Podcast appearances and mentions of kristin zhivago

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Kristin Zhivago (President, Zhivago Partners & Author, Roadmap to Revenue: How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy) Kristin emphasizes supporting the customer's buying journey. Before founding Zhivago Partners in 2017, she spent decades as a revenue coach, transforming marketing and sales departments for businesses of all sizes. Kristin's innovative strategies and deep understanding of customer needs have made her a trusted expert in digital marketing and sales.

Ann Carden introduces Kristin Zhivago, who shares her journey and insights on AI's business impact, selling businesses without employees, and market challenges. They discuss issues with digital marketing agencies and Kristin's new book on people-centered business, emphasizing human connection.

Want to increase your revenue?In this episode of The Business Ownership Podcast I interviewed Kristin Zhivago. Kristin is the president of Zhivago Partners, a digital marketing management company that serves both B2B and B2C clients in a variety of industries. She is a revenue coach, helping CEOs and entrepreneurs sell the way her customers want to buy. Her 5-star book, Roadmap to Revenue: How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy was chosen by Forbes as one of the top sales and marketing books. Zhivago speaks frequently on the subject of the customer's buying process, which she was one of the first to identify as being key to selling to today's customers, and about building your business to compete effectively in our fast-changing, hyper-competitive markets.Learn how to fine tune your marketing so that your customers can buy easily, and, you can increase your revenue. Check this out! Show Links: "Roadmap to Revenue: How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy Book" on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Roadmap-Revenue-Sell-Your-Customers-ebook/dp/B07FMN9BPP?ref_=ast_author_mpbZhivago Partners Website: https://zhivagopartners.com/Book a call with Michelle: https://www.AwarenessStrategies.com/m30Join our Facebook group for business owners to get help or help other business owners! The Business Ownership Group - Secrets to Scaling: https://www.facebook.com/groups/businessownershipsecretstoscalingLooking to scale your business? Get free gifts here to help you on your way: https://www.awarenessstrategies.com/

Have you ever sat across from someone, listened intently to their story, and suddenly realized it has completely changed your perspective? That's the kind of shift that happens when businesses truly start to listen to their customers—not just hear them, but deeply understand their experiences, desires, and frustrations. It's this understanding that can pivot a company's direction towards real success. With such a cluttered and noisy marketing environment, where shouting the loudest often gets mistaken for being the most effective, the voice of the customer is often overlooked. Many businesses are so wired into the loop of speculation and assumption that they miss the strong undercurrents of customer sentiment that actually drive sales. We're living in an era where the customer's voice can either crown you as a market leader or blatantly reveal that your "innovative" product is just not cutting it. Customer behavior and their buying journey are more important than ever, and businesses need to adapt by adopting a customer-centric strategy. On this episode, I'm thrilled to explore this topic with Kristin Zhivago, the founder and president of a digital marketing agency, Zhivago Partners, where the bring in qualified leads to their clients, while helping clients with pre- and post-sale customer interactions that lead to higher revenue. Kristin is the author of the 5-star book, “Roadmap to Revenue: How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy,” and is an expert on the customer's buying process. She spent decades as a revenue coach to company owners and CEOs, helping them grow their revenue by understanding what their customers want to buy, and how they want to buy it. She's worked for hundreds of companies and interviewed thousands of their customers. She has developed a system that helps marketers and top management quickly and inexpensively find out what their customers are really thinking when they set out to buy, so they can use this information to reverse-engineer successful sales and create new sales in quantity. Kristin has spent her life helping others realize their dreams. Links Mentioned: "Roadmap to Revenue: How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy" on Amazon: https://amzn.to/49kgkmT Zhivago Partners website: zhivagopartners.com

Kendra talks imperfect marketing with revenue coach Kristin Zhivago. With decades of experience, Kristin helps companies sell more by truly understanding their customers.Topics covered in today's conversation include:- Common marketing mistakes to avoid- The importance of caring about your clients- Following Amazon's customer-focused example- Getting candid insights directly from customers- Kristin's pivotal early sales lesson- and more. Join Kendra every Tuesday and Thursday as she discusses how to make progress and grow through Imperfect Marketing.Resources:Kristin's book "Roadmap to Revenue": https://a.co/d/gwPcmtx Link to Zhivago Partners website https://zhivagopartners.com/You can find Kristin Zhivago:On Zhivago Partners website https://zhivagopartners.com/On LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristinzhivago/ Looking to save time or get more information from AI?If you're just starting out with AI or looking to enhance your outputs, my book 'Mastering AI in Communications' is your essential guide. Whether you're a beginner or ready to take your skills to the next level, grab your free electronic copy or purchase it on Amazon right here!Amazon: https://a.co/d/bhblVcGFree e-version: https://courses.kendracorman.com/aibookDon't miss this opportunity to transform your approach and make AI your most powerful tool yet in saving time and improving efficiency!

Today on the Grownlearn podcast, we sit down with Kristin Zhivago, a seasoned revenue coach and founder of Zhivago Partners, to unravel the intricacies of successful selling and marketing. With a wealth of experience helping CEOs and entrepreneurs understand their customers' needs, Kristin shares valuable insights on building businesses that not only thrive but also make a lasting impact. In this episode, we delve into the psychology of business, exploring how love—care for employees, customers, and oneself—forms the foundation of successful enterprises. Kristin's journey from being the first woman to sell machine shop tools in the U.S. to becoming a renowned business psychologist offers unique perspectives on selling, marketing, and building robust infrastructures for sustainable growth. This episode provides actionable strategies, current trends in selling and marketing, and the essential elements for building a business that not only succeeds but lasts. Contact Kristin Zhivago on: https://zhivagopartners.com/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Kristin Zhivago is a seasoned business consultant, author, and thought leader specializing in customer-centric marketing strategies and revenue growth.   Kristin is best known for her expertise in understanding and mapping the customer's buying process, helping businesses align their sales and service strategies with the evolving needs and expectations of their customers.  She is the author of the acclaimed book "Roadmap to Revenue: How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy," which provides actionable insights and practical guidance for businesses aiming to improve their sales processes and maximize revenue. Throughout her career, Kristin has worked with companies of all sizes, from startups to Fortune 500 corporations, across various industries. Her approach emphasizes the importance of authentic customer engagement, transparency, and continuous improvement to deliver exceptional customer experiences and drive long-term success. In addition to her consulting work and writing, Kristin is a sought-after speaker and podcast guest, sharing her expertise and insights on customer-centric marketing, sales optimization, and revenue growth strategies.  She is dedicated to helping businesses thrive in today's competitive landscape by putting the customer at the center of their operations and decision-making. Key Takeaways 1. Customer-Centric Approach: Emphasizing the importance of understanding and aligning with the customer's needs and preferences throughout the buying process. 2. Sales Training Transformation: Highlighting the need for sales training that prioritizes active listening and addressing specific customer questions rather than rigidly following a scripted sales pitch. 3. Empowering Customer Service: Recognizing the value of empowering customer service teams to focus on satisfying customer needs rather than solely on making sales, leading to increased customer satisfaction and revenue growth. 4. Continuous Improvement: Advocating for a culture of continuous improvement, where businesses regularly assess and adapt their strategies to better meet customer expectations and drive long-term success. Timestamps [00:17:46] The challenges salespeople face when they prioritize selling over listening to customer needs, highlighting the impact of readily available information on customer behavior. [00:23:12] The pitfalls of outsourcing and the importance of maintaining quality and cultural understanding, illustrated by an example of offshore content creation leading to subpar results due to cultural differences. [00:25:44] The prevalence of meaningless marketing content and the need for authenticity and relevance in customer communications, emphasizing the importance of addressing customer needs rather than relying on generic messaging. [00:28:59] Levels of scrutiny applied to purchasing decisions and the necessity for businesses to anticipate and address customer questions at each stage of the buying process. [00:33:39] The importance of gathering the customer's truth through open and objective conversations to inform business strategies and ensure alignment with customer needs, advocating for a customer-centric approach to drive success. Quotes 1. "Your customers are eager to tell you their truth, and talking to just 5 to 7 of them reveals clear patterns."  2. "We're not selling to make friends; we're just trying to get something in our hands that will work."  3. "You don't have to hire me; I wrote the book so people could do it themselves." Connect with Kristin LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristinzhivago/  Website - https://www.zhivagopartners.com/  X - https://twitter.com/KristinZhivago 

Today, we use marketing superpowers to confront the crisis plaguing the marketer's mind - the insidious control of outdated ideas. While some ideas might worry marketers about the competition, they could miss ways to turn rivals into allies and supercharge content marketing results.  That struggle intensifies during economic turbulence. Should marketers alter their language or lower prices?  Revenue coach, author and modern marketing expert Kristin Zhivago shares some answers. Finally, beware of the deceptive allure of 'free' offerings! We'll reveal the right and wrong times to deploy this strategy. Join us as we dismantle the shackles of self-defeating marketing mindsets and learn new ways to view competitors and connect with audiences. Show notes - https://marketingsuperpowerpodcast.com/episode/escaping-marketing-mind-control

In this episode of Chasing the Insights, I talk to digital marketing guru Kristin Zhivago. Kristin talks to us about how to grow your business without having to guess how to market to your customers. Kristin Zhivago is the founder and president of a digital marketing agency, Zhivago Partners. Their main goal is to bring in qualified leads to their clients, while helping clients with pre- and post-sale customer interactions that lead to higher revenue. Kristin is the author of "Roadmap to Revenue: How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy," and is an expert on the customer's buying process. She spent decades as a revenue coach to company owners and CEOs, helping them grow their revenue by understanding what their customers want to buy, and how they want to buy it. She's worked for hundreds of companies and interviewed thousands of their customers. She has developed a system that helps marketers and top management quickly and inexpensively find out what their customers are really thinking when they set out to buy, so they can use this information to reverse-engineer successful sales and create new sales in quantity. Kristin has spent her life helping others realize their dreams, and believes that the real answer to success in business is love, leverage, and logistics.

Kristin Zhivago, a seasoned entrepreneur and marketing expert, has a rich background in tech and years of experience working with tech companies, which has shaped her understanding of the importance of customer understanding in business and self-publishing. She firmly believes that customer understanding is crucial and emphasizes the need to figure out what customers want rather than guessing. Her book, "Roadmap to Revenue," provides a framework for interviewing customers, asking the right questions, and using this information to market effectively. Zhivago also acknowledges the challenges that established companies face in adapting to digital marketing and offers her agency's services to help increase revenue through digital marketing strategies. Join Kim Thompson-Pinder and Kristin Zhivago on this episode of the Author to Authority podcast to delve deeper into these insights.

Kristin Zhivago author of " by The Best Business Minds

Kristin Zhivago is the president of Zhivago Partners, a digital marketing agency that uses successful digital marketing methods and channels to produce qualified leads for its B2B and B2C clients. Zhivago is author of “Roadmap to Revenue: How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy,” selected by Forbes as one of the top […]

Kristin Zhivago is the president of Zhivago Partners, a digital marketing agency that uses successful digital marketing methods and channels to produce qualified leads for its B2B and B2C clients. Zhivago is author of “Roadmap to Revenue: How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy,” selected by Forbes as one of the top […] The post Kristin Zhivago With Zhivago Partners appeared first on Business RadioX ®.

Sales…. Arghh - for so many heart centred service providers, Sales is a hot potato topic! We - I include myself - don't want to sell! We want to serve! Yet how can you truly serve if you don't sell? My guest today is Kristin Zhivago, President of Zhivago Partners, a digital marketing agency. Krisitn knows her stuff, having spent decades as a revenue coach - helping entrepreneurs to generate revenue, knowing and owning their figures and selling! Kirstin speaks about Mindset Driven Marketing. You need to know the mindset your customer is in. She says it's quite simple:  Sales is about the desires your customers have, the concerns your customers have and the questions your customers have.  You must listen and speak to them! Zhivago Partnershttps://zhivagopartners.com/ Kristin Zhivago on LI https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristinzhivago/ Book: Roadmap to Revenue on Amazon Marianne on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marianne-rutz/ Rutz Consulting Website: https://rutzconsulting.com/   This Podcast is produced by: Andrew Madden Photography & Media Production

“Things really do work out when you take care of everybody, and you take care of the people love.” - Kristin ZhivagoToday's featured bestselling author is revenue coach and leading expert on the customer's buying process, Kristin Zhivago. Kristin and I talk about her book, “Roadmap to Revenue: How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy”, mindset-driven marketing, and more!! Key Things You'll Learn:How her entrepreneur journey beganThe 3 Things Your Website Must Have to Effectively Sell More Products & ServicesThe importance of interviewing your customers and why surveys don't workThe major setback that set Kristin up for major success as an entrepreneur Kristin's Site: https://zhivagopartners.com/Kristin's Book: https://www.amazon.com/Roadmap-Revenue-Sell-Your-Customers/dp/0974917923/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Kristin+Zhivago&qid=1659202658&s=audible&sr=1-1-catcorr The opening track is titled "Duel Accelerator EX Battle - Yu-Gi-Oh Stardust Accelerator R-MIX" by Rukunetsu (aka Project R). Click on the following link to listen and cop the full tune. https://soundcloud.com/rukunetsu/duel-accelerator-ex-battle-2022?utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing You May Also Like… Ep. 479.5 – “How Entrepreneurs Can Be More Productive, Make Better Decisions, & Increase Their Bottom Lines” with Belinda Ellsworth (@stepintosuccess): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-4795-how-entrepreneurs-can-be-more-productive-make-better-decisions-increase-their-bottom-lines-with-belinda-ellsworth-stepintosuccess/ Ep. 488.5 – “Create, Innovate & Dominate” with Tracy Hazzard (@hazzdesign): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-4885-create-innovate-dominate-with-tracy-hazzard-hazzdesign/ Ep. 438.5 – “Creatively Lean” with Bella Englebach (@HumansLean): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-4385-creatively-lean-with-bella-englebach-humanslean/ 106 - "You Were Born to Fly" with Daniel Gomez (@DanielInspires): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/106-you-were-born-to-fly-with-daniel-gomez-danielinspires/ 44 - "How to Work With Jerks" by Eric Williamson (@TTS_Williamson): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/44-how-to-work-with-jerks-by-eric-williamson-tts_williamson/ Ep. 493 – “The Three R's of Business Growth” with Edwin Dearborn (@edwindearborn): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-493-the-three-rs-of-business-growth-with-edwin-dearborn-edwindearborn/ Ep. 497 – “The Financial Mindset Fix” with Joyce Marter (@Joyce_Marter): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-497-the-financial-mindset-fix-with-joyce-marter-joyce_marter/ Ep. 502 – “A Leadership Development Strategy To Bond And Unite” With Amy P. Kelly (@AmyPKelly): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-502-a-leadership-development-strategy-to-bond-and-unite-with-amy-p-kelly-amypkelly/ 113 - "Business, Faith & Empowering Women Over 40" with Jen Du Plessis (@JenDuPlessis): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/113-business-faith-empowering-women-over-40-with-jen-du-plessis-jenduplessis/ Ep. 515 – “From Food Stamps to 7-Figure Mompreneur” with Iva Paleckova (@IvaPaleckova): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-515-from-food-stamps-to-7-figure-mompreneur-with-iva-paleckova-ivapaleckova/ Ep. 468 – “The Power Of Mindset” with Hayk Tadevosyan (@hayktadevosyan): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-468-the-power-of-mindset-with-hayk-tadevosyan-hayktadevosyan/ Ep. 477 – “P.S. You're a Genius” with Kelly Trach (@kellytrach): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/ep-477-ps-youre-a-genius-with-kelly-trach-kellytrach/ #Bonus Ep. – “Structure Creates Freedom” with Brad A. Milford (@BAMilford): https://www.goingnorthpodcast.com/bonus-ep-structure-creates-freedom-with-brad-a-milford-bamilford/

This week, Dave Molenda and Kristin Zhivago discuss how to increase your sales revenue by being more customer-orientated. Through a process of “reality check research,” Kristin explains how a company can identify their blind spots through customer feedback and work to improve their bottom line in the process.

The primary clients we serve today are established businesses that are struggling to figure out how to generate a return on their digital marketing. I've been in tech for decades and ran an advertising agency with my husband for a decade before becoming a revenue coach. Over the years I've helped companies of various sizes find success through digital marketing and position them for growth. We typically work with businesses that have $2m to $10m in annual revenue.  Mindset driven marketing is a concept I coach clients on frequently. You hear a lot of people talk about buyer personas but truthfully an 18-year-old guy is likely to buy a blender for the same reasons an 80-year-old guy would buy it. What I realized through my work is there is a gap between what the seller thinks the buyer wants and what the buyer truly wants. To me, the mindset of the customer is a combination of their desires, concerns, and questions. These are critical to know when thinking about any marketing because you want to address those immediately and show the customer how your product or service is the answer.  Running a successful business today requires that your systems and processes be cloud-based. Every business has to build a digital infrastructure to support its operations or it will fail. The key to a successful system is that you can easily capture the needed information and that each system integrates with the other. Even if you're a small business with a limited budget, there are dozens of platforms out there that are affordable that can help you start to automate your processes.  The foundation of any good marketing campaign is measurement. We set up dashboards for our clients that they can access anytime to see where their money is being spent and what it is producing for them. Digital advertising is the quickest way for most businesses to generate leads but a good content marketing campaign with great copy will deliver you the most cost-effective leads over time. However, it takes time to build up a lead funnel from content marketing so you need to recognize that you won't see immediate results like you would with digital marketing.   Resources Shared: Zhivago PartnersRoadmap to Revenue by Kristin ZhivagoThryv

Kristin Zhivago is the president of Zhivago Partners, a digital marketing management company that serves both B2B and B2C clients in a variety of industries. Her digital agency is comprised of a core infrastructure team, and a variety of specialists in the various digital methods and media. Zhivago's career began in the high-tech industry; she and her husband, through their high-tech agency, helped introduce and market all of the technologies we take for granted today. When the web emerged as a commercial medium, she branched out into other industries and re-invented herself to become a revenue coach, helping CEOs and entrepreneurs sell the way her customers want to buy.  Her 5-star book, Roadmap to Revenue: How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy was chosen by Forbes as one of the top sales and marketing books. Zhivago speaks frequently on the subject of the customer's buying process, which she was one of the first to identify as being key to selling to today's customers, and about building your business to compete effectively in our fast-changing, hyper-competitive markets. In this episode we discuss: Kristin's upbringing An early lesson in sales Going to school for music What gift her brother gave her  And much more! Connect with Kristin: Website: https://zhivagopartners.com/ Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristinzhivago/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ZhivagoPartners/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/KristinZhivago Thanks for listening! We hope you enjoyed this episode! Connect with Jordan: https://jordanjmendoza.com/about-me Check out our Sponsors: https://www.byotpodcast.com/sponsors/  Check out our Partners of the Show: https://www.byotpodcast.com/p/partners/  Leave us a 5 Star review!

Welcome to Not Another Marketing Podcast where I'm talking to Kristin Zhivago, founder of Zhivago Partners, a digital marketing management agency. We're talking about how to market a little more ethically and ask more questions.

Should we be tracking all our customers to the Nth degree, finding out every little detail about them or should we be a bit more ethical in our approach?In this episode I'm chatting with Kristin Zhivago, founder of Zhivago Partners and author of Roadmap to Revenue: How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy. Kristin explains how we can be a little more ethical with our marketing efforts and how asking the right questions can get us better answers.You can find Kristin on the Zhivago Partners website and on LinkedIn.Can I quickly mention is that Not Another Marketing Podcast is totally ad free and I'd love it if you could give the pod a quick shout on social media and subscribe via your podcast app.Check out more episodes at https://www. jtid.co.uk/podcastsI'd also love you to join my digital marketing Facebook group called Not Another Facebook Marketing Group

From Forbes recognizing today's guests book as one of the top 6 marketing and sales books, to decades as a successful revenue coach, this is an episode you do not want to miss.As President of Zhivago Partners, Kristin Zhivago runs a digital marketing management company. "We are absolutely committed to generate qualified leads for our clients, using the full range of appropriate digital techniques and channels. We tap into the Mindset of the customer to make spot-on offers, resulting in the win-win outcome for our clients and their customers. I founded and now manage the company with the goal of helping all our clients "sell the way your customers want to buy" including the realities of the ever-changing digital technologies, techniques, and tools. We put into practice what I learned as a revenue coach, much of which can be found in my 5-star book, "Roadmap to Revenue: How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy," named by Forbes as one of the top 6 marketing and sales books.Prior to founding Zhivago Partners, I spent decades as a "revenue coach," mostly in the tech industry in Silicon Valley, helping CEOs and entrepreneurs grow their companies.WHAT WE DO: We work with CEOs and entrepreneurs to help them increase their revenue. HOW WE DO IT: We have built a team that operates responsibly, wisely, and collaboratively, comprised of professional writers, designers, developers, and digital marketing specialists who are immersed in their area of specialty. Successful digital marketing requires people who focus on specific areas, in order to keep up with and leverage the constant changes in tools, technology, and methods. We have built measurement and quality control into all our efforts."Welcome to Episode #194 of That Entrepreneur Show - Each week since 2019, the founder of a company or brand shares what worked for them, what they needed to improve on, and all of their learning lessons along the way. Guest Episode on Writing with Authors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROzX9kdL4Zw&list=PLat9MDCRaOgKnpjC528PB3BxtG9snH6aa&index=3Guest LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristinzhivago/Listen to all episodes here: https://ThatEntrepreneurShow.Buzzsprout.comWebsite:  https://www.VincentALanci.com/InstagramFacebookTwitterLinkedInFor Digital Editing Inquiries and Potential Podcast Guests: Email: PodcastsByLanci@Gmail.comHost Name: Vincent A. LanciYouTubeInstagramAdventure by MusicbyAden | https://soundcloud.com/musicbyadenHappy | https://soundcloud.com/morning-kulishow/happy-background-music-no-copyright-fun-royalty-free-music-free-download

Decision Vision Episode 162: Should I Replace My Salespeople with Customer Service Representatives? – An Interview with Kristin Zhivago, Zhivago Partners In an age where customers can do extensive research on their own before they buy, does a business still need a traditional sales force? Kristin Zhivago, President of Zhivago Partners, and host Mike Blake […] The post

Decision Vision Episode 162: Should I Replace My Salespeople with Customer Service Representatives? – An Interview with Kristin Zhivago, Zhivago Partners In an age where customers can do extensive research on their own before they buy, does a business still need a traditional sales force? Kristin Zhivago, President of Zhivago Partners, and host Mike Blake […]

Kristin Zhivago is President of Zhivago Partners, a digital marketing management company. She is an expert on the customer's buying process and has spent years as a revenue coach, teaching CEOs and entrepreneurs how to sell more by understanding what their customers want to buy and how they want to buy it. She is the author of the 5-star book, Roadmap to Revenue: How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy, named one of the top sales and marketing books by Forbes. Mentioned in this Episode: The Alchemist by Paulo CoelhoData Smog by David ShenkTime Codes: (2:48) - What is it like to wake up alone in the middle of the ocean?(11:40) - How does one become a Revenue Coach?(15:01) - How have you used your method to determine your own strengths and weaknesses? (17:45) - How does this work apply to a department selling their work internally?(26:04) - Are there core principles that people are looking for when they buy?(30:44) - Do you find that the desires, concerns, and questions are the same from clients who buy from one specific company?(32:37) - What are the base characteristics needed to lump someone into a buyer group?(33:53) - What advice do you have to get through to people who are dealing with burnout and may not want to talk to you?(41:35) - What mistakes are you seeing people in your field make?(42:48) - How often do you find that people can't articulate why they do or don't buy?(49:03) - What are you sick of talking about?(50:31) - What are you most excited to be talking about?(53:02) - Why is the word “love” such a hang-up?(55:25) - What is the purpose of business?(56:07) - Where can people find you?

Join Shalom Klein on his weekly radio show, Get Down To Business with guests: Kristin Zhivago Levent Yildizgoren Martha Razo

In this episode, Kristin Zhivago, President and Founder of Zhivago Partners, discusses her "find it, face it, fix it" approach to life and business. Kristin also shares how to live in the truth and the importance of leading a no regret life.About Kristin Zhivago:Kristin started out in tech sales at the early age of 17. Later on, she started up an ad agency with her husband in Silicon Valley for 12 years. After that, she became a revenue coach helping CEOs and entrepreneurs make more money by understanding what their customers want to buy and how they want to buy it. She's been doing that ever since as President of Zhivago Partners, a digital marketing management company.Additional Resources:► Follow Communispond on LinkedIn for more communication skills tips: https://www.linkedin.com/company/communispond► Connect with Scott D'Amico on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottdamico/► Connect with Kristin Zhivago on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristinzhivago/► Subscribe to the podcast: https://communicast.simplecast.com/► Download the ProSpeak® app. Providing users with instant feedback on presentation and communication skills.- Apple: https://apple.co/3jTJbqe

In this Pocket Sized Pep Talk, you'll learn:A unique look at four different buyer types.Changes within the buying process over the last few years.Why does so much marketing fail to hit the mark.Why  there is still such a big gap between “sales” and “marketing,” and what can be done about it.Kristin's “magic bean” in marketing.Kristin's favorite sales authors, and spoiler alert: Rob Jolles is not one of them!   

Welcome the Driven Female Entrepreneurs Podcast! The weekly show that helps you dream bigger and achieve more in your business, by learning what works from successful female entrepreneurs.   In this episode In this episode of the Driven Female Entrepreneur Podcast, I speak with Kristin Zhivago, a revenue coach and the president of Zhivago Partners, a digital marketing management company. Kristin started her entrepreneurial journey when she was 17, selling machine shop tools. Being young and having no training whatsoever, she learned the hard way that sales was not as easy as just showing up. After failing miserably, she dedicated herself to learning everything about tech and selling and soon turned her fortunes around. After college, she started selling for various companies around Silicon Valley until she and her husband started an ad agency business together. When her husband retired, she decided to put everything she had learnt into helping companies grow and became a revenue coach. Today, she teaches CEOs and entrepreneurs how to make more profit by understanding what their customers want to buy from them and how they want it to be. Knowledge that she has also captured in her book: Roadmap to Revenue. Don't miss this episode to discover more about Kristin's success story and the necessity of knowing the demands and mindset of clients in order to achieve continual business growth.   "Selling is not really selling. It's having a conversation with somebody about what they're trying to do and then seeing if you can help." - Kristin Zhivago   Highlights In this value-packed episode you'll learn: The importance of product knowledge in gaining more revenue. How to understand the customer's needs and wants by knowing their mindset. A simple way to acquire real customer feedback and how it will help you get the confidence to proceed. How to understand exactly how your customers like to buy. How to navigate the minefield of sales. The difference between brand and branding. The value of delivering and keeping promises when building a business.       "Business takes bravery, courage and humility. Most people are afraid of what they'll find out from customer research, but it's a lot better to find it out before you invest in a business that isn't going to work." - Kristin Zhivago   About Kristin Kristin Zhivago is the president of Zhivago Partners, a digital marketing management company. She spent decades as a "revenue coach," helping CEOs and entrepreneurs increase revenue by understanding what their customers wanted to buy from them and how they wanted to buy it. She has interviewed thousands of customers for hundreds of companies and is an expert on the customer's buying process. She and her team generate leads for companies in all types of industries. Kristin is the author of the 5-star book, "Roadmap to Revenue: How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy." Connect with Kristin Website            Facebook Page            Twitter             LinkedIn                                 Join the Driven Female Entrepreneur Community Come and join like-minded women in the FREE online community for Driven Female Entrepreneurs.  You can expect many more tips, tools and insights to support you as you build and grow your business to 6 figures and beyond!   > The Driven Female Entrepreneurs Club   About Your Host, Melitta Campbell Since 1997, Melitta has been using her ability to spot gaps between a company's goals and its strategy and positioning to help businesses become profitable and achieve growth - in as little as three months. By combining the insights gained from working directly with senior leaders for more than 20 years, her unique blend of art-school and business-school training, and her restless curiosity, Melitta has helped her clients identify new opportunities and develop creative solutions that add value in profitable and purposeful ways, that are straight-forward to implement and result in a clear competitive edge. After witnessing too many talented and passionate women fall short of their vision to make a profit and a difference, more recently, Melitta has brought her business, leadership and marketing expertise together with her personal experiences, to become a trusted advisor and coach for female-led businesses. Book your Free Business Clarity Call: www.melittacampbell.com   Get More Clients with your FREE Listener Gift The number one question I'm asked is: How can I get more clients?  To help you market your business and attract more of your ideal clients, download your free eBook today: Download your FREE Gift: 100 Ways to Market your Business for Free!

Have you ever tried to go somewhere new without directions? Your confidence in your sense of direction starts to wane as you realize it's not as simple as you thought it would be... Business can feel much the same way. The sense of I'll-figure-it-out bravado only takes us so far. At a certain point, we need some direction from someone who's mapped out the course to success. Today's guest is Kristin Zhivago literally wrote the book on the topic: Roadmap to Revenue. She is also the president and founder of Zhivago Partners. After our conversation, I can safely say that Kristin is an expert in the B2B buying process. In this episode, we will discuss the buyer's mindset and how the buyers set the pace for how sales happen. As business owners and salespeople, we have to be in tune with that in order to adjust our sales and marketing efforts to listen to what buyers want and give them what they want in order to grow sales. Kristin has been helping CEOs and entrepreneurs increase their revenue for decades. Recently, Kristin and her introduced the concept of Mindset-Driven Marketing, a way to focus all your offers on the customer's mindset when they set out on their buying journey. Matching the offer to buyer mindset results in a very rewarding result: increased sales.

A Masterclass in Learning From Your Customers with Kristin Zhivago I told Kristin about my conversation with Jesse Cole I mentioned Competing Against Luck by Clayton Christensen which I highly recommend reading. Kristin's book is Roadmap to Revenue available at Amazon Kristin can be found at zhivagopartners.com and also at the following Social Links: LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristinzhivago/ Twitter https://twitter.com/KristinZhivago Facebook https://www.facebook.com/ZhivagoPartners --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/corporatethought/support

In this episode of Startup Hustle, Hernan Sias and Kristin Zhivago, President of Zhivago Partners talk about everything you need to know about digital marketing. Find Startup Hustle Everywhere: https://linktr.ee/startuphustle This episode is sponsored by Full Scale: https://fullscale.io/ Learn more about Zhivago Partners: https://zhivagopartners.com/ Learn more about Business Bros Podcast: https://www.businessbros.biz/optin1613537007900   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Zhivago Partners President Kristin Zhivago shares with Dan Albaum the the roadmap for breakaway revenue by truly understanding how customers buy and the power of partnering with sales in adopting a new marketing mindset to exceed customer expectations.

Today's guest is our new friend,  Kristin Zhivago, president and founder of  Zhivago Partners, has been helping CEOs and entrepreneurs increase their revenue for decades. Recently Kristin and her team rolled out the concept of Mindset-Driven Marketing, a way to focus all your offers on the customer's mindset when they set out on their buying journey. Matching offer to mindset results in a very rewarding result: increased sales. Kristin has literally written the book on how to sell the way your customers want to buy, and has trained marketers worldwide. She and her team have built a digital marketing machine that works for a variety of industries, products, and services. The conversations you'll have with Kristin will provide relief, practical next steps, and inspiration. As clients who have been with her for years will tell you, she is an exceptional managerial resource.###Your hosts Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton have spent more than two decades helping clients around the world engage their employees on strategy, vision and values. They provide real solutions for leaders looking to manage change, drive innovation and build high performance cultures and teams. Their work is supported by research with more than a million working adults across the globe.They are authors of multiple award-winning Wall Street Journal and New York Times bestsellers All In, The Carrot Principle, Leading with Gratitude, and Anxiety at Work. Their books have been translated into 30 languages and have sold more than 1.5 million copies. They have been called “fascinating” by Fortune and “creative and refreshing” by The New York Times. Gostick & Elton have appeared on NBC's Today Show, CBS 60 Minutes, and are often quoted in Fast Company, Newsweek and the Wall Street Journal.Learn more about their Executive Coaching practice at thecultureworks.com. Book Adrian and Chester to speak by contacting christy@thecultureworks.com###If you love this podcast please share it with friends, family and co-workers and leave a 5-star review! We would also love to hear from you on LinkedIn and invite you to join our online community We Thrive Together where we are creating a safe place to talk about anxiety and mental health at work.Thank you to our sponsor, Methods of Leaders. Learn the Methods of leadership from some of the best CEOs, executive coaches, thought leaders and business thinkers on the planet. Use our discount code, GRATITUDE2021 at checkout for 50% discount. Methods delivers accessible and practical leadership guidance for continuous improvement from the very best of Marshall Goldsmith and his 100 Coaches. 

Kristin Zhivago is the president of Zhivago Partners, a digital marketing management company. She and her team build lead-generation campaigns for small and mid-sized companies, including websites, SEO, online advertising, social media, and video. Zhivago has built a solid team of professionals in the various digital channels; writers, designers, and developers; project managers, and client success managers. She is an expert on the customer’s buying process and the author of Roadmap to Revenue: How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy.   Most passionate about I started a digital marketing management company in 2017. I was a revenue coach, mostly for tech companies. Basically, I helped people grow their companies, work better with customers, and do a better job of selling and marketing their products. Before that, my husband and I had an agency in Silicon Valley back in the early days. We helped introduce pretty much everything that we use today; The semi-connectors, computers, email, voice mail, and the like. Kristin’s career and story When I was a revenue coach, I often did rent-a-VP services. I would turn around a marketing or sales department. We specialize in digital marketing, content marketing, search engine optimization, online advertising, social media, and so on. We work mostly with small to midsize companies. There's less politics in companies of that size. We want the client to be as smart as possible about what's going on. It's their marketing and we work together to improve what needs to be improved. We're growing our company steadily. We bring on clients as we can absorb them because we're a service-based business. Best advice for entrepreneurs The first thing is: Don't be afraid to interview your customers after they buy from you. If you interview people after they have bought from you, they are no longer playing poker. They're no longer negotiating. They won't tell you what they're really thinking when you're selling to them. However, after you start working together, they will tell you what they were thinking. After they buy, they have a vested interest in your success. They want to make sure that you stay in business and can help them. So, they'll tell you what they were thinking. The biggest, most critical failure with customers When I was 17, Pratt & Whitney gave me a catalog and said, “Here. Go out and sell.” I finally met one old guy who came out and said, “Okay, all right, well then, tell me how your drill bit is better than the one I'm using now.” And of course, I had no training. I just had a catalog. I couldn't answer the question. I was so embarrassed, so I walked out. I thought to myself, ‘I'm going to learn everything I can about technology and sales.’ And that has been my path. Biggest success with customers This was way before anybody was talking about the buying journey. I was one of the first people to identify that it isn’t how we sell that matters. It’s about how they buy. Our job is to make it easy for them to buy from us. We have a client who sells luxury yacht cruises. She was really in trouble at the beginning of last year. There were two words—and I can't tell you what they are, unfortunately, because, you know, it's our thing—but we put those two words in the ads. It was a huge success, bigger than what she hoped for. I love business-to-business, so we keep working on it. It has proved to me that there is such a thing as immediate recognition. Kristin’s recommendation of a tool SpyFu SpyFu used for judging the popularity of various terms on Google. Besides selling to your customers you need to sell to Google. You have to go through them, they are the gatekeeper, they have 200,000 algorithm criteria you need to go through. If you're doing search engine marketing, you need to get through them. SpyFu will help you do that. Google analytics Kristin’s one key success factor My husband came up with this phrase a while back: Find it,...

We cover: * The transformational power of the don't argue rule * What business is really all about * How to figure out what really excites your customers And much more Kristin Zhivago is the president of Zhivago Partners, a digital marketing management company that serves both B2B and B2C clients in a variety of industries. Her digital agency is comprised of a core infrastructure team, and a variety of specialists in the various digital methods and media. Zhivago's career began in the high-tech industry; she and her husband, through their high-tech agency, helped introduce and market all of the technologies we take for granted today. When the web emerged as a commercial medium, she branched out into other industries and re-invented herself to become a revenue coach, helping CEOs and entrepreneurs sell the way her customers want to buy. Her 5-star book, Roadmap to Revenue: How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy was chosen by Forbes as one of the top sales and marketing books. Zhivago speaks frequently on the subject of the customer's buying process, which she was one of the first to identify as being key to selling to today's customers, and about building your business to compete effectively in our fast-changing, hyper-competitive markets. Website: https://zhivagopartners.com/ (https://zhivagopartners.com/) Twitter: https://twitter.com/KristinZhivago (https://twitter.com/KristinZhivago) Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ZhivagoPartners/ (https://www.facebook.com/ZhivagoPartners/) LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/public-profile/in/kristinzhivago/ (https://www.linkedin.com/public-profile/in/kristinzhivago/) Grab your free copy of the Mindset Mastery Blueprint here: https://jessebrisendine.lpages.co/mindset-mastery-blueprint/ (https://jessebrisendine.lpages.co/mindset-mastery-blueprint/) Website: https://jessebrisendine.com/ (https://jessebrisendine.com/) Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jessebrisendine (https://www.facebook.com/jessebrisendine) Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JesseBrisendineCoaching/ (https://www.facebook.com/JesseBrisendineCoaching/) Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jessebrisendine/ (https://www.instagram.com/jessebrisendine/) Twitter: https://twitter.com/jessebris (https://twitter.com/jessebris) Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/JesseBrisendine (https://www.youtube.com/user/JesseBrisendine)

Welcome to 261  of The Today's leader podcast. This week, it is with great pleasure that I welcome Kristen Zhivago to the show. This was a recent chat where Kristen shares her experience leading the charge on being a revenue coach and helping businesses generated more leads and revenue.This is a conversation not to miss. While this conversation is being had in many different spheres, Kristen genuinely walks that talk. Some of the key points we dive into.- Understanding the state of the mind of the customer when they want to buy- The consumer is no longer the prisoner and has many avenues available for them when they commit to buy- What does "putting on your buyer hat" really mean?- What is the jerk test?Connect with Kristin on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristinzhivago/The Zhivago Partners Website  is: https://zhivagopartners.com/In today's disruptive world, good leadership skills will always stand you in great stead. If you are looking to build better leadership skills, check out The Todays Leader website at todaysleader.com.auOur website showcases our Podcast and our magazine and we are pleased to say our masterminds are now available Supported by our network sites, Today's Leader is a collective mindset For the leaders and entrepreneurs of today, forging the path of success for tomorrow.The mindset to make a difference and the ability to create an impact.Think & Grow Business Hosts our Today's Leader Masterminds. TAGB where we focus on personal, professional, and business growth. Book your free 30-minute discovery call at https://thinkandgrowbusiness.com.au/book-your-free-discovery-call/The Coach Curl Academy has over 75 programs to help you build a better you. Join for just $1 for the first month. The Academy equips you and enhances your mindset, leadership, and business. Check it out at https://www.thecoachcurlacademy.com/You are standing Stronger, Braver, and Wiser. Don't forget the golden rule – Don t be an A-Hole

Welcome to 261  of The Today's leader podcast. This week, it is with great pleasure that I welcome Kristen Zhivago to the show. This was a recent chat where Kristen shares her experience leading the charge on being a revenue coach and helping businesses generated more leads and revenue.This is a conversation not to miss. While this conversation is being had in many different spheres, Kristen genuinely walks that talk. Some of the key points we dive into.- Understanding the state of the mind of the customer when they want to buy- The consumer is no longer the prisoner and has many avenues available for them when they commit to buy- What does "putting on your buyer hat" really mean?- What is the jerk test?Connect with Kristin on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristinzhivago/The Zhivago Partners Website  is: https://zhivagopartners.com/In today’s disruptive world, good leadership skills will always stand you in great stead. If you are looking to build better leadership skills, check out The Todays Leader website at todaysleader.com.auOur website showcases our Podcast and our magazine and we are pleased to say our masterminds are now available Supported by our network sites, Today’s Leader is a collective mindset For the leaders and entrepreneurs of today, forging the path of success for tomorrow.The mindset to make a difference and the ability to create an impact.Think & Grow Business Hosts our Today’s Leader Masterminds. TAGB where we focus on personal, professional, and business growth. Book your free 30-minute discovery call at https://thinkandgrowbusiness.com.au/book-your-free-discovery-call/The Coach Curl Academy has over 75 programs to help you build a better you. Join for just $1 for the first month. The Academy equips you and enhances your mindset, leadership, and business. Check it out at https://www.thecoachcurlacademy.com/You are standing Stronger, Braver, and Wiser. Don’t forget the golden rule – Don t be an A-Hole

Nobody likes to be sold to. (Not even sellers, if they're honest.) Instead of being a sale, customers want a specific solution that originates from their current mindset.   In this episode, I interview Kristin Zhivago, Founder and President at Zhivago Partners, about mindset-driven marketing, otherwise known as selling the way that customers actually want to buy.    Kristin talked with me about:   - How COVID-19 inspired Kristin to formulate mindset-driven marketing   - Why so many companies don't deliver on their promises   - Customer interviews & mindset immersion   - Selling successfully when nobody likes being sold to   Check out these resources we mentioned during the podcast:   - Kristin's book is Roadmap to Revenue   - Learn about mindset-driven-marketing: introduction, example, how to sell   Subscribe, listen, and rate/review the Customer Experience Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play or Google Podcasts, and find more episodes on our blog.

"Your customer's mindset is the most important thing for you to understand in business. You can't assume that you understand it." -Kristin Zhivago How do you know what your customers need? Is price the only reason customers buy? Can emotion help complete the sale? Can the competition help you sell to your customers? Learn the answers as Arlene talks to Revenue Coach Kristin Zhivago about the mindsets that help entrepreneurs sell the way customers want to buy! They also discuss using digital marketing, from Google algorithms to SEO and SEM and why these matter in this day and age. If you know your business message is life-changing, don’t let it stay hidden on search engines. Learn how you can help your target customer find you faster, easier. Of course, this conversation is not complete without talking about business development secrets for B2B and B2C secrets and tips!  Join the Mindset Meets Mastery Today  Book Writing Business  Facebook  Twitter  LinkedIn   YouTube  Highlights: 00:50 Balance the Equation  08:01 Is Price the Only Reason?  14:17 What Creates the Shift? 19:15 How to Find Out What Your Customer Needs 23:44 Find It, Face It, Fix It 27:43 The Blind Side 31:49 What Is SEO and SEM and Why It Matters 35:15 Why is Competition Important 39:39 The Roadmap to Revenue 49:34 2 Ways to Love Yourself 55:40 The Most Important Thing Entrepreneurs Must Understand

When it comes to marketing are you taking into consideration your customer’s mindset when they are making the purchase so you know how to sell the way they want to buy? If not, you are missing one of the most important elements of marketing and sales. According to my guest on Amplify Your Success Podcast episode 197 Kristin Zhivago, if you understand the customer’s Mindset, and make an offer that appeals to their specific Mindset, all of your marketing efforts, in any channel, will work as they should. Your customer will get what he or she wants, and you will get what you want: a sale. Listen in on  Amplify Your Success Podcast episode 196 to hear Kristin’s revolutionary way of marketing that’s transforming the results of her clients. Be sure to join the Amplify Your Success Community to hear more.   Key Takeaways How buyers are buying differently than they have in the past impacts how to sell what they want. The four types of scrutiny that impact each sale. What Mindset driven marketing is and how it plays out in your sales process. What’s REALLY in the way of companies selling the way their customers want to buy (if your sales are slow, you’ll want to know this!) How a business owner or CEO can fix their sales process and tap into the secret buying language of their clients.     About The Guest Kristin Zhivago, revenue coach, is the president of Zhivago Partners, a digital marketing management company, and author of Roadmap to Revenue: How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy. Zhivago and her team of digital marketing experts focus on helping clients meet their revenue goals by using “Mindset-Driven Marketing,” which matches the offer to the Mindset for a positive outcome. Zhivago spent years in the tech industry doing revenue coaching, marketing and sales turnarounds, and creating campaigns. As a leading marketer working in Silicon Valley in the wild west days, she introduced many of the technologies we all use today, including email, voicemail, spreadsheets and dozens of other applications, semiconductors, personal computers, industrial control systems, touchscreens, telecom and networking equipment, security systems and more.   Resources Mentioned in This Episode: Get Kristin’s Free Guide: How to Sell The Way Your Customer’s Want to Buy https://zhivagopartners.com/

Kristin Zhivago is president of Zhivago Partners, a digital marketing management company, and author of the 5-star book, Roadmap to Revenue: How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy. Zhivago was a revenue coach to CEOs and entrepreneurs, mostly for tech companies, for many years, doing marketing and sales department turnarounds and teaching company managers what their customers wanted to buy from them and how they wanted to buy it. She was one of the first to identify selling as supporting the customer's buying journey, and is now rolling out a lead-generating concept called "Mindset-Driven Marketing." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The travel industry is one of those most affected by the current pandemic we’re on. We anticipate that the recession we’ve entered will likely kill many businesses in this industry. Surprisingly, there is one travel company that’s growing in the midst of all stalemate in travel. But we find that their ability to thrive is based on their use of mindset-driven marketing. Which is why we continue on the theme of buyer enablement in today’s episode. Revenue coach Kristin Zhivago is here with us as we talk about leveraging your customer’s mindset to grow your business, looking at the customer’s perspective on why they’re buying from you, why sales and marketing cannot be isolated, and much more. If you’re a B2B company interested in approaching growth this way, then this is just the right episode for you!   Resource Links: Brett Trainor Website (https://bretttrainor.com/) “3 Stages of Startup Growth and How To Breakthrough” (https://bretttrainor.com/resources/) Zhivago Partners Website (https://zhivagopartners.com/)   We’ll be talking about:   The journey from traditional advertising to digital marketing [01:45] We’ve been incorrectly assuming what customers want [05:55] Why you shouldn’t focus on features and benefits [11:36] Don’t forget about the post-sale journey [17:14] Reaching customers outside your network [19:40]  Marketing and sales should not be separate [26:43] Customers just want their questions answered [29:33] Her excitement over mindset marketing [33:47] One thing she recommends [35:00]   About Our Guest: Kristin Zhivago is the President at Zhivago Partners. Zhivago helps partners increase their revenue by providing digital marketing management services. Kristin’s book, “Roadmap to Revenue: How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy”, has been named the Top 6 Marketing & Sales Books by Forbes. You can get access to her guide on mindset-driven marketing, her book, and more resources on her website. If you liked this episode, please don’t forget to subscribe, tune in, and share this podcast. There’s a lot more to learn when it comes to podcasting, and we’re here to help!   Connect with B2B Founder:  Subscribe on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCySoKsETeKxu-Fnf2VfE7Gg/

Kristin Zhivago is the President of Zhivago Partners. She is a revenue coach, digital marketing expert and author of Roadmap to Revenue. In this episode you can learn about: The role of Mindset in leading marketing How to sell the way your customers want to buy The buying process vs. The sales process The difference between Brand and Branding The benefits of a “No Jerk” policy   Follow us and explore our social media tribe from our Website: https://leadership-hacker.com Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes courtesy of the Free Music Archive FMA   Find out more about Kristin below: Website: https://zhivagopartners.com Blog: https://kristinswisdom.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristinzhivago/ Book: Roadmap to Revenue   Full Transcript Below:   ----more----    Steve Rush: Some call me Steve, dad, husband or friend. Others might call me boss, coach or mentor. Today you can call me The Leadership Hacker. Thanks for listening in. I really appreciate it. My job as the leadership hacker is to hack into the minds, experiences, habits and learning of great leaders, C-Suite executives, authors and development experts so that I can assist you developing your understanding and awareness of leadership. I am Steve Rush and I am your host today. I am the author of Leadership Cake. I am a transformation consultant and leadership coach. I cannot wait to start sharing all things leadership with you. On today's show, we have Kristen Zhivago. She is the president of Zhivago Partners. She is a revenue coach and a digital marketing expert. Before we get a chance to speak with Kristen, it is The Leadership Hacker News.   The Leadership Hacker News  Steve Rush: South Korean baseball fans may not be allowed to watch their favourite teams live at stadiums due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but NC Dino stands where not empty, thanks to life-size cardboard cut-outs of portraits sent in by their fans. The Korean baseball organization league season kicked off this month after a five-week delay due to the coronavirus; all games were played however, without any fans in attendance. No fans were allowed in, even though the league reopened. Dino marketing manager Parc Jung-Un said, we thought about ways of giving enjoyment to fans and motivations to players, but keeping everybody safe, the club had more than 60 fans participating by sending their own pitches in, along with their favourite players and even their pets. Han Dong-Su a 38-year-old baseball fan said outside the stadium. I can't go in, but my avatar is cheering the team on instead of me and it just feels like I'm in the stadium. The club also set out cardboard, cut-outs of characters of other fans, of other teams and declared it support for them on Twitter. The South Korean team are getting support from baseball teams across the United States and across the world and more and more fans are set to send their cardboard cut-outs in to support the teams virtually. It was a major marketing hit, it is allowing a connectivity to the club while at the same time, promoting a togetherness, which of course connect fans loyalty and is demonstrating some great marketing leadership. That has been The Leadership Hacker News. If you have any news insights or crazy stories that we could share with our listeners, please get in touch with us.   The Interview Steve Rush: I am joined on today show by Kristin Zhivago. She is the president of Zhivago Partners. She is a revenue coach, digital marketing expert and author. Kristen, welcome to the Leadership Hacker Podcast. Kristin Zhivago: Thank you very much, nice to be here. Steve Rush: Keen to get inside the mind of what a revenue coach is but before we get into that, just tell us a little bit about your backstory. So you've been a leader of Zhivago Partners for a number of years, and you've worked through Silicon Valley for a while. Just tell us a little bit; about what you have done and tell, us maybe a little bit, about how you've arrived, where you've arrived? Kristin Zhivago: So I started selling when I was really young and discovered really early on through some painful experiences that you need to know what you're talking about before you can sell it. And that painful experience was in a technical environment and I just was so embarrassed that I didn't know what I was talking about, that I decided to devote the rest of my career to selling and learning everything I could about tech, and I've been doing that ever since. It never stopped. Steve Rush: Can you tell us a little bit about that experience? Kristin Zhivago: Yeah, I was the first woman to sell machine shop tools in the U.S. as far as I know; the Pratt & Whitney Distributor told me that was the deal. He gave me a catalogue and you know, I was back in the days of miniskirts and I just went out and sold. Called on companies back then I was in San Diego. There was a small Silicon Valley growing and in San Diego and there was one machine shop foreman who kind of called me out. You know, everybody came out to see who was there and why she was in the machine shop. This was back a while ago and he asked me, you know, why is your drill bit better than the one I am using now? And I didn't have an answer, and he said, honey, you better learn this stuff before you go out and sell. So that was my big fat, embarrassing moment, you know, as a senior in high school and I thought, you know, when you're senior in high school, you think you're hot stuff. And man, I just slunk back to the car and that's when I made that life changing decision, and been following that ever since, been a really great thing. Anyway, so started an agency in Silicon Valley, did that with my husband for a long time. Then the Macintosh came along and I said. Why don't you retire? I am going to go out and help people market in house because they were all using the Mac to do stuff in house and I ended up inventing myself as a revenue coach and I basically taught CEOs and entrepreneurs how to sell more by understanding what their customers really wanted to buy and how they wanted to buy. It did a lot of marketing and sales turnarounds for companies of all sizes, including Dow Jones and did a lot of work for IBM for a number of years, writing instructions for their marketing people, so it was fun. But as I got older, I started realizing that the digital marketing stuff was really confusing business owners, especially those that weren't digitally astute themselves. Decided to help them and opened up a Zhivago Partners, which is a digital agency in 2017. That is where I am now, have a wonderful worldwide virtual staff and specialists, and core infrastructure people and we are just having a wonderful time. Steve Rush: That is awesome and it is really interesting to notice that in many successful entrepreneurs like yourself, there's seems to be that epiphany moment, that moment where something's happened in their life, where they go, Grrrrrr, this is it. I'm going to head in this direction. Great it was so early for you in your career. Kristin Zhivago: Yeah. Steve Rush: You talk about a revenue coach. What is the role of a revenue coach? Kristin Zhivago: Well, as I said, I did a lot of marketing and sales turnarounds, so I'd go into a failing marketing department or failing sales department and I always thought I could do it in two or three months. And it always took eight, I mean, it was just the reality and after a while I knew that, of course but it takes time to get the current team where they're at. Fire the jerk if there is a jerk, you got to get rid of them because he's dragging everybody else down. He or she and put the right people in the right jobs and get the processes fixed. 9 times out of 10, the biggest problems were always processes and I found that in all of my revenue coaching work, so I had literally have interviewed thousands of customers and worked with hundreds of CEOs and entrepreneurs and that is the biggest problem. They think they know what the customer is thinking and they don't. So there is just a lot of stuff that you have to work on to turn things around and, make it a profitable exercise and make sure that you are marketing to the customer and doing the right thing. Steve Rush: Often businesses, I think, tend to market with their own lens don't they? Their own perception of, what their customers want and how does that kind of play out in the work that you do, changing that perception? Kristin Zhivago: Yeah, that ended up being the main job of my career. In the sense that every time I went to work for a company, I would ask them what was important to their customers. And they had a list of, you know, 5 or 10 things that they really believed were important to their customers. Then I go out and interview their customers and their customers had a completely different list, so I knew that they were off the Mark. They just were not hitting the customer where the customer lived. Steve Rush: Right. Kristin Zhivago: And going back to processes, I realized that I had this sort of this famous quote now attributed to me, which is that branding is the promise that you make, but your brand is the promise that you keep and they are not the same quite often. The tools that people have to keep their promises so that their brand actually matches their branding are the people, the processes, the policies, and the passion of the leader. And there's one other, I can't remember at the moment, it's a lot of P's. Anyway, the biggest one that was always a problem was the processes. They usually had pretty good people, if the guy wasn't a jerk, they had good policies, made good decisions, but the processes were terrible and people suffered under that, and even in the age of apps that we're living in now. Where you are only as good as your apps, processes are a big deal, which is why when I started this company. The first person I hired was an app whisperer and infrastructure assistant kind of person who helped me build the systems, which is basically what Amazon did. You know, Jeff Bezos. It was a process centric company and he just plugged in all these other products into the processes that he built. Steve Rush: It is really neat and I particularly liked that quote by the way, branding versus brand. Branding is what you send out isn't it but brand is where you make that emotional connection with your customers. Kristian Zhivago: Well, it is keeping your promises is whether you do what you say. If you say, we care about you and you leave them on hold for 15 minutes, when they first call, or they go through voicemail help. Well guess what. Your actions say, just the opposite, which is why people get angry at big corporations, because they make all these glowing promises in their ads and everything. We care about you and all that, and then you try to interact with the company and it is not like that at all. They are like your worst enemy kind of thing. They are stopping you from trying to achieve your goals. They don't understand you. They don't understand your mind-set Steve Rush: And mind-set plays a big part and I guess we will come to pick some of that in a moment. I am keen to explore with you. We had a great conversation the last time we spoke where we share some similar views around the whole buying and selling principle. In my coaching and consulting career. Not once if I found anybody who likes to be sold to, but they still have sales driven teams. What is your experience about the kind of the dichotomy of buying versus selling? Kristian Zhivago: Well, you bring up a really good point. Every CEO I have ever talked to, doesn't like to be sold to, and yet they hire salespeople and they go out and they hunt and they make a hundred cold calls and gets through to one person. That system is very broken; it is almost as broken as you can get in a business system. It just does not work and customers have gotten so good with caller ID and everything. They don't even pick up their phone. They just wait to see who it was and if, they think they really wanted to talk to them, they are going to leave a voicemail. I have probably bought something off a cold call, maybe once out of every three years or something like that. Maybe it is once out of every year. I don't know, but it feels like more and every CEO is the same way, but they don't treat their customers that way. They assume that these, you know, marketing has a lot of language about targets and a shotgun approach and, you know, rifle. We treat these folks like they're animals that we're hunting down and it doesn't, really work. It is kind of insulting and just calling someone out of the blue and thinking, or assuming that they are going to be in the market for your product at that moment, we're kind of forgetting that there's a moment in time when somebody wants to buy what you're selling. And that moment is very urgent and that moment drives all of the marketing things people do. Search engine optimization and they go out and they search, they talk to their friends, they read reviews, all of the things that you need to do to be there when they're ready are so much more important than just sending a guy out. I have nothing against sales. I have been in sales half of all my life. In my own company, I have always had like an 80 or 90% closing rate. I know how to sell, but selling is not really selling anymore. Selling is being there when the customer has a need for what you sell. It is showing up when they go looking and then answering their questions, the buyer's journey is nothing more than a series of questions that need to be answered to this buyer satisfaction. And the minute you answer in a way that turns them off or something, they're not going to tell you, we all play poker when we're being sold to we're negotiating. We don't say, Oh man, you just blew it. I am probably one of the few people in the world that actually does stop the sales guy and say, you just blew it because I can't help myself. You know, I feel sorry for him, but I will say, you know, what you just said is an absolute turnoff and I will not buy from you. We are done and he would be just like…. Steve Rush: Good feedback! Kristin Zhivago: Yeah. Steve Rush: And I guess the sales, person's just going to get lucky if the customer is in that buying space, unless you really understand that customer need. And you understand the journey that they're about to take in that buying process, right? Kristin Zhivago: Yes, but again, there is a timing problem. I mean, it is like going after somebody who is married and just, you know, trying to get them to love you. And it's like, no, excuse me, I'm married. It is kind of like that. I mean, if you are happy, where you are, nothing they say is going to make you change your mind. If you are unhappy and you are looking for a solution. Well, then you're going to be going out and looking for a solution and your mind-set will be, I have to solve this problem and you leave breadcrumbs all over the place, looking for a solution and the trick is people have to be there when they go looking in that specific mind-set. And that's how we get leads for our clients, we figure out what that specific mind-set is and it's very specific. Then we advertise to that, so to speak, we put the message out. We say those words, that appeal to them in that mind-set, so we are basically hunting for mind-sets and they come looking for us. It is a matchmaking thing. Steve Rush: Got it, and your whole approach now is driven through that whole mind-set driven marketing approach, isn't it? Tell us a little bit more, about how that came about. Kristin Zhivago: Yeah, I am actually going full scale on that. I am just about to launch it, so you are getting a preview, but is the idea that if you understand very specifically what their mind-set is, and the way you do that is as I pointed out in my book. Roadmap To Revenue, How To Sell The Way Your Customers Want To Buy. In chapter three, I explained exactly how to go out and find the information among your current customer, so you can basically reverse engineer a successful sale and create new sales in quantity because you will understand their exact mind-set and once you have that, then you want to make an offer that appeals to that specific mind-set. And that leads to an outcome that both of you are happy with. Customer gets what they want and you get what you want. You get a sale. It is a formula is very simple and the reason it is so hard is because people…I know that, you know, in my book, I talk about discovery debate and deploy, so you discover you debate and you deploy, which is how marketing should work, but people always miss the first part. They don't discover, they assume and that assumption is very dangerous and very expensive. Steve Rush: I have experience that as a buyer too, having then ended up with perhaps the wrong solution as a result. Kristin Zhivago: Oh yeah. That is really sad. I mean, regrets are in…especially when you are buying a B2B, but even in B2C, I mean, buying regrets are very sad because you have spent the money. You have gone through all that trouble to get the right thing up and in the case of say enterprise software; you have trained all your people. Then you discover we have all had this experience now because we have all had software long enough where you get the whole thing set up and then you discover there is a got you, that's a deal killer. It is a showstopper. It is like, wait, I remember I have one of my clients before I showed up who had a group working for him. They had this great software program and he started to put his whole business on it. He spent a hundred thousand dollars and then they discovered that it did not interact with their mail program. Now you roll your eyes and say, well, excuse me, but it was some interaction thing where when the lead came in, you know, they would be alerted and this was a little while ago. Now everybody assumes that is going to happen, but he had to stop the whole thing. He wasted a hundred thousand dollars, and all that effort and all that excitement and training and everything for something that did not work, so buyers are sceptical. I mean, I used to say we are selling software and a scepticism swamp because people have been burned so often. Software has been around a long time now, and people have been disappointed and I don't know how many project management systems I've gone through myself. Probably 35 or 40 of them really, truly testing and trying to figure it out, making it work until you find the right one, and when it's good, it's really good, but getting there is hard and everybody promises that, Oh yeah, no problem. It is all good. You know, it all worked, we can make it work and then it does not work, and you are out all that time and money, it is very frustrating. Steve Rush: Given that, we have so much more data, in our hands now and marketing can be more scientific. What do you think the reason is that organizations spend a disproportionate amount of time getting their marketing right? Versus getting their sales channels right. Kristin Zhivago: Well selling is very understandable, so somebody who is a finance guy or an engineer or something, it seems very black and white. You know, you send a guy out there, you make a hundred calls and every day or every couple of days, and you know, you'll see results. I mean, it just seems like arithmetic. If you beat enough bushes, you are going to shake something out of the tree or whatever, I am using for my analogies. So it makes sense and it ignores the customer's mind-set completely. I mean, it even ignores the fact that they hate cold calls and they don't like being approached by salespeople and they do everything they can to avoid them in their own life, but they think it's okay to do that to their customers, search for their prospects. Steve Rush: Very true. Kristin Zhivago: And another thing they do is they think that the salespeople are bringing back market data. And the way I get around that is I look at the CEO and I say, okay, your salespeople are going out there talking to customers and they're coming back with valid customer data, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, we hear from them and they call us after the call and blah, blah. Okay, so when was the last time you told a salesperson, what you were really thinking while you were being sold to? Crickets, because they never say, like I said, they're playing poker, they're negotiating. They don't want to tell the guy what they're really thinking. Unlike me, where I actually stopped the thing and tell the guy that he's got a real problem here. Because I feel sorry for him, CEOs won't do that. They are just going to let you be stupid, and you go through the whole thing and they shake your hand at the end of the call. Then the CEO goes right back to his computer and starts Googling the solution again, because he knows he is not going to hire that guy or that company, so they will not tell you what they're really thinking while you are selling to them. However, the secret, the big thing that I learned was that there are more than happy to talk after you have sold to them and they are happy. They have invested in you and they want you to succeed, so they don't mind. People are basically unless, they're jerks. They are basically helpful and they'll spend 30 minutes on the phone with you. You ask open-ended questions, so you would get what they are really thinking. Not what you think, they are thinking with a survey or something where you are making them do multiple choice or whatever. But you really just doing that discovery and finding out what they really think about that subject, and getting the truth out of them. And then turning that into report that's anonymized and categorized by question and answer so that the executives in the company finally get to see what people are really thinking, why they bought from this company, not the other company, what the competitors did, what they think about, what their concerns were, what their biggest problem is. And that gives you a map, I mean, every single time we're talking hundreds of times that I came back in with this information and the CEO and the other executives were in the room. They were having that V8 moment. You know, where you slap your forehead, I could have had a V8. Steve Rush: Right. Kristin Zhivago: It was like, oh geez. I had no idea that people were feeling this way about us or gee, did they know that we made that mistake? Hmm, that is bad. You find the good stuff in the bad, and you actually understand who you're selling to for the first time and you respect them and you know, they're smart. Cause that is the other thing. Sometimes people think their customers are not that smart. Customers are pretty smart, people buy things from the time they're five years old and probably sooner now because of iPads and you know, Amazon and stuff. So we are experienced buyers and we know what we want and we know when we get it and when we're getting it from somebody and when we're not, it's very black and white. So they finally see the picture and then they start making good decisions, decisions that make sense and decisions that lead to more revenue and grow the company. That is what a revenue coach really does. Steve Rush: That makes loads of sense, for me. Your book Roadmap To Revenue was named by Forbes as being one of the top marketing and sales books written and love to get a little bit of insight as to the key principles that you mentioned earlier. So in your book, you've got those three stages of discovered, debate and deploying. We covered off the discover bit, a little earlier on. In the debate stage, that is really, what you focus on the round that buying process. Tell us a little about that. Kristin Zhivago: Well, during the debate stage, I then want to educate them to the type of buying journey that we are talking about and one of the biggest contributions I think I make in the book besides teaching people, how to discover. Is that there are basically four types of products and services in the world based on the amount of scrutiny that the customer applies to the purchase. So there's light scrutiny, medium scrutiny, heavy scrutiny, and intense scrutiny. Light scrutiny is impulse, cheap purchases, the candy bar at the checkout counter, you know, the tabloid magazine, whatever. Just one or two questions. Can I afford this? Can my waistline afford this? Should I buy this or not? That is light scrutiny. Medium scrutiny are products and services are things like clothing, where it's still pretty much one person making the decision and there's maybe 10 or 15 questions will this fit? Do I like the colour? You know, maybe you are, worried about your significant other liking it or not but it's a pretty simple buying process. Heavy scrutiny is when you really are making a big purchase in the B2C side, its cars and houses and things like that. There is a contract; there is a sales person of some sort and I always think of these salespeople really should be sales guides or buying guides. They help you make the buying decision in an honest, straight forward, you know, what are your trade your way? So it is like the trade-offs, the things you need. What is your main concern? Okay, well this will work or maybe it won't, that's really what we need now rather than people who are out hunting. That is heavy scrutiny, then the B2B side. Those are big enterprise software programs or programs. You are going to run your business on. Something you make a deep commitment to, that is a big deal, and it costs a lot of money and then intense scrutiny, products and services are those where it's everything that the heavy scrutiny is, but you get married. It is a long-term contract. It is like two or three years and maybe it is a big consulting thing. That is where they are making airplanes, you know. Boeing or something, so the reason that I came up with this is because of the gap that I kept finding between the company mind-set and the customer mind-set, and I had to close that gap somehow. And I kept seeing people who were selling light scrutiny, products and services as if they were heavy scrutiny, products and services. Like you don't need a newsletter to learn how to chew gum kind of thing. It just was silly. Steve Rush: Right. Kristin Zhivago: And the same thing with the high scrutiny products and services, where they were treating it as a branding exercise, where all we have to do is just get the word out to everybody. And we're a great, and we can do this for you and make this big promise, but they weren't able to answer the very specific questions that the buyers had. Again, the buyer journey, which I was one of the first people to talk about selling as a buying journey is again, a series of very specific questions that need to be answered to the buyer satisfaction in order for the sale to be made. That is basically it, they weren't answering those questions. They did not equip their salespeople to answer those questions and these are end of the funnel questions. We talk about the funnel where they are really close to buying, and now they just want to have three questions answered. Steve Rush: The big thing here is getting on the agenda of that customer and consulting almost with that customer in that buying process, right? Kristin Zhivargo: Yeah, you are their advocate. You are on their side. You are trying to figure out what you can give them will actually satisfy those requirements. In an honest, no BS kind of way. That is really what buyers want. Steve Rush: Right. Kristin Zhivargo: And nobody gives it to them. Steve Rush: And there is a lot of psychology involved here too, isn't there, so the whole principle around calling somebody a salesperson versus a buying person, like a buy an advocate or buying a system. Kristin Zhivargo: Or buying guide or yeah, whatever the word is. Steve Rush: Yeah, companies still have not quite caught on to that, have they? Kristin Zhivargo: No, because again, it is so easy to just put a guy on the phone, you know, it just makes so much sense. You go out and you hunt and when you think about it, it's pretty crazy the states that we're in right now, because the buyers have completely rejected that approach. Yet we have a whole industry. I mean, there are millions of sales consultants and you know people out there who are continuing to help people get on that phone and make those calls and, you know, go for dialling for dollars. We are still doing that and the customer has left us in the dust. I mean, we are selling buggy whips in time when people are driving cars. It is that bad. Steve Rush: Right and I think also my experience of sales people is the agenda shift from; I need to make a sale versus I need to help you buy is also the biggest thing that as consumers we are now really attuned to aren't we? Kristin Zhivago: Yeah, you are so right. You know, the salesman's agenda, the minute he opens his mouth, I mean, it's just, okay. I understand you are trying to make a quota. That is all you care about is closing the sale. Well, I don't want to be closed. Nobody wants to be closed, it is like, okay, okay, okay, make a decision quick, quick, quick. Okay, it is going to all going to be fine. No problem, just sign here quick, quick, quick. And people know, like I said, this is scepticism swamp. They have grown up buying things and regretting those purchases and dealing with the, you know, one of the things that people totally ignore when you are selling B2B is the, reputation whiteboard. When I was doing marketing and sales turnarounds, I would be an entrepreneur working in a very big corporation and the first thing I learned was when you start that job, you get your own little personal whiteboard. It's like hung around your neck. It is just a small letter size thing. I mean, it is just, you know, my imagination of what this thing is, every time you make a mistake, there is a black mark on that whiteboard. And it there's no eraser, nobody ever forgets that you were the one that put in that enterprise program and the whole thing failed, or that you didn't make your quota or whatever it was or you said the stupid thing to one of the top executives on a bad day. You know, whatever it is, every time you screw up, there is a black mark on your whiteboard, and so one of the mind-sets of the corporate buyer is keeping those black marks off that whiteboard, avoiding corporate embarrassment. It is like one of the main drivers, the bigger the company, the bigger the issue. Because if you get too many black marks on your whiteboard, nobody will even pay any attention to you anymore in a meeting, they will just roll their eyes. Oh yeah, there is Bob again, you know, well, don't pay any attention to him because he did that terrible thing back in 1979, we're never going to forget it. And the only way to get out of that in many cases is to just people that have that problem, they have to leave the company because nobody's going to respect them anymore. Nobody is going to take their advice. They are not part of the team they have been rejected. So that's, what is driving. That is the biggest driver is the embarrassment factor, and yet we don't address that at all when we're selling. People will just, you know, act like, Oh, well, you know, you just go out there and you are going to get all this and you will be a hero and the guy's like, yeah right, I'm going to be a hero. If this thing fails, I am going to be toast. Steve Rush: My favourite sales person's line is when they call you up. And the first line is, don't worry. I am not trying to sell you anything. Kristin Zhivago: So guess what, you have just started the relationship with a lie. Steve Rush: Exactly, right. Kristin Zhivago: I mean it is terrible. It is terrible, the way we treat people, when we are selling to them. It is really rotten. It is like bait and switch and you lie to them. When people say that to me, I say, oh, okay, well, gee, it is 7:30. I am trying to eat dinner and I don't know you, I've never heard from you before. Tell me really, why you are calling. If you are not trying to sell me something, do we know each other? You know, have we met before? I mean, people really should not call me because I am terrible about that stuff, I am so sick of it. Steve Rush: We have a bit of fun with it in our family too, which we should not do, right? Kristin Zhivago: No Steve Rush: Because people are trying to make a living and we get it. But equally, if we've also been consumers of selling, we recognize those patterns in people's tonality, In particular when somebody says I am going to sell it, I am not trying to sell you something and we know they are and our hackles go up as consumers don't they? So heading over to your “Deploy” stage, what transpires here? Kristin Zhivago: Well, This is just classic, you know, carrying out projects. I mean, truthfully, once you understand the mind-set of the customer and you have made a proper offer to that mind-set, then you have to say, okay, where are they looking for us? That is the biggest thing. Are they in social where they actually go to social to buy from us? Or are they just going to social to see what we're tweeting about? And they would only do that as part of their buying process, but they have to find us when they go looking and you know, Google still owns 95% of the search market, so guess what? That is one of the places you go and search engine optimization. Where you are using your content and you are getting out there. There is, some ways to get on the first page of Google. I am not going to say what they are right now, because I don't want to give it away. Totally honest, a good content driven kind of way, but there's also advertising and advertising does work these days. That is where we are getting the most far leads for our clients. That fast stuff, there is sort of two things that happen. There is the quick get leads as fast as you can stuff. Then there is sort of the back end. You need to be there as they're looking around, especially if you're selling a heavier intense scrutiny product or service, they are going to check you out before they talk to a salesperson and another famous quote, which nobody attributes to me. But I really was the first person, as far as I can tell, to say in the stage of the web, by the time a person talks to a salesperson, they've already gotten 60 to 80% of their questions, 60 to 80% of their questions answered before they get a salesperson on the phone. So they just want answers to those remaining very specific questions. They have already checked your site. They have checked your reviews. They have gone and talked to other people they have, you know, gone through Google and looked around. They have done a lot of homework and got 80% of their questions answered. Now they come to the sales person who by the way, is not trained to answer those very specific remaining questions and instead he wants to start his PowerPoint at, we were founded in 2001 and everybody's in the room. Oh God, do we have to sit through this now and go through the whole thing. They have two or three questions. If your marketing is really working, which by the way mine does which better do or I shouldn't be talking to you. By the time they get to me, they have two question and I sell a very intense product or service I sell, you know, we are getting married. I am going to make sure that your company grows. That is my responsibility. That is big, intense kind of thing, so they have done all their homework. They have decided they want to do business with me already. And they just want to know, am I interested in taking them on? When can I start? How much is it? They have three questions. So one of the whole philosophies behind this heavy, medium light scrutiny thing is that if you can get through your marketing to the point with a heavier or intense scrutiny product or service, to the point where by the time they come to you, they have two or three questions. If it is a light scrutiny thing, man, you have done your job. That is the goal. Steve Rush: That is really clever, I am really focused. I love it, so as a leader of marketing agencies, too, you have led people and this part of the show. We already want to tap into your leadership thinking if you had to distil your years of leadership into, let's say your top three leadership hacks, what would they be? Kristin. Kristin Zhivago: I think the first one is don't assume. Never assume because when we assume we think we know it all. We think we know the answer, so you really have to always be curious, keep asking, keep trying to figure out, keep being humble, not only with your customers, but your partners, your staff just assume that you don't know at all. And by the way, I didn't get to this point until, you know, after my fifties, because you have to get over yourself. In order to get past that point of thinking, you know, at all, or wanting to know it all or needing to know it all, you really have to get over that and just keep being humble that you might in fact, learn something today from somebody else. Steve Rush: Right? Kristin Zhivago: And that is the key, because if you do that, then you are going to understand the customer's mind-set. You are going to understand your staff and what they want. What makes them happy and try to give it to them and the second one is, make it a nice place for nice people to work. I have a no jerk policy, clients, vendors, our staff, absolutely. The minute anybody puts their hands on their hips, that is it we are done because we don't do that around here, including me. I am not allowed to put my hands on my hips either by the way and that makes it a, culture where it is a nice place, a happy place. It is a safe place for good people to work and they love it. They love it. It is just so wonderful. You are not being stopped and by the way, the definition of a jerk is somebody who makes it harder for other people to do their work. Nice people try to make it easier for you to do your job. They try to help; they try to give you what you need and a jerk does just the opposite. Everything is a struggle. You never get a good decision. They love everybody paying attention to them because they don't know the answer. It is a power trip, so we have a jerk free environment and it is a wonderful place to work. Steve Rush: I think I am going to be sharing that with my clients and colleagues. Hey, do you have a no jerk policy? Kristin Zhivago: Yeah, exactly. Steve Rush: Because ultimately we put up with a lot of BS from people. Kristian Zhivago: Yeah.   Steve Rush: Unnecessarily, but if it's, you know, right from the outset, people understand, this is the way we do things. This is the environment we've got, just creates the right tone from the start. Isn't it? Kristian Zhivago: Yeah and it helps you help your customers too, because one of the reasons it is hard for employees to help customers is because their boss is a jerk. So they have to work around that somehow. And if your boss a nice person who wants to help the customer. Oh gee, guess what, you know, you are all on the same page. Customers happy, you are happy. The boss is happy, so it is really a wonderful way to go. And the third thing I would say that I've learned is never give up, never give up. I mean, no matter what is happening. I mean, I learned that in Silicon Valley, we had many recessions in Silicon Valley where people would think the Valley was dead, so when my husband and I were running an ad agency, we made this poster to call the Valley lives, and we sent it around. People put it up in their conference rooms. And it was just about the fact that there's always money flowing somewhere. And there's trillions of dollars that change hands every single day in the banking system. Used to be 3 trillion, I think it is up to 5 now or something, but it's a lot of money. Somebody is always buying something somewhere and you just have to figure out who is it? What do they want? How can I help? What is their mind-set? How can I address it? Make an offer that will appeal to them in that mind-set. There is always a way to make money. If you are humble and you go after just that one thought that you are trying to help somebody achieve something. How can I take what I do and apply it to that? And by the way, that's a big deal right now with COVID and all this stuff's going on with this virus, same thing. Steve Rush: Sure is. Kristin Zhivago: What do people need? How can we help? Steve Rush: If not even more so now just understanding their lens at a different level. Right? Kristin Zhivago: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Things are different. This thing has radically shifted us. All of us, the whole world has shifted. It is a big deal, and so people are going to approach things differently and prioritize things differently and need different things. And we have to understand quickly what those mind-sets are. Steve Rush: So we affectionately called this part of the show Hack to Attack, and it is where we learn from our guest's. Period in their life or their career where things have not gone well, or they may have screwed up, but they have used that lesson. That is something that is now positive in their life. What will be your hack to attack? Kristin Zhivago: You talked about it, that humility experience when I was a senior in high school, and I went out to my car with my tail between my legs. I remember distinctly standing in that parking lot. You know, I had a 52 Chevy. I did not even go into my car right away. I just stood there in the parking lot, feeling the full-scale humiliation and saying to myself, man, I just screwed up. I mean, you know, I had the whole thing ready. They would have bought from me. I saw the sale, you know, when you are a sales person, it is like, I tell people, I am a recovering salesperson. You saw it, you know, that he could have bought, but he did not, and it was because me. Steve Rush: It is such a vivid emotion for you still isn't it? Kristin Zhivago: Yeah. I knew right then, you know, and I was a singer. I was in show business. My whole family was in show business. I could hold an audience in the Palm of my hand while I was singing. You know, it was a big ego boost. And that's the other thing. I mean, you really do have to get over yourself to succeed in business. That was that moment where I knew there was something more than just holding an audience, just being good at performing. It was something way bigger and way deeper, and I've just devoted my life to it. That is really the main thing, you know, and every time you go through a recession or something and you have to learn, but the other big thing for me was that, that realization, that the difference between the gap between the customer's mind-set and the company mind-set is always amazingly large and they don't even know it. They don't even know how far off they are, so those two things were things that have just driven me and driven me and driven me, Steve Rush: Brilliant stuff and the last thing we want to explore with you is to do a little bit of time travel now. And if you're able to bump into Kristen at 21, what would be the one bit of advice you would give her? Kristin Zhivago: Kind of the same thing, like get over yourself, you know, calm down, watch more than you talk, look around. It is hard to figure this out. You know, I mean, I am not stupid. So I knew I had smarts and when you're smart enough to kind of get by in life. You have a tendency to think that, you know, you are pretty good. It was not that I was conceited, I was never conceited, but I had sort of a confidence in my own mental abilities and the problem with that is then you kind of like being right. And that's a big mistake. It is a big mistake because honestly, I mean, I have people working for me now that every single day somebody says something that makes me slap my head and go, yes. Golly. That is a great idea. That is such a great idea. We are going to do that. You know, and I have gotten more satisfaction in my older times now. My advanced age, I am much happier with those moments than I am with me being the one that knew the answer. To me, that is just, okay, I got a lot of experience. I know what to do in certain situations. I usually have an answer, but I am very calm about it. It is not a big deal to me. What is really exciting is when one of our staff comes up with a great idea that I hadn't even thought about. That is fun. It is really turned into a big high for me. I am so proud of them. I am so excited. Steve Rush: Right.    Kristin Zhivago: So, that is the big thing. Steve Rush: And it is also great leadership. Kristin Zhivago: Yeah. Steve Rush: Finally, we want to make sure that our listeners can get in touch with you and continue the dialogue where we leave off. Where would be the place that you would like them to go? Kristin Zhivago: Best thing is just go to zhivagopartners.com I mean, everything's there, my blog articles, my podcasts, my book and as we roll out this mind-set driven marketing, we are going to have a guide for that. That is coming out over the next month or so, so everything that I do is pretty much in that. I also write a blog for the up and comers. It is kind of a labour of love. It is called kristinswisdom.com and that is just for people getting out into business who really went through the school system and did not learn anything about business. And of course, you're going to spend the rest of your life in business, so I'm just trying to help them understand what's really going on and what really works and hopefully avoid some of the mistakes that we all make when we're younger and full of our self. Steve Rush: That is lovely and we will make sure that all of those links are in our show notes as well, so as folks are finished listen to this. They can actually just click into the show notes and go take a look. So Kristin it is just for me to say. It has been really lovely talking to you. There is some super hints and tips, and idea to help people think about the way that they approach marketing and certainly mind-set driven marketing for me I think where the future lays of organization and for business. So Kristin thank you so much for being on the Leadership Hacker Podcast. Kristin Zhivago: I love it. You are great. I really enjoyed it, thank you so much.        Closing   Steve Rush: I genuinely want to say heartfelt thanks for taking time out of your day to listen in too. We do this in the service of helping others, and spreading the word of leadership. Without you listening in, there would be no show. So please subscribe now if you have not done so already. Share this podcast with your communities, network, and help us develop a community and a tribe of leadership hackers. Finally, if you would like me to work with your senior team, your leadership community, keynote an event, or you would like to sponsor an episode. Please connect with us, by our social media. And you can do that by following and liking our pages on Twitter and Facebook our handler their @leadershiphacker. Instagram you can find us there @the_leadership_hacker and at YouTube, we are just Leadership Hacker, so that is me signing off. I am Steve Rush and I have been the leadership hacker.      

Digital Marketing guru and CEO, Kristin Zhivago shares what it means to be a servant leader. Kristin walks us through her journey that includes a background of 40 years in technology...this mother and entrepreneur knows what she is talking about! From revenue coach to opening her own digital agency, she lets us in on a few principles worth noting when it comes to the business world.

In this timely episode I do a deep dive with revenue & marketing expert Kristin Zhivago on topics like how businesses can adapt to the current challenges facing entrepreneurs.  She shares her process on understanding how your customers want to buy and how to sell to them based on 4 types of buyer scrutiny.  This is from decades of work as an marketing agency owner & revenue coach to top executives in silicon valley and beyond. Get in synch with the mindset of customers by shifting from designing a selling journey to learning from customers their buying journey.  Kristin Zhivago is author of forbes top 6 marketing and sales books called:  Roadmap to Revenue: How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy will change your mindset from “seller” to “buyer” — as in, you will understand how to find out how your customers want to buy from you and what they want to buy from you. Follow Kristin Linkedin: Kristin Zhivago Twitter: @KristinZhivago Web: https://zhivagopartners.com/ Groundswell http://www.Groundswell.fm http://www.Groundswell.Marketing Scott Martin Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottadammartin/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/ScottAdamMartin  

Kristin Zhivago is president of Zhivago Partners, a digital marketing agency, and the author of the 5-star book, “Roadmap to Revenue: How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy.” She is a worldwide speaker on the subject of selling to today’s digitally savvy customers and today we talk about how to adjust your processes to meet the needs of your customers during the health crisis whilst keeping your brand promise.To find out more about Kristin Zhivago visit: https://zhivagopartners.com/To access Kristin's blog "Kristin's Wisdom" head to: https://kristinswisdom.com/author/kzhivago/Key discussion points:How the health of your business is aligned with the health of your mental stateFocus on the essential to meet the needs of customers and continue generating revenueBranding is the promise you make, Brand is the promise you keepThe 5 P's to provide value to your customersUnderstand what your customers think of youDigital Transformation: The apps and tools you can use to evolve your processes, pivot and serve your customers during lockdownLinks to get in touch with Lauren Kress, The Business Scientist®Connect with Lauren on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurenkress89/Tweet with Lauren: @laurenkress89Or you can also follow all the latest from us on our new podcast Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/growyourbrandpodcastSend an email to: lauren.kress@thechangemakers.org.auFor more links to connect and get in touch with Lauren or book a call visit: https://linktr.ee/laurenkress

We might think we know what our customers are thinking, but we’re wrong, according to revenue coach, Kristin Zhivago. And in order to really go down that journey of better customer service, you first need to toss aside any expectations of what you think your customers are going to say, and actually be willing to start talking to them.  By doing this, you get to find out your company’s strengths and weaknesses. You find out the things you're really good at that you want to promote, and the things that you need to fix in the background. And once you fix them, then you can promote those.

Beth interviews Kristin Zhivago

How does one of the world's top email conversion strategists help clients improve conversion rates and reduce churn? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, email conversion expert Val Geisler shares how she approaches working with clients to revamp their email workflows and reduce customer churn through email.  From the discovery process she uses to craft email strategies, to how she determines who the sender should be and how to format emails, Val digs into the details that enable her to deliver impactful results for the clients she works with. Listen to the podcast to learn more about Val's approach to email conversion strategy and how you can apply it to your business. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. My name is Kathleen Booth, and I'm your host. This week my guest is Val Geisler, who is an email conversion strategist. Val came to the podcast because one of our previous guests mentioned her as someone who was doing inbound marketing really well. So I'm very excited to have you here Val! Val Geisler (Guest): I'm excited to be here, thank you so much. Val and Kathleen recording this episode Kathleen: I ask my guests every week in the podcast, "Company or individual, who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well?" Because I'm always curious to see best practice examples and also to discover new people to follow and new companies to watch. And when your name came up, it immediately piqued my interest and I thought "ooh, I really need to interview her." I've been looking forward to it. Val: That's awesome, I love having these conversations, so it's my favorite part of my day. Actually, I just realized I have my space heater on, I'm gonna turn it off. Kathleen: Go for it, yeah. And while you're doing that, it's funny, Val and I were talking before we started the podcast about how I really like to do these interviews in a very organic way. So sometimes the dog barks and sometimes the space heater needs to get turned off. And today, I can guarantee you that I will be coughing throughout this podcast because I'm on the tail end of a late fall head cold. So for everyone who's listening, bear with me as I cough in your ear for the next hour. Val: Yeah, for the people who are listening like to old recordings next summer, they'll be like "head colds and space heaters, what's going on?" Kathleen: Right, it's the week before Thanksgiving, November 2018, and it's definitely fall turning into winter. Val: No kidding, yeah we have snow today. Kathleen: Ugggh. Yeah, we had nasty freezing, sleeting, grossness yesterday. So I'm glad the sun is out! Well before we dig into our topic for today, I wonder if you could tell my listeners a little bit about yourself because I think you have an interesting story and you focus on such a fascinating niche. Meet Val Geisler Val: Oh, sure. Like you said, I'm an email conversion strategist. And what that means is that I work mostly with software companies and eCommerce companies on their lifecycle emails. So that is the onboarding emails, ongoing retention emails, anything that's campaign-driven. You know, I'm just wrapping up a few Black Friday / Cyber Monday campaigns. Those kind of things where you can really see a start, a middle, and an end. Not the ongoing email marketing that brands do. But when it's really about that overall customer journey. And they always like to say that it's like a Trojan Horse really, because what you come to me for and what you get is emails, but what you really get is a better idea of who your customers are and what they need and the kind of journey they want to go on with your brand and what's gonna keep them around long term. Kathleen: That makes a ton of sense. I've worked with all range of different types of businesses. I was an agency owner for 11 years before I joined IMPACT. So I've worked with B2B, B2C, small, medium, enterprise. And one of the things that I find fascinating is how much the sales process really changes so fundamentally based on industry and company size, particularly in software and SaaS. I've always found it interesting, in some respects, for a lot of those companies, that your email marketing is your sales. A lot of those companies, especially the lower priced SaaS solutions, you're not getting on the phone with a salesperson to go through a long and considered sales process, so if you're email marketing strategy is not tight, you're essentially gonna lose the sale. That's always how I've looked at it. It plays such a fundamental role and so I'm fascinated by what you do because so much is riding on it. Val: Yeah, the software example is an interesting one because in most cases, you're coming up against a free trial. So the industry standard is to have some kind of free trial, or a you know, first month, 30 day money back guarantee, kind of something like that. Which is essentially a free trial, right? You're going to refund them if they ask for it that time frame. So you're doing everything that you can to go from, they're no longer at the top of your funnel. They're much more mid funnel or they haven't quite yet made the decision to absolutely become a customer of yours. You're still on tenuous grounds, as it were. But you know you do have this opportunity where you are still selling to them and you want to treat them as though they already are a customer. And I think that is what's the most magical thing about email is that you have this really personal way to connect with somebody. If you think about it, our inboxes are like our virtual living rooms. Kathleen: Yeah. Val: You don't let just anybody in your inbox these days. So how do you treat your customers like they gave you that free pass to their living room that you can come by anytime? How are you going to respect that and then also treat them like the customers they already are and help them see themselves as a customer of yours? Kathleen: That's so funny. I love your analogy about the living room. All I can think of in my head as I hear you say that is that my living room has a lot of people in it that have overstayed their welcome, because my inbox is so full! Val: Oh yeah. Mine is not a good example because I actually collect emails for my blog on a regular basis. I write onboarding tear downs and retention tear downs and so I collect a lot of emails in my inbox. So mine is not a great example either. Developing Email Conversion Strategies Kathleen: Now if a company is coming to you for help with this, walk me through your first conversations. Where do you start when someone says "I want you to help me with my email strategy". Val: The first place I start in every instance is the customers. And this is a non-negotiable really of working with me is that we need to interview your customers. We need to talk to them, find our more about them, about them and not abut the product, right? So the typical conversation with potential clients of mine goes something like "hey, so the first thing we're gonna do is talk. I'm gonna talk to your customers" and they say "we already do that, we talk to our customers every single day". I say "yeah, I hear you and I know you talk to your customers about product and maybe there's a little bit of conversation about them or their business in those conversations. But the conversations are by and large about the product. What I'm gonna talk to your customers about is them. What they need. Why they came to you in the first place. How they're growing their business or what they're using your product for. How they make decisions. Who influences them? All of those things go into the buying process. To know that is pure gold. I have taken those customer interviews in the past and copied and pasted real sentences customers have said from the transcripts I get straight into onboarding emails that have an incredible conversion rate because of those exact words the customer's were using. And there's not way that we could get those from, you know help tickets or conversations that really are about the product. Kathleen: Yeah, I also think, I was having this conversation with somebody recently about buyer persona research in general. And I also, in my experience, found that your customers are never gonna be as honest with you as they will be with somebody from outside of your organization. Val: Yes. Kathleen: So even if you're diligently doing customer research and really working on those buyer personas, you're still never gonna quite get the same story as someone who's considered to be impartial or third party will get. Val: 100 percent. The answers that I get from the customers. Most of the conversations, my clients will introduce me to their customers as someone they're bringing in to do these interviews and this is the why behind the project. Then I get on the calls and the customers talk to me like "well you know, you guys do this, and I found you" they always say "you guys" you know like I'm part of the brand. In almost every single interview I've done I remind them that I'm actually not part of the company, I'm an outside perspective. Sometimes they joke and they say "well in that case, let me give you some feedback" Kathleen: Right, "Here's the straight scoop." Val: No, they do. They tell you what they're often afraid to tell somebody who works at the company. Kind of like, you don't want to tell the waitress something about your order in case the kitchen might spit in your food. I think of that as a very similar feeling in software and especially for smaller software companies. A lot of times the founder, CEO, is the original product builder as well. Customers don't want to offend you by saying something that, even if it's not directly about the product, that could hurt your feelings about how your marketing or who you're talking to. Kathleen: Right, it's like telling you "you have an ugly baby" Val: Exactly, so they'll tell me. There's an inherent promise that I make to all of the customers that I'll get testimonials. Sorry, not testimonials, I'll get transcripts which we can turn into testimonials with their permission. So I get transcripts of all the conversations, so I have their exact words. But my clients never know who said those words unless the customer gives me explicit permission for that. Kathleen: You know, it's so fascinating to hear you talk about this because you're touching on something that came up in another interview I did a couple of months back with a woman named Kristin Zhivago, who's written a book on buyer persona research and she talked about how, even if you're doing this research in-house, like as a marketer, if you're doing it in part to try and convince the C-suite of a change that needs to be made or a particular strategy that needs to be followed. What she talks about is how important it is to pull actual quotes from the research so that it's not you as the marketer saying "well here's what I see as the takeaway from the research". It's literally like "We asked five people this question" and here are quotes from five of them coming right from their mouth, what they said. It's really hard to argue with that. I think it's fascinating because not only is it hard to argue with that, when you go back to a software company or a client or your boss. But it's also interesting that the buyer themselves, you know you described a process where you put a quote in an email, and I think it's like the buyer themself is reading that and thinking "wow, it's like they read my mind". Val: When in fact we interviewed you, you know? The quotes come in handy not just in that onboarding process, but I used them a lot in long term retention sequences. So, after I work with a client on onboarding and we have that really nailed, then we dive into long term retention. So what kind of communication are your customers getting beyond that first like 30 days and is it regular newsletters, cadence, and that's it. They only hear about product announcements and new blog posts on your blog? Or are they getting other targeted communications about their use of the account, about things that will matter to them as they grow their business. Those comments that they make, those quotes that we have from the onboarding process, using them throughout the retention sequence to remind people why they made the decision that they did six months ago, twelve months ago, just putting those words back in their head that they were using about their buying decision. There is a period of time where we start to reflect on hopefully everyone is going through their expenses and seeing like "hey, what am I spending money on that I'm not using?" How could I be using that better or do I want to stop using it. It's a smart business move to do that. So you can't hold your customers at fault for canceling a subscription that they aren't using. If anyone's at fault, it's you for not talking to them about why they aren't using it, helping them get the most out of it while they're still there. Don't try and win them back as soon as they want to cancel. Stop it before it starts. Kathleen: It's so funny, because I literally just did that this morning in my role as a buyer of martech. I have a budget that I have to, that my team needs to stick with for marketing tools, which is essentially all the software that we use. That's one of our biggest line item expenses for my team and I literally this morning, before I got on with you, was going through that and thinking "What is the fat that I can cut from this?" There's a new product I want and in order to get it, I have to cut something else. You're 100% right. If there's something we're not using, or we're only using it casually, and it's not delivering full value, it's gone. Val: Yep. So, we need to continually remind them of the value and that values-based conversation is how everything should be positioned, moving forward. So, the product announcements are about the value that those new features are providing the customer. It's not about, "Hey, we spent three months building this feature," and, "We did all this," and, "We, we, we." It's about you. "Here's what you said you needed, so we put it into action, and we heard you, and wanted to create this for you, where you can learn more about it." I remember, as a kid, my mom taught me that if you use, "I" statements, you get a lot more convincing done when you're arguing with your brother and sister. Right? So, I think, "Man, everything you need to know about business, you learn as a parent," because all those things that you tell your kids are things you can use as your clients and customers do. Kathleen: So true. You know, I think what you just talked about with the "You" statements, can be applied even beyond emails. We do that when we look at customer websites. If you go to the home page of the website, and it's saying, like, "We, we, we," like, "We do this the best," and "We created this product," instead of, "Our customers have this problem and come to us for X." It's almost like you can count the pronouns on the page, and if the number of "I" and "We" statements exceeds the number of "You" and "They" statements, there's a mismatch. Val: Yeah, absolutely, and it's also an indicator of the working relationship, long-term. As a buyer, thinking about investing in a product or a service, you want it to be about you because you're spending the money, and you're deciding to hit that "Buy" button and sign up for that product. It just makes sense to put the statement back on the buyer and take it away from you. Kathleen: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. True. Now, you begin with that persona research, the buyer research, learning more about the needs they have, the challenges they have, the problems they're trying to solve through the product. If I'm hearing you correctly, you get certain takeaways from that. The value that they're searching for becomes a little bit clearer. What's the next step, then? Is it to really, then, look at the product and the customer journey through the product and marry the value statements to that so that you can, kind of, map out a sequence? How do you, then, take it forward? Val: That's exactly it. If I'm working with a company that's been around for a while and has data collected, where they can say, "Hey, here are the things that our most successful customers do." It's usually a combination of several different events, but our successful customers do these five things in the first 30 days. Then, you wanna make sure that your messaging is around ... and maybe not even all five things, but what three things are the absolutely most important? Building a framework of emails around that, so that you're not throwing every single feature, under the hood, at your customers from day one, but how are you helping them become the most successful customer you have in those early days? How are you helping them see the value that they wanted out from your product through those email communications? Val: Most of the time, email isn't actually about getting them to use the product, but it's about building a relationship, staying top of mind for them, and reminding them of the value that they have at their fingertips. We know that most of us are reading emails on our phone, and we're not in front of a computer, or we're checking our email in between calls, and we don't have a dedicated hour to sit down and do something. So, use those emails to provide value, to teach them what's possible. The call to action on the email can certainly be to login to their account, but just know that, that's not necessarily what they're gonna do, maybe, the first time they read the email. You're there simply to stay top of mind with them, because people often sign up for software and then hop onto a call, or go into a meeting, or go grab lunch. You know, they signed up, but they don't remember that they did it, even an hour later. So your job is to remind them that they did it, remind them why they did it, and remind them, what you provide for them ... what value you can give them because of the decision that they made. Kathleen: Now I have a million questions that are really detailed, nitty-gritty things that I want to go into. I guess I will start with ... You talk about reaching out to customers through email to remind them that you're there, to stay top of mind. When you work with software companies, how do you advise them about who the email should come from? Do you suggest that the email should come from, like, a specific person, like a Customer Success Manager? Should it come from the company? The sender ... How important is that? Val: It's important that it's personal because, again, your base emails, especially these initial onboarding emails, are building relationships. So, I like an initial welcome email to come from a CEO or a Founder. I like the following-on onboarding emails to come from a mix of that same Founder or CEO and a head of Customer Success or, if it's a more technical email, maybe, a Director of Engineering chimes in on those. I do like to introduce other people on the team, because they're people that your customers are building relationships with, inherently, over time. If they send in the support ticket, who might they hear back from? Who is leading the helm in this particular area of the products? That's the person you want to introduce ... one, because it shows a buyer, a customer, that there's more than just you behind the brand. When every single email comes from Founder and CEO, it's like, "Okay, but are you the entire team?" Kathleen: Right. Smoke and mirrors. Val: Right. Kathleen: Is there just one guy back there? Val: Right, 'cause we all know there are plenty of software companies that are, like, the Founder and CEO is also the Director of Engineering and the Head of Marketing. S o, it's really important that they know that there are other people behind the brand, and it is super simple to turn around from a piece of software, from this inanimate object you have no relationship with. When you start to build relationships with other people and, even if that's a one-sided relationship where they're just emailing you and you're not necessarily interacting with them, you're reading their name. You're seeing their words. There is a little bit of a relationship that gets built, and it's so much harder to turn away from a person, and it's even harder to turn away from multiple people, to tell you, "Hey, Kathleen, I'm sorry. I'm not really using this software that I signed up for. I know I made the choice to sign up for it. I'm not really using it." That's a harder statement, for me, than to go into a piece of software and click cancel. Kathleen: I could not agree with you more. I use a lot of different software products, and I sign up for a lot 'cause I like to trial things and, kind of, understand if there's something better out there. I find, first of all, that not a lot of software companies do this well, and the small number that do do it well, where, from the beginning, I establish a relationship with a person or a group of people, you totally hit the nail on the head. It's almost like I feel like I'm letting them down if I cancel. Val: Yeah. Kathleen: There's, like, a sense of guilt almost. Val: Yeah, and even though we're marketers. We know those emails are automated. We know that there isn't somebody on the other end personally typing it out to us, but it's a little tougher decision to make. So, there's lots of reasons for making it from a person. I do always like it to be the person's name and, then, from ... I was just using Drift as an example, yesterday. So, I'll use Drift. So, instead of it saying, "The Drift team," it would say, "Dave from Drift," and it also wouldn't say, "Dave Gerhardt," as the only name because, then, it's confusing. In your inbox, you're immediately like, "Who is this? Who's spamming me? Who's this person?" If you have some kind of reference point, "Dave from Drift," "Oh, okay. It's Dave from Drift. Got it," then, I'm more likely to open that email. Kathleen: You know? That's interesting, too, because we are not a software company at IMPACT. We have a very large readership for our content, and we A/B tested the difference in open rates if we send an email from Ramona, who is our head of editorial content. If it says, "Ramona from IMPACT," or if it's just her email address and her name ... It was funny going into it 'cause my theory was that her email address and the name would get opened more because it more closely approximates if it was a person you knew emailing you, that's what it would look like, but you're right. When we A/B tested it, I found out I was wrong and, "Ramona from IMPACT," actually got better results. Val: It does. Yeah. It's, like, friendly and familiar. It's comforting in knowing there's a point of reference because, also, you have to remember that this is a new relationship. This is, kind of like, when you are talking to a friend about somebody else, and you, kind of, always have to mention their last name until that friend gets used to you talking about that person. Then you can just use their first name. You know what I mean? It's like you need to mention the company name as a point of reference for who you are and why you're in their inbox. Kathleen: It's not pretending to be something that it isn't, like, if you don't have a really deep relationship, it's not pretending and trying to come into your inbox in disguise as though you do. Val: Yeah, totally. Kathleen: My next question ... These are all, by the way, totally selfishly motivated because we spend a lot of time in my team talking about email. So, I'm really psyched to see if you can, maybe, help clear up some questions that we have. Val: Oh, okay. So, this is a consult call. Kathleen: In disguise, it's a podcast interview. No, no, no. This is why I was so excited to talk to you, because email is a topic that is so top of mind and there aren't a lot of really concrete black and white, right or wrong answers. It's different depending upon industry, depending upon what you're emailing about, but- Val: A hundred percent. Kathleen: Yeah, the other thing that we debate all the time is the format that emails should take, meaning, when should you use a more traditional designed email with, like, a banner header and- Val: HTML. Kathleen: ... Yeah, and when should you use something that -- I mean, let's be honest, it's not plain text, it's like, plain HTML -- something that looks like it came out of your Gmail inbox- Val: Yeah, text-based. Kathleen: ... What are the use cases? Val: The way I like to think about that is transactional emails, HTML all the way. Put all your images in, put your header and your logo and all that stuff. So that is like monthly invoices, anything about the product, anything that is future releases, your regular blog post newsletter, that kind of thing. Those are all pretty transactional emails. Those are great for HTML, templated, beautiful, whatever, kind of emails. Relationship-building emails are where I love to use text-based emails. Relationship-building emails are the ones that I write for my customers. They're the onboarding, the retention emails. They're the campaigns about something really specific going on. That's where you wanna, again, really hone in on that customer journey and the personal aspect. So, if it feels like it's relationship-building, stick to relationship-building, stick to text-based. If it feels more transactional, then, template it up. When I say, "text-based," it's really important to know that I don't mean text only. You can certainly have images. You can even use a header if you want. Add your logo at the bottom. Whatever you wanna do. Text-based means at least 60% of the email is text. Kathleen: Now, does that actually improve deliverability as well? Val: It does. Kathleen: Have you noticed any particular ... Is there X percent more ... How impactful is that from a deliverability standpoint? Val: Deliverability varies by inbox since you have to think about where your customers are receiving your emails. If a lot of your customers are on Outlook, then good luck to you. Truly, if most of your customers are on Outlook, then, ... Outlook is, like, tons of corporate customers. Right? So, if that's the case, then you really do wanna stick with text-based emails because Outlook does not like a lot of HTML emails. They just look horrible, and email developers and designers will tell you that Outlook is like the bane of their existence It's their kryptonite. So, if that's the case, stick with text-based as much as possible, even for those transactional emails. Kathleen: Yeah. There's just so much potential for things to go wrong. We ran into this all the time when I had my agency. You would design what you thought was the most beautiful newsletter and it looked great, and you preview it in some of the different email clients, and then, it goes to an Outlook, or something, and all of a sudden, it's just a disaster. Val: Yes. It's a total mess. Again, on mobile. What's it gonna look like on mobile? Are they gonna have to scroll around on mobile 'cause nobody likes to do that. So, just considering that, as well, but as far as deliverability goes, it really depends on the inbox. I'm in this community of email geeks, and we all talk about this a lot. The deliverability experts there have told me that, really, the more text in a email, the more it looks like an email from a friend, even if it's being sent through an email service provider. The more an inbox can read text, it thinks that ... because, again, it's AI. It's not a real person making a decision. It's an algorithm, and so it's saying, "Okay, this is a lot of text. This person probably really wants to see this email," versus, "This is a ton of images. It's probably more promotional, or even SPAM." I want to be certain to say that the Promotions folder in Gmail is not the SPAM folder. That Promotions folder is, often, a good place to be. I know a lot of consumers who get really upset if a brand is trying to sneak into the main inbox, because they rely on that Promotions folder. They go to it to look at what deals they have available to them ... especially in the world of eCommerce. What's the next offer in their inbox? They'll drag those emails over to Promotions, left and right, when they land in their main inbox. So, be really careful about your industry, but also know that the Promotions folder is not like a garbage can. It's a place people actually really enjoy going to. Kathleen: Amen. You know, in my case, it's interesting. I subscribe to a lot of email newsletters just to, sort of, stay up to date on what's happening in the world of marketing, the world of technology, and also because I like to see what best practice email newsletters look like because we just launched a new one. You collect emails, I collect email newsletters, and they all go to my Promotions tab, or the vast majority of them do. The few that don't, I do move over because I have an hour blocked out in my day just for going to the promotions tab and reading everything in there because I really wanna see that information, but I want it categorized in such a way that I'm able to use my time efficiently. So, I couldn't agree with you more. Val: Right, and if you're an eCommerce brand, and your emails aren't in the Promotions folder, and somebody goes to the Promotions before they make their buying choices, and if your competitors are there, but you aren't, guess who they're gonna choose? Kathleen: Right. That's a very good point. That's a very good point. Yeah, the issue of images and text-based emails is interesting to me. I've really been looking at that closely lately because we're trying to make some decisions about the newsletter that we send out. I've noticed, even in Gmail, watching my own habits, I have Gmail set up so that it doesn't automatically download images. So when I go into these newsletters, if they're very image-heavy, they look really messy because, by default, those images are not opening, and I don't always click that little Gmail link that says, "Display images below." So I find myself gravitating more towards emails that don't have a lot because they're easier to read and digest without having to load the images. And if an image looks like it's gonna be really relevant I'll hit that button but there's something to that, you know to making something easy to read and cohesive without having to rely on a bunch of particularly decorative images as opposed to useful ones. Val: There's so many use cases that you just have to consider the majority of your customers and then do the best that you can by the rest of them. Use the alt text, uses few images as possible, you know all those things. Kathleen: Yeah the alt text ... we had a conversation yesterday because somebody on my team did a text based email that had a video in it and the video didn't show up in it by default. The alt text did and the alt text was like 'webinar promo' and we talked about how there's a real opportunity with alt text to change it to say 'click here to see a special message from,' you know? Just not something that you normally think about but I think it's those little details that can really improve results. Val: Yeah, absolutely. And the alt text has an opportunity to give more information. Like it shouldn't be a repeat of the heading on the sentence below the image. It should be its own stand alone piece of information. Kathleen: Yeah. That's so interesting. I love those little details. I must be a huge email geek as well. Val: You are. You're a secret email geek. Kathleen: I am. I'm letting my freak flag fly today. So we've talked about formatting and what these emails should look like. Where do you generally see -- in the SaaS customer onboarding and retention funnel -- where do you generally see the most leakage from the funnel and how do you use email to shore that up? Val: In the world of SaaS -- we've talked a lot about eCommerce I'm gonna transition back to SaaS -- the biggest concern is churn. And churn looks like revenue churn for most SaaS companies. The leak in the funnel is really around right when somebody converts to being a paid customer. Those first 30, 60 I'd say even as far as 90 days are absolutely crucial to nail the customer experience. There are too many software companies that are getting to conversion, so maybe they have an onboarding sequence set up and they're getting to conversion once their customer becomes a paid customer. That's it. They hear nothing else from the company until, you know, they get their monthly invoice and they get added to the newsletter segment and that's it. There's no other communication. That is a huge problem for battling churn because they're still a new customer, they're still trying to figure things out. Just because they've decided to go ahead and pay for month one doesn't mean that they're sticking around long term. I think once you get past month three, definitely past month six you have a dedicated customer at that point. But you know the biggest problem for SaaS is getting through those first couple months as a paid customer. And if you aren't paying attention to your customers in that time then you're gonna see pretty high churn numbers. You can drop your churn numbers just by paying attention to your existing customers. Stop trying to battle churn by bringing in new customers and increasing your conversions on new customers; everybody tries to battle churn by doing webinars and adding sales people to the team and going out and getting new customers because we have to get two customers for every one who churns, or you know whatever math they work out. If you just focus on the customers you've already attracted then you don't have to get any new customers. You can just keep the ones you have. Kathleen: Right. Plug the leaks in the bucket as opposed to pouring more water in the leaky bucket. Val: Exactly. Yeah. And you know, especially if your pricing model is based around the growth of your customers. So you know if you have something where they have some kind of tiered plan based on their usage or based on the number of subscribers or website hits, any of those things, if you educate your customers and help them grow their business then they're gonna move up your pricing plans and the more you educate them, the more you help them grow the business while they're moving up the pricing plans they are also seeing you as a valuable resource in their business in general, right? You become a trusted advisor as a brand and then they're not going anywhere and now you have them not going anywhere, loving your brand, probably evangelizing your brand and they're at one of your higher price points so that's a win for everybody. Kathleen: Now during those crucial first few months, if I were a software company that decided, "Okay I'm really gonna double down and make sure I'm treating these new customers well. I'm nurturing them so I'm encouraging product usage and adoption," I imagine it would be very easy to kind of tip the scales in the other direction and overwhelm them with email communications. So how much is too much and how often should these companies be having a touchpoint with their customers? Val: Well you definitely wanna make sure the left hand talks to the right. What I see often happening is that the product team will send out emails about the product while the marketing team is sending out emails about the blog or the newsletter and they're overlapping one another, they're creating this weird cadence or they're just crowding up an inbox. So you definitely wanna make sure that things are consolidated. And I'm not saying put everything in one email. I'm just saying make sure that you understand the send cycles in the calendar. There should be kind of one master calendar for all emails going out to your customers. And then there's segments inside of there too. So customers who aren't actively using your product but are paying for it you wanna talk to them a lot. You wanna know why that's happening. Because it's way better to ... honestly it's way better to let them churn out early than to have them on for months and months and months and then come back and say, "Hey I really haven't been using the product for six months can you refund me at least three of those?" Like that sucks. So you know I think a lot of founders are afraid of talking to people who aren't using their product because maybe they have a whole bunch of customers who aren't using the product and it's like, "Well then I won't have any customers left-" Kathleen: It's like there's something very, very wrong with that entire mindset. Val: Yeah, yeah. And also you don't really have any customers right now. Like you have people who are paying you. But they aren't your customers, they aren't using your product, they're not doing what you intended to have done with what you built. So they're just people who happen to be paying you money and probably forgot about it. Kathleen: Right, they're like zombie customers. Val: Yeah, yeah. I actually have an article that I wrote about the customers, those zombie customers. There are vampire customers who are the ones that like suck your customer support team dry of everything, they're not great customers. There's ghost customers who are customers who maybe sign up for a trial, never converted but have experienced your brand before. And there are zombies that are like out there in the wild running around trying to figure out how to use your product and maybe even forgetting that it's available to them. So yeah those are two great areas of opportunities to focus on is those ghosts, those customers who were around at one time and then vanished because there's a level of familiarity with the product and especially if you've done some major feature releases making sure you're reaching those customers in that process. And then yeah the customers who aren't actively using your product -- get them on board and talk to them a lot. If they are actively using the product, that's where the cadence changes. They maybe get less emails, but the emails they get are more of a congratulatory and a support from a level of, "We see you, we see you out there working hard. We wanna support you however you need it, here are the ways that we can do that." Versus someone who's not using it at all like, "Hey, we wanna help you be successful, whatever that means. Here's some of the opportunities that are available to you we'd love to hop on a call with you." Get your customer support team on board with really supporting those people in doing one on one calls or setting up group Q&A hours, webinars or whatever you need to do. Try out different tactics because what works for one business won't necessarily work for another. Kathleen: That makes sense. Now you've worked with a lot of different companies on these types of email strategies. For companies that do it well, what kinds of results can they see in terms of reduced churn or increased trial to customer conversions? Val: Well the results ... results may vary. They really do vary depending on what area the company's focusing on. And this is the one thing I caution people on is trying to do too much at once. I think you'll get no results if you try to do too much at once. But you will see results and they might be incremental, but a one percent decrease in churn can have a massive impact on your bottom line revenue. So if you focus on one segment of customers and maybe you focus on churn reduction for those zero to three month customers and really hone in on that instead of trying to cover all the way from new trial onboarding all the way through 12 plus month retention, just focus on a small segment of that and see how that can move the needle for you. And then replicate it. Everything about email is testing. Like if you aren't testing things ... like I love when my clients say, "Hey we wanna work with you and understand that these emails might not have the best results immediately so it's all about testing and we wanna have AB tests and we wanna run different segments through various email campaigns. And we wanna see what doesn't work because then we know what will work." Those are my favorite clients. The ones who say kind of like, "Let's break it and make it messy ..." because usually they come to me with a, "It can't get any worse from here" kind of mindset. So yeah, you can see a significant change if you focus on one segment at a time. If you're trying to do too much at once you really aren't gonna see much improvement. Kathleen: That makes a lot of sense. Well I feel like I could continue asking you questions forever and picking your brain and having my free consultation- Val: Yeah, let's do that. Any time. Kathleen: But you know as I said earlier you came to the podcast because one of my guests mentioned you as somebody who was doing inbound marketing really well so I wanna ask you my two questions that I always ask and see what you have to say. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: So company or individual who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well right now? Val: I love Tara Robertson at Sprout Social. So Sprout Social's a really special company, they do social media distribution I suppose -- she probably knows a better word for it. But Tara's really focused on that customer retention piece and talking to customers. She does it so beautifully and is an advocate for customer relationships in her company. And she's really made a big change internally and also with their customers. So I love ... I got to spend a little bit of time with Tara recently and I wanted it to be days and days and days. So I love her, yeah. That's a great one and it's funny that it hasn't come up yet. I know Tara pretty well. She's also a friend of IMPACT's so it's great to hear her name come up on this podcast. Val: Yeah, for sure. Kathleen: Now my second question is digital marketing changes so quickly, how do you stay up to date and keep yourself abreast of the latest developments? Val: So my biggest resource in the world of email is Litmus. So they're kind of like the email mecca I suppose. So Litmus is both a tool and they kind of aggregate all the email marketing news and really stay on top of things in the world of what's happening from an email design development strategy distribution. All categories of email they are covering on their blog, in their community and at their conference. And so I'm a huge part of the Litmus community and I don't know where I'd be in email without them. Kathleen: Oh I will definitely be checking them out as soon as I get off of this conversation. Val: Yeah and they have a really powerful tool too for email testing. You can see what your emails will look like in various inboxes. There's a one simple button that you can see what it'll look like without those images displayed so it's really handy, yeah. Kathleen: That's neat, I'll have to check that out. Well thank you! This has been so interesting, I've learned a lot. You've definitely cleared up some sources of, I don't know if confusion's the right word, but you've helped to resolve some of the debates we've been having on our team about emails so that's awesome. Connect With Val Kathleen: If somebody's listening or has a question or wants to reach out to you what's the best way to get in touch? Val: So my website is a good place to start, it's valgeisler.com. I'm also pretty active on Twitter and I'm at @LoveValGeisler. It's G-E-I-S-L-E-R.com. So come say hi to me on Twitter, tell me you listened to the podcast I would love to meet you. And if you LinkedIn request me I'll get back to it in like three months, my quarterly checkup with LinkedIn. But Twitter is where I am on a daily basis. And then come join my own email newsletter. I send out my regular blog post, I write onboarding tear downs. In 2019 I'm writing more on retention and the overall customer journey and I would love to see you over there as well. Kathleen: So I do subscribe, it's great. That's a little plug for anybody who's thinking of that. I love your writing style -- it's really different but it's really kind of authentic so it's a great example. Well and I also love your Twitter handle by the way. Val: Oh thank you. Kathleen: Well speaking of Twitter if you're listening and you liked what you heard here consider tweeting me at @WorkMommyWork to give me some feedback. I'd love to know what you think about the podcast, if there are more topics you'd like to see covered or if you know somebody who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work I'd love to hear about that because I want to interview them. And if you like the podcast, give it a review on the platform of your choice. I would really appreciate it. That's all we have for today, thank you so much, Val, this was a lot of fun. Val: Thanks for having me, Kathleen. Kathleen: Thanks.

Imagine if you were able to predict - with consistent certainty what exactly your potential buyers are going to ask you? what if you could know ahead of time what challenges they may present to you or how they view you and your offering versus your competition? What if you knew exactly how to sell to them - what to say and how to say it? On today’s episode of the Selling With Soul podcast, we are talking with Kristin Zhivago about how entrepreneurs and business owners can build sales and marketing processes that are completely designed around and aligned with how your clients want to buy. Kristin is the president and founder of Zhivago Partners, a digital marketing management company, and the author of Roadmap to Revenue: How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy. Zhivago was one of the first to identify that it wasn’t how we sell that matters; it is how well we support the customer’s buying journey. She has been writing and speaking about marketing for years, training marketers worldwide. Prior to founding Zhivago Partners, Zhivago was a revenue coach to CEOs and entrepreneurs, mostly in the tech industry, specializing in marketing and sales department turnarounds. All Of Your Sales Questions Answered Many businesses neglect to mine the vast amount of knowledge that sits, waiting for them in their current client list. If we as business owners and sales people were to ask our clients the right questions, at the right times- we could find out everything that we ever wanted to know about our clients and how they prefer to interact and buy from us. What platforms are they looking for us on? what questions do they have for us? What do they value about doing business with us? The answers are all right here. Our clients are more than willing to unlock all of the sales and marketing secrets that we have been looking for - if we only ask. We dive into all of the details in today’s episode. Episode Brought To You By   My own revenue generation strategy sessions.  What sales or revenue generation challenges are you facing right now? Do you have questions around the best way to grow your business  – like, should you introduce a new distribution model or hire a salesperson? Or maybe youre looking for some guidance on how to close that big dream account or make your sales quota for the year?   A strategy session may be just the thing that can help you move forward quickly. It’s a video conference where you and I get together one on one to talk about your specific situation and we detail the actions that you can take to get you to where you want to be. It’s a mini-mentoring session designed to help you get some clarity quickly. Reserve your session here. If you haven’t done so already, I would also like to invite you to subscribe to the podcast to automatically get all of the revenue generation strategies and skills that you need to build your business delivered right to you weekly. Plus, you’ll be sure to get the special bonus episodes that I am planning for you. Leave us a review on wherever you consume content - Apple Podcast, Stitcher or Google play and consider sharing if with someone else that might benefit from the content. This helps others find the podcast, grow our message and improve our content. Lastly – is there a particular topic, challenge or expert view that you would like to see featured here on the Selling With Soul podcast? Please feel free to reach out to me directly at Meredith@MeredithMessenger.com to tell me about it. “How To Sell The Way That Your Customers Want To Buy” Episode Resources Revenue Generation Strategy Sessions Contact Kristin: Website  Roadmap To Revenue Book Twitter LinkedIn  Blog

The world is changing. If you're a B2B marketer, you know that one of biggest challenges facing marketing professionals today is meeting the buyer where they are. So how do you market the way that they want to be sold to? How do you align your marketing strategy to meet them where they are?

The world is changing. If you're a B2B marketer, you know that one of biggest challenges facing marketing professionals today is meeting the buyer where they are. So how do you market the way that they want to be sold to? How do you align your marketing strategy to meet them where they are?

Roadmap to Revenue: How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy by Kristin Zhivago Click here to view the show notes! https://www.salesartillery.com/marketing-book-podcast/roadmap-to-revenue-kristin-zhivago

What's the easiest way for marketers to uncover insights to inform your marketing strategies while also creating buy-in with the C-suite? On this week's episode of The Inbound Success Podcast, marketing expert and author Kristin Zhivago shares her tried and true process for conducting customer interviews and distilling the insights she gains into actionable marketing strategies - all while gaining the trust and buy-in of her C-level clients. Kristin's exact strategy is provided in detail in her book  Roadmap to Revenue, How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy, but you can get the CliffsNotes version here! Listen to the podcast to get step-by-step instructions for carrying out customer interviews (not to be confused with buyer persona interviews!) and learn how the results can transform your business. Transcript Kathleen Booth (host): Welcome back to The Inbound Success Podcast. My name is Kathleen Booth, and I'm your host. This week, I have a special announcement before we get into the conversation with today's guest, and that is that the podcast now has an Alexa skill. So, if you have an Amazon Alexa, go into the app under skills, search "inbound success," and you can add it to your Alexa and hear my voice talking to you every day if you so choose. 

Kristin Zhivago started her first business with her husband in 1979. Since then she hasn't rested. In fact, she spent nearly 35 years as a Revenue Coach for hundreds and hundreds of companies. During the past four years, she has co-founded Cloud Potential and Cloud Wise Academy, both of which she has now parted ways from. She is currently the founder of Zhivago Partners, a digital marketing management company. Kristen is also the author of a new book called Roadmap to Revenue: How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy. In this conversation, we discuss customer interviews, why customers buy, and being stoked. Now, let's hack... Kristin Zhivago.

Cloud Wise Joe and co-host Chauncey probe local businesses to google their websites and their businesses as customers would. They explain that owners don't often see from the buyer's point of view and aren't answering the questions that customers are really asking. Google AdWords: http://bit.ly/2CJ2NWV Keyword planner: http://bit.ly/2gt3tmS Kristin Zhivago: http://bit.ly/2zhUpxR "Roadmap to Revenue: How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy" written by Kristin Zhivago: http://bit.ly/2ziwDSr

Join Kurt as he interviews Kristin Zhivago. Kristin is president of Zhivago Partners, a digital marketing management company, and the author of the book, Roadmap to Revenue: How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy. Kristin was one of the first to identify selling as a matter of supporting the customer's buying process. Kristen and Kurt discuss: Biggest blunder people make today in sales & influence Tips for entrepreneurs How to think like a buyer How to deal with a prospect who has found wrong information or too much information from the internet How to not bore your prospects What questions to ask to get your customers to buy Current trends in online marketing And much more! Content Marketing: How to go from Creep to Friend Why do they need or want what you’re selling? It is never, ever what you assume. Interviewing thousands of customers for my clients convinced me of that by the second interview. What roadblocks must be overcome, in their own minds, before they can reach for their wallet? Who do they have to convince? What else have they looked at, and why did they reject it (so far)? What makes them nervous about buying from you, because of their past experiences and because of the things you said – or didn’t say – on your website? What is the question they wish everyone would answer, but no one does? All of us marketers can easily suffer from a problem that is similar to the one salespeople have. Most salespeople listen only closely enough so that they can talk. In other words, their goal is to talk, not to listen. They listen so they can talk. Similarly, marketers gather facts about their customers so they can prove to their bosses that they “get” those customers, and so they can write. They are more excited about the output than the input, just like salespeople, and just like the graph above makes clear. For more information about Kristin visit: zhivagopartners.com Offer of the week: Find our your Persuasion IQ & get a free digital copy of my best-selling book! www.takeyouriq.com   

In this episode, Shari speaks with Kristin Zhivago. She is the president and founder of Zhivago Partners, a digital marketing management company, she speaks worldwide about the customer’s buying process, and is the author of Roadmap to Revenue: How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy. Kristin’s specialty is being able to map out the customer’s buying journey and recognize the role that the internet plays in the buying process. Music: BenSound.com

Takeaways Selling Your Friends is Not Traction: When launching a new product (or company for that matter), it’s easy to immediately to your friends for your first sales. The problem is, they have a vested interest in liking you and wanting to support you. Thus, you don’t have to overcome skepticism. You have to quickly learn the challenges non-affiliated prospects are going to raise and figure out how to sell to that in order to grow. You’ll Never Sell Anything While You are Talking: I know it almost sounds blasphemous, but customers will talk themselves into buying something if you let them. By asking the right questions and being courteous enough to shut up and actually listen to their answers, you’ll discover a whole new side of the sales process. Understand What Your Buyer is Up Against: Buyers are under assault every day. They’re getting bombarded with spam disguised as prospecting, dodging calls by getting rid of their voicemail, and making sense of the countless salespeople lying to them to get a deal done. What they really want to know is what happens to them after they buy from you. Will you make them look like a hero or a chump? Book Recommendation Outlander Series by Diane Gabaldon  Full Notes https://www.salestuners.com/kristin-zhivago/ Sponsors What if every sales rep inherited the habits of your best rep? With Costello, they do. The pipeline-centric system is strategically built on a proven selling methodology that keeps teams focused on the only thing they can control in sales – actions that push deals to close.  

John North from Evolvepreneur interviews our special guest, Kristin Zhivago. Kristin Zhivago, president and co-founder of Cloud Potential and author of the ground-breaking 5-star book "Roadmap to Revenue: How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy." She speaks worldwide on how the Digital Revolution has changed everything - what's new, what's changed, and what you can do about it.

Today I'm joined by the first woman to sell machine-shop tools in the USA - and since then she’s been learning everything she could about tech and selling... welcome to DMR, Kristin Zhivago. [You can find Kristin over at ZhivagoPartners.com.] On this episode of Digital Marketing Radio we discuss honing the customer buying process, with topics including: What aspects of that do you think many businesses are struggling with at the moment? Why do you think that is? What can we do better as businesses to pay more attention to the customer buying process? What can marketers do better to provide buyers with what they’re looking for? Content marketing is what a lot marketers are focusing on at the moment - how do we ensure that we’re producing content that helps the buyer process? What are your thoughts on how sales and marketing can do to work more effectively together? How has the customer buying process changes over the past few years and how is this likely to further change over the coming few years? [Tweet ""You can't sell to people you don't know. Guessing is guaranteed failure." @KristinZhivago #Selling"] Software I couldn't live without What software do you currently use in your business that if someone took away from you, it would significantly impact your marketing success? Teamwork.com [Project management software] What software don't you use, but you've heard good things about, and you've intended to try at some point in the near future? Salesforce [If you have a programmer in your back pocket!] My number 1 takeaway What's the single most important step from our discussion that our listeners need to take away and implement in their businesses? You can't sell to people you don't know. Really know your customer as well as you know your best friend or your family. Any guessing is fatal. It's so expensive. It's guaranteed failure. Guessing is guaranteed failure.

Kristin Zhivago, president of the digital marketing management firm Zhivago Partners, is the author of the 5-star book Roadmap to Revenue: How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy. Zhivago spent decades as a “revenue coach” to CEOs and entrepreneurs and has always been on the bleeding edge of marketing technology. Zhivago teaches writers worldwide how to write for SEO and customers.

Kristin Zhivago, president of the digital marketing management firm Zhivago Partners, is the author of the 5-star book Roadmap to Revenue: How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy. Zhivago spent decades as a “revenue coach” to CEOs and entrepreneurs and has always been on the bleeding edge of marketing technology. Zhivago teaches writers worldwide how to write for SEO and customers.

Today, I'm talking with Kristin Zhivago, the author of Roadmap to Revenue: How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy and President of Zhivago Partners a digital marketing management company that helps clients with customer and digital presence research. We hear it time and time again, “You need to get out of the office and talk to your customers.” But we rarely hear about what that actually looks like in practice and how that helps us grow our business. In our interview today, Kristin changes that by laying out how to interview your customers to get the information you need and then what to do with that information once you have it. If you aren't regularly having calls with your customers, and I mean multiple times a month, then you need to listen to this episode. Even if you are having those conversations, tune in so you can be sure you're getting the most out of them.

“Don’t just be selling. be connecting” – Bernard Kelvin Clive In this podcast episode my guest Kristin Zhivago share on how brand can sell the way that customers will buy. Kristin Zhivago has become one of the leading experts on the customer’s buying process, and was one of the first to see selling from the buyer’s perspective. She speaks and teaches worldwide for companies and organizations. She spent decades as a “revenue coach” helping clients ranging from thriving young start-ups to those in the Fortune 500, including Dow Jones, IBM, and Johnson & Johnson. Recommended Books: GOALS Are Dead! How to Make Every Day Count Skills Every young Executive Must Have  HOOKED: Overcoming Social Media Addiction Rebrand: The Ultimate Guide to Personal Branding Branding Simplified  Roadmap to Revenue: How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy Books by Bernard Kelvin Clive

How would you like a proven roadmap to increased revenue?I am pleased to welcome Kristin Zhivago to the show this week. She is president and co-founder of Cloud Potential, a company that helps businesses acquire more customers.Marketing factors are constantly changing and, as a business owner, you need to keep up with the changes to keep your marketing strategy relevant and productive. Kristin will share with us some of the key areas that have changed, and how to stay up with the changes.This show is broadcast live on Wednesday's at 12PM ET on W4CY Radio – (www.w4cy.com) part of Talk 4 Radio (http://www.talk4radio.com/) on the Talk 4 Media Network (http://www.talk4media.com/).

Tips to get customers to want to buy and artificial intelligence to get B2B leads is the focus of today’s show. Cloud Potential President Kristin Zhivago has a company dedicated to helping companies gain an unfair advant Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Here’s How » Join the Take The Lead community today: Dr. DianeHamilton.com Dr. Diane Hamilton Facebook Dr. Diane Hamilton Twitter Dr. Diane Hamilton LinkedIn Dr. Diane Hamilton YouTube Dr. Diane Hamilton Instagram

Tips to get customers to want to buy and artificial intelligence to get B2B leads is the focus of today's show. Cloud Potential President Kristin Zhivago has a company dedicated to helping companies gain an unfair advant   Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Here’s How » Join the Take The Lead community today: […]

Tips to get customers to want to buy and artificial intelligence to get B2B leads is the focus of today’s show. Cloud Potential President Kristin Zhivago has a company dedicated to helping companies gain an unfair advant Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Here’s How » Join the Take The Lead community today: Dr. DianeHamilton.com Dr. Diane Hamilton Facebook Dr. Diane Hamilton Twitter Dr. Diane Hamilton LinkedIn Dr. Diane Hamilton YouTube Dr. Diane Hamilton Instagram

In this episode, we elaborate on how so much of the purchase decision happens without a sales rep present, and what smart reps can do about it. Kristin Zhivago, President at CloudPotential, and author of Roadmap to Revenue: How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy, joins me on this episode.

In this episode of The Advanced Selling Podcast, veteran sales trainers Bill Caskey and Bryan Neale play a clip from Kristin Zhivago, Author of Roadmap to Revenue, who explores the idea of the buyer process map. She also talks about one of our favorite topics which is intention, and how intention matters and how it's often at odds with the customer's intention. Learn more about Kristin’s book, Roadmap to Revenue: http://a.co/e0DvD0w ========================================= Want to have your sales question answered on The Advanced Selling Podcast? Email us at listener@advancedsellingpodcast.com or give us a call 317.575.0057 ext. 10. Looking for more sales training like this? Visit www.advancedsellingpodcast.com for access to exclusive listener sales tools and resources. Be sure to join the Advanced Selling Podcast LinkedIn Group www.advancedsellingpodcast.com/linkedin. =========================================

Kristin Zhivago brings her savvy approach to making better sales. Her thought provoking ideas may surprise listeners. Katherine Niefeld, Founder/President of Blink Public Relations, talks about ways small business leaders can better utilize public relations in their marketing efforts.- Bruce Holden has a terrific new technologically advanced sunglass offering. He talks about the challenges and opportunities he sees for his product line. Then gets advice, guidance from the other two guests on how to market his uniqwue product in a master class setting.   Take a look at our new issue of Small Business Digest ezine at http://digital.turn-page.com/i/342149  

Kristin Zhivago started as a teacher like me but when she finished her teaching degree there was little in the way of positions. Lucky for us she invested her time in sales and marketing and has spent her career seeking out customer insights by interviewing customers for organisations. Kristin is the author of the RoadMap to Revenue, How to sell the way your customers want to buy. I recently interviewed Kristen about her journey and asked her about the trends she is seeing in selling, about best practice questions when interviewing, the role of persona's and how the buyer journey has changed. Kristin's website

Search engines, once the number one tool buyers used to help find service providers, have lost their appeal. Buyers have changed their behavior and now turn to friends and social network communities to help them decide who to hire. Sellers and marketers need to acknowledge this or risk losing their business, says Kristin Zhivago, author of Roadmap to Revenue: How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy.

http://www.thesaleswhisperer.com/blog/topic/podcast http://MakeEverySale.com ( http://MakeEverySale.com ) * Couple decades as a revenue coach—mostly in high tech—then branched out.  (Mid-90's) * Joe McKenna - Cloud Potential at the end of 2014 * Helps people get more business through digital marketing * Google is the gatekeeper * SEO is still vital * Principals then tactics * Google changes their algorithms daily but it still matters * Build for you a Google identity * Your content needs to tell Google all about your “neighborhood” * It's partly content, partly page structure * Understand your competition * Wordpress has an SEO tool called Yoast that helps with your Meta Descriptions * It's an endless job * Be careful of the “near me” phenomenon * Watch the reviews for the “Knowledge Graph” on the right side of your company's results (You need at least five reviews) * Google is getting better at Latent Symantic Indexing (synonyms) and understanding what you mean * Spyfu shows you what your competitors are up to * Interview your customers (she discusses in her book) * Now you can get so much information on your competitors and customers * With her tech industry experience since she was 17 she was always on the bleeding edge of technology so autoresponders and CRMs were not foreign to her * But mobile and Google are changing how people buy If you keep trying the old ways you'll be frustrated * Old school companies are confused and they don't know what's happening * She looked at 30+ industries and identified the leaders to see what they are doing * The leaders focused on six areas: * Customers * Search * Pay Per Click * Conversions * Competition * Technology (fast site, responsive, reads well) * Stop making your website launch such a big production * Build a prototype, socialize it, and make it an iterative process * Your website is a living, breathing being that needs to be nurtured * The web “breaks” Google changes * Stop being so picky * The principles mean make sure the pages and posts are optimized for Google * Then ask and confirm that your pages and posts feed into your Google identity * Out of the six areas what is your focus? * If conversions are your top priority then go with tools like UnBounce, LeadPages ( http://link.leadpages.net/aff_c?aff_id=2640&offer_id=6 ) , etc. * You need to understand the buying process of your prospects * *Don't make them think* * In B2B, social may be more about LinkedIn than Facebook but you need to participate because Google pays attention to your entire digital footprint * Google looks at who is linking to you * Everyone is frustrated with the rate of change and trying things (dabbling with things) without a coordinated effort so they say “we tried it and that didn't work” * They usually go to single-vendors who only do one thing like PPC or SEO but they aren't focused on segmenting or lead-scoring * Since they targeted the wrong customers their bounce rates increased * That hurt their SEO * She has packages to help even mom & pop companies grow their online presence * She teaches her clients how to do things on their own * She left Silicon Valley because it was such a hotbed of ego * The web has been around long enough and so many businesses have been held hostage for long enough so now those charlatan companies are starting to be pushed aside * LinkedIn is a great place for B2B companies to put their blog articles but put it on your blog first and fetch it. Once Google “fetches” it and knows you are the owner (about 24 hours) then share it on Quora or LinkedIn. * Jerks have a few games and that's it * They are gaming the system * Honest people do good work and test new things Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-sales-podcast/exclusive-content Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy