomes; set a few inspiring, stable, and measurable targets to dent the universe.

Create two to four inspiring, difficult, actionable, and measurable goals, using a thousand apps as a tangible milestone to guide Macintosh evangelism efforts.

Turn goals into concrete actions by crafting action oriented, pragmatic tactics that are tightly attached to each goal and flexible when better approaches emerge.

This activity guides you to pair each goal with specific tactics, creating a goal-tactic plan that directly supports realizing every objective.

Create a crisp two- to three-word mantra and tell everyone what you do, so all employees answer 'what do you do?' with 'we democratize design' and align messaging.

Learn to craft, practice, deliver, and revise the pitch, a core skill for evangelists, and leave with a pitch you can take on the road.

Prepare your pitch by knowing your audience, your product, and the facilities, and by practicing. Focus on the cause, not you, and use LinkedIn to tailor the message.

Learn to craft a powerful, personal pitch script that emphasizes impact and urgency, rehearse relentlessly, seek feedback, and refine through what-and-how storytelling.

Participate in an activity to outline your pitch by defining what you want to accomplish, the conclusion, the introduction, and setting slide-by-slide specifics from one to four.

Adopt a tinder-style approach to pitching, favoring quick, compelling messages. Use stories, the opposite test, and the so-what frame to create a brief elevator pitch that intrigues.

Deliver a specific, decisive close by asking for an appropriate, easy, and safe next step. Be flexible and fast, offering options that move the prospect toward agreement.

Engage in an activity to optimize your pitch by testing it with others, collecting feedback on what went well and what sucked, and studying masters like Jobs, Rosling, and Robinson.

Identify a great cause to fuel your evangelism, educate buyers on why your product is differentiated, and tell personal stories of its impact while avoiding jargon.

Sewing your evangelism means taking your cause to the world, applying the key operating principles of going out and evangelizing. These principles, learned over years, guide your outreach.

Plant many seeds to accelerate evangelism by offering broad access and documentation, because you can't predict which seeds will blossom; avoid focusing on a few partners.

Embrace many ideas and let a hundred flowers blossom, resisting early judgment of winners. Unexpected outcomes, like desktop publishing, emerge when you let seeds bloom.

Localize your evangelism by talking to people and companies about personal, concrete benefits instead of megatrends, making the pitch relevant to daily life and local outcomes.

Localize your impact by identifying how your product affects individual people, turning broad causes into relatable, real-person benefits that strengthen your pitch.

Engage with the people who actually do the work, including secretaries, engineers, and product managers, rather than focusing on titles, and pursue middle- and lower-level support for your cause.

Provide a safe first step that makes Cannava easy to try for simple graphics or PowerPoint, offering a low-risk, hard-to-say-no-to invitation.

Don't prequalify who you evangelize; pitch to anyone who will listen, even an intern. Use LinkedIn to learn about each meeting participant's background to inform your evangelism approach.

Explore how social media enables evangelism, making it easier, cheaper, and more effective. Compare past technology like cars, airplane tickets, and fax machines to today's social media-enabled evangelism.

Build your social evangelism strategy by optimizing your profile picture and cover photo, posting value-adding content with images or videos, and engaging through comments and live video.

Post valuable content across social media, test your profile and cover photos for trust and appeal, and go live to share behind-the-scenes insights, embracing experimentation in evangelism.

Cultivate evangelism by pruning and prioritizing a subset of blossoming opportunities, interviewing many applicants, and focusing on the best partners to help them succeed.

Prune and prioritize promising evangelism efforts after planting many seeds to fit finite resources, cutting underperforming projects to focus on the strongest opportunities.

Brainstorm with your team to prioritize leads by assessing potential and mutual benefit, embracing a meritocracy that prunes and focuses on the most promising companies, products, and services.

Apply follow-through by pruning and prioritizing, then actively support winning companies to boost their visibility and demonstrate the power of evangelism.

Inspire others, don't compete with the people and organizations you cultivate, and avoid overlapping products or giving away free tools that undermine their efforts.

Beat your own chest to declare victory and share platform successes, showing evangelists you chose the right path and attracting more innovation and users.

Celebrate small victories with your team, keeping a positive mindset and sharing progress across the organization. Track wins and declare success publicly to show that things are working.

Assess evangelism by industry, development cycle, and costs such as documentation, API, and support; prune early when costs are high and cycles short, otherwise let it roll while belief remains.

Identify the temptations and dangers that arise after evangelism succeeds, and learn what to avoid during the harvest as audiences rally around your product, platform, and brand.

Fight superficiality by ensuring new hires believe in the cause, not for a resume or perks, and require them to demonstrate how they use our product to show true belief.

Subjugate yourself to the cause to keep the movement alive beyond any single leader. Champion the greater good—democracy, meritocracy, greater information, and greater empowerment—over personal fame to dent the universe.

Remember your friends and treat allies with respect as you rise, because former partners can support you when opportunities shift.

Focus on the customer, not the tradition; avoid fanaticism by embracing change and innovations that improve the customer experience, such as digital photography and autonomous cars.

Maintain evangelism across every curve, since success is temporary; reuse evangelists from the current curve for the next, and remember your friends to bridge transitions.

Recruit, train, and deploy internal evangelists to sustain momentum, identifying great candidates and developing them to carry the message forward within the team.

discover why more evangelists multiply impact, driven by genuine belief rather than credentials, and how customer champions inside your install base become your most effective advocates.

Train hires to deeply understand the product and deliver great demos, then create a demanding, informal, realistic, high-touch program that relies on person-to-person and social media engagement.

Deploy trained evangelists with tactical, real-world assignments and delegate them to the field to practice evangelism. Provide the right tools—demos, documentation, and APIs—and empower customer-based advocates to evangelize.

Recruit evangelists who already love the product to cut ramp-up time, provide the right tools and information, and delegate responsibilities so they require minimal supervision for several months.

Prepare questions to gauge if a candidate loves the cause, then conduct a phone interview and use a demo script checklist to verify the candidate hits key points.

Explore the ethics of evangelism and how powerful techniques to influence and persuade people carry responsibility. Learn how evangelism can change lives while demanding accountability.

Apply four acid test questions to evangelism to sharpen your moral compass: verify belief, truth, safety, and alignment with laws and others' best interests.