Kristin Zhivago With Zhivago Partners

Intro: [00:00:04] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for high velocity radio.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:14] Lee Kantor here, another episode of High Velocity Radio. And this is going to be a good one. Today on the show, we have Kristine Zhivago with Zhivago Partners. Welcome.

Kristin Zhivago: [00:00:25] Thank you. I’m glad to be here.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:27] Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us about your practice. How are you serving folks?

Kristin Zhivago: [00:00:31] What was the last part of your question?

Lee Kantor: [00:00:33] How are you helping people?

Kristin Zhivago: [00:00:35] Oh, we basically help people sell more. That’s my goal in life to help company owners sell more. Been doing it for years. I’ve been a revenue coach for decades, mostly helping CEOs and entrepreneurs sell more by understanding what their customers want to buy and how they want to buy it. I’m an expert on the customers buying process.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:57] What was the genesis of this discovery, of this skill set you had?

Kristin Zhivago: [00:01:01] Well, I started out selling very young. In fact, at 17, I was the first as far as I know, I was the first woman to sell machine shop tools in the United States. And it was kind of humiliating because they just gave me a catalog and told me to go sell. So I really I learned quickly that I needed to know more about the product in order to sell. And I also just I made it a vow to myself that I would learn everything I could about technology and selling. And I’ve been doing that ever since.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:36] Now, when you went out and started being a revenue coach and working on helping others, was that something that just organically happened in your career after you were a successful salesperson? You were like, Hey, I can you know, selling is selling. It doesn’t matter what industry I can, you know, apply these same tools and help other people wherever they are.

Kristin Zhivago: [00:01:58] Well, actually what happened, I was selling a number of different things, and then my husband and I opened an ad agency in Silicon Valley, and we did that for about 12 years. And I started that revenue coaching work. Then what really changed my whole outlook on marketing and selling is I would go into companies and they would say, Here’s what’s important to our customers. It’s a list, you know, and it made sense, perfectly logical. Then I would go out and interview their customers and the list was always different than what the company had given me. So I knew that what they were doing was marketing incorrectly because they weren’t addressing something. I call the mindset of the customer when they set out to buy, which is their desires, their concerns and their questions. If you don’t know specifically what they are, your marketing efforts will all be wasted. So that really started me on this path. And then once the Macintosh came out, I looked at my husband and said, You know what, They’re all going to go in house. I’m going to help them. So I labeled myself as a revenue coach, and I did that for a number of decades before opening my digital agency.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:13] And then is the same strategies, whether you’re selling kind of human to human in person, the same as digitally, if I’m using, you know, Facebook ads or LinkedIn or Google ads.

Kristin Zhivago: [00:03:25] Oh, absolutely. It’s even more important because the message is all you have. If the message is off, if they come to your website and they don’t see themselves, they don’t understand what you’re selling and what’s what it would do for them if it doesn’t press their buttons, they will leave immediately and they won’t come back. So it’s even more important in the digital arena.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:49] Now is the first step in in this process. What you discovered is just talking to your customers like that seems to be a common strategy in a lot of startups is, you know, you do 100 discovery calls.

Kristin Zhivago: [00:04:03] Yeah, you don’t need to do 100, though. If you do if you do the surveying the way I recommend. And by the way, in my book, Roadmap to Revenue How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy. I spell this out. I’ve done thousands of these interviews. I’ve learned a lot of lessons. I basically get on the phone with them. You make an appointment so they have time and you ask open ended questions. Surveys don’t work. Surveys are your assumptions put in the form of questions so you don’t really learn anything new. Now, the great thing about in-depth phone interviews and you should do it by phone so there’s no human contact kind of body language issues or anything like that, and they can talk to you while they’re driving or whatever on their cell phone. The the thing that’s interesting about this is by the fifth to seventh phone call. You have the trends. You have bankable information that will continue to show up. If you interviewed 40 people and I’ve done that, I’ve had big companies say, oh, no, no, no, no, no. You have to interview 40 people. And honestly, by the seventh call, what we were learning was the same all the way through to the 40th person.

Lee Kantor: [00:05:22] Now the person doing the questioning, do they have to be the CEO or is it better to be kind of not the person that’s that emotionally invested in the outcome?

Kristin Zhivago: [00:05:32] It’s better to be not mostly because the person on the other side of the line will try to be very polite. I mean, I’ve even had situations where I was interviewing some guy who was running a factory, and the machine, my client’s machine that he was using to build all of his products was down when I call them. And every third word was F, and he was just really upset. And I said, You know, I’ve never done this before, but you seem to be really upset. Let’s get the CEO on the phone and see if we can work this out. So we did. And he was a completely different person to the CEO. He was super polite. So the CEO really didn’t get the full gist of his anger at not being able to manufacture these things while was basically out of business while the machine was down. So it’s better to have a third party, but that third party has to be someone who’s familiar with the products and so on. So they don’t they don’t bore the customer because customers will get off the phone pretty quickly if they get bored.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:42] Now, can you share a story of maybe the most insight you were able to glean from this and and maybe the most disparate from what the assumptions that the client had? And then what was the reality of after speaking to the client, you know, their client, what they discovered?

Kristin Zhivago: [00:06:58] Yeah. One of my favorite examples is a company that sold software to companies who did field service of any type. So this is kind of an operating system for field service companies. You know, they sent technicians out into the field and the company, the CEO was very technical, wonderful guy, and they were really proud of their integration with QuickBooks because, of course, QuickBooks was the standard. So everybody thought big deal, and they were very proud of how elegantly they did that integration with QuickBooks. So I get people on the phone, and when that subject came up, the customers were like, Well, yeah, everybody integrates with QuickBooks. That’s not a big deal. So to them it was like at the bottom of their list, It was like, airplanes have to fly, food has to take.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:52] That was it was just table stakes for them.

Kristin Zhivago: [00:07:55] Exactly. Perfect word for it. Yeah. Baseline industry promises, what I call it. So it turns out that the thing that made them buy that product was that when you’re first talking to a customer and you’re entering their information where they are and what their their equipment is and instructions and all of that, you enter it once and then it automatically populates all the other parts of the program, the invoices, the directions to the techs, all that stuff, because these were usually small businesses and they hated entering data more than once. Any entrepreneur will tell you they hate double entry. It’s terrible, inefficient thing. So we ended up rebranding the company. They were called Pioneer Interactive or something like that, which didn’t tell anybody anything about what they sold. And we ended up calling it Field One. You enter the data in once and it populates all the other fields and field, one in the sense that they were sending people out into the field. They ended up selling the company. They did so well. They sold the company in Microsoft. And it was I mean, it was a massive turnaround. But we’ve done this many times with clients very similar exact kind of you find out the truth and then you use the truth to interact with your customers and they they respond, your revenue goes up.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:25] So now what is the kind of the the biggest mistakes that you see people make over and over again? Is it just this not like is everything at the heart of it the polling of your clients and asking them why they bought?

Kristin Zhivago: [00:09:38] Yeah, that’s why I called my book Road Map to Revenue because if I mean, you’re selling the customers, you’re selling the people, they have these desires, concerns and questions. I mean, if you think of it as a buyer, you know this if they answer your questions to your satisfaction, you’re going to buy from them. If they don’t, you’re not. It’s really simple. And most people think they know what customers want or they’re shy about talking to customers or they’re egotistical about it. They’re too proud. And so they don’t do it. The ego drives the problem. So, you know, I kept thinking I would solve the problem in life could go on, but every company still has this problem. So.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:26] Now, is it something that you solve at once and then you’re good for a while? Or is it should you be doing this on an ongoing basis?

Kristin Zhivago: [00:10:33] Yeah, that’s another wonderful thing about it. Even as fast as markets move and change, customer mindsets don’t change that much over time. If you’re in a super fast moving market, doing it every six months or so is sufficient. Now, obviously, if there’s a massive change like you’ve got a pandemic or something, then you have to reassess because the desires, concerns and questions may change radically and you have to be on board. But as a general rule, you can do this every six months, once a year, and just make sure you’re on the right, still on the right track.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:13] And it’s just a matter of getting your book, kind of taking those questions and using that as a guide and then just polling a half a dozen clients every six months.

Kristin Zhivago: [00:11:26] Yeah, half a dozen clients of any given type. So if you’ve got dealers and customers or dealers and distributors or so on or VPNs and and workers and CEOs, then you still have to talk to 5 to 7 people of a given type.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:44] Now, when you have that, when you are asking these open ended questions and they are probably going to talk a little bit and hopefully ramble a bit, and then within that there’s going to be, I guess, the nuggets of truth or the you’ll get you’ll glean the heart of the, you know, the key reasons that they made the purchase or that they were interested.

Kristin Zhivago: [00:12:05] Yeah. So what I do is I give the clients a conversation report. That’s a transcription of all the conversations broken into categories. So here are the answers to all the answers to that question, which, by the way, I can tell the person at the beginning of the interview that I’m going to do that. So it’s anonymous, which means they can speak openly. So that’s great. Then I also give him a summary and recommendations report. So I end up personally taking the hours that it takes to read through that conversation, report and bulletin using the findings so that anyone in the company can look at that and immediately understand. They can scan through that document and say, Oh, we see the big the big picture here and people will use the exact same phrase to describe that big picture thing, even though they’ve never talked to each other. It’s fascinating to me.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:04] And when you’re when you’re doing like, you know, call one to call to the call three, are you kind of using the information you’re learning as you go to help in kind of gleaning these nuggets? Or is it something where you’ve got to be kind of every time, the first time, and just ask them as if this the first time you’ve ever talked to anybody about this?

Kristin Zhivago: [00:13:27] It’s kind of a combination. I mean, obviously, if someone brings up something in the first call, that’s a total surprise. And and then the second person doesn’t mention it. I might at the end of the interview because you definitely don’t want to impact the interview in any way. But at the end of the interview, I might say, well, one person did mention this. What do you think of that now? By the way, I did that with that company that wanted me to talk to 40 people. By the ninth call, I thought, you know what? I’m wasting their money here, so I better start getting some more value. So I did that at the very end of the conversation, I might say, You know, I’ve talked to three people that mentioned this. What do you think? But you do have to be careful not to lead them or make your ideas end up in that report. It has to all be the customer stuff and you can’t sell to them either. You’ve got to just be interviewing. The minute you start selling, they’ll start playing poker and they’ll clam up and they won’t tell you anything.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:29] Now, what’s the kind of the frame you have to give them where they’re even open to having this type of conversation?

Kristin Zhivago: [00:14:37] Usually we used to just send the emails myself out to prospective interviewees, but I’ve found lately that it’s better to have the client send out the emails and say, We’re just trying to improve. We just need a half an hour of your time, open ended questions and we’ll set up an appointment. Interestingly, contrary to what you see in the movies and popular entertainment, most people are nice and they’re and they’re happy to be helpful. And this is one of those things where they don’t have to prepare, they don’t have to do any work. They just have to show up and start talking. So it’s kind of fun work. It’s not that hard.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:22] And they feel like they’re helping, right? They they they feel like they’re helping and giving back.

Kristin Zhivago: [00:15:27] Yes, exactly. And because they are customers, they have already invested in your company and they want you to succeed. That’s one of the prime things about this is you talk to people who have already bought from you, so you’re reverse engineering successful sales. You’re trying to find out their buying process so that you can replicate it and support it. And they want you to be successful. So they’re way more open to talking to you after they’ve bought.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:58] Now, so does it not work as well, like with a freemium product, like to to talk to someone who’s maybe using it for free or benefiting without paying and then asking them what it would take to move them to be paying.

Kristin Zhivago: [00:16:12] Oh, you could you could do that kind of interview. Sure it wouldn’t. It wouldn’t. Yeah, you do it. You might have to adjust your questions a little bit, but yeah.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:21] So it could work. Like somebody that’s a startup that doesn’t have maybe clients yet, but is just testing an idea or concept?

Kristin Zhivago: [00:16:29] Yes, it’s harder to do that. I mean, most of my clients are established companies that are trying to sell more, and I’ve known this from the beginning that it’s harder to find people. You have to find prospective customers who are not friends because one of the mistakes entrepreneurs make is they sell to their friends and then they hire a salesperson who’s selling to people who don’t know them. And the entrepreneur is like, Well, why are you having so much trouble? I didn’t have any trouble, but he was selling to his friends. So yes, it’s a little harder. You have to find the people. You still follow the basic pattern and as soon as you do start having customers, you should start doing this because that’s the real deal. You want to talk to people who’ve already gone through the buying process. They know you and your product.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:19] Now, is it is it helpful or is that like how is making that transition from early adopters to more mainstream? Because early adopters tend to try new things and take more risk and will take a flier on something where somebody who is less are more risk averse, is more hesitant. Does that change the the messaging? Does that change how you approach sales?

Kristin Zhivago: [00:17:45] Yes. Yes, obviously. And again, going back to their desires, concerns and questions, the concerns thing is a big deal. Nobody. There’s no such thing as a virgin environment when you’re selling. Everybody has been through millions of buying processes and and they’ve all become very sophisticated customers with our digital age and everything. The desire, the concerns might change when you’re talking to the people who are more risk adverse. But you’re still going to hear some of that with the people who wanted to try it for free. Because it’s not just money, it’s also time. It’s also being willing to invest the time to learn something or try something new. And that’s a risk too. So there will be some commonalities between the early adopters and the people that come after.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:39] Now, have you found after doing this, I would imagine across multiple industries and in multiple products and services that there’s kind of ways to chunk these out? Are there kind of. Certain types of products and services that like everybody kind of falls into. And then once you’ve kind of put yourself in that box, then you can, you know, optimize for that.

Kristin Zhivago: [00:19:06] Yes and no. One of the mistakes people make is they look at their competition and say, here’s what they’re doing. We’ll do that to. That’s okay for things like SEO where you’re finding the keywords that they’re being found for and the clicks they’re getting for those keywords, but. Your company, your product, your management team. The decisions that you make are very different from those of your competitors. So people look at the whole thing and every company is different and there might be a reason why they would go with one company over another and it might not be what you think. So you do have to be you can’t generalize this stuff. The specificity of this is actually what makes it work. And then you get that very specific message. Right. And they see it when they first come to your site or see your product or whatever, and they go, Yep, that’s me. Oh, good. They get it. They get it. It’s got to be very specific. You can’t just say makes you sexier, healthier, richer. Nobody pays any attention to that stuff anymore.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:15] And the more specific you are where the person kind of believes, oh, they get me, they’re talking right to me. That’s that’s what you’re shooting for?

Kristin Zhivago: [00:20:24] Yep.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:26] And then how do you. Is there once you get this information, do you help move the person from. Oh, they get me to. Okay, I think I’ll buy this or I’ll at least consider this to okay, I buy this and maybe I’ll tell my friends, like, do you help them through all the kind of the path of a client to not just being a client, but to be like kind of a raving fan as well?

Kristin Zhivago: [00:20:52] Yes. Short answer to that question. The buying process is all the way through those stages. I’m thinking about buying it, I’m buying it, and then after I buy it, I react to it somehow. All of that helps your sales. All of that drives revenue. So you don’t just stop with the sale. In fact, the companies that continue and cross-sell and upsell or make sure that people are happy, those are the ones that leverage the revenue they already have and turn it into more revenue.

Lee Kantor: [00:21:27] And is that low hanging fruit for most businesses that they’re not really kind of leveraging to the fullest? Is that existing client? It seems like a lot of folks focus on the new client more than the existing client.

Kristin Zhivago: [00:21:41] You’re absolutely right. And yes, that’s that is I can’t tell you how many companies could do so much better if they just turned around and looked at what they already have. They already have customers. Those customers can help them sell more to other customers if they ask them the right questions. That’s the first part. And the second part is reaching out and keeping in touch and being there for them. It’s sort of shocking to me how much money is wasted on bad messages because they never did talk to the very people they were taught they were selling to. And then afterwards they just drop them like a hot rock and go on to the next one. It’s just it’s crazy. There’s so much revenue. I have I’ve helped a lot of people sell through recessions, and that’s one of the first things you do, is you look for that low hanging fruit that’s sitting in your backyard already.

Lee Kantor: [00:22:40] Why do you think that people are more kind of enamored with the stranger rather than the people that are already there buying from them?

Kristin Zhivago: [00:22:50] Well, part of it is that sometimes the CEO doesn’t like customers. You know, they just they’re sort of a non social. And I found this a lot in the tech industry. They were they were not people people. They were equipment people and system people. And they really thought customers were a bit of a bother. So there’s that aspect. There’s also just feeling embarrassed about going back to them, like, why should we go back to them? What’s what can we offer them? And you have to think about that. I have one client who’s just a master at leveraging the customers they already have and giving new customers new reasons to reach out to them. And one of the things that we did, they sell a particular type of a lift for a data center. So you move your equipment around with this lift. It’s a motorized dolly kind of thing. And one of the things we did was we built a database of all the servers in the world and whether this machine can pick them up or not. And there’s thousands of servers. There’s a big project. But it’s a wonderful idea. And it’s helping customers, existing customers and new customers. So that kind of thing where you look and say the real question. That you ask yourself every single day is, how can I help these people? Given the resources that I have, how can I help these people?

Lee Kantor: [00:24:24] Right. And I think that’s that’s kind of a gap for most salespeople. They’re trying to sell something instead of just trying to help somebody. And and if they just started focusing on just helping more people, whether they buy their service or product or not, I think they’re going to sell more because they’re going to be a resource, then they’re not going to be another vendor.

Kristin Zhivago: [00:24:46] Yeah, this same client I’m talking about, actually, the salespeople were replaced with customer service people and they help the customer by. So whatever their issue is, supply chain problems or they need something right away, or they need a particular kind of thing, those people are dedicated to helping the customer. And sometimes you’re right, they don’t make a they’re not on commission, they don’t make any kind of commission if they help them or not. So they’re just helpful people and their revenue has gone through the roof. It’s masterful, wonderful thing to do. I’ve been advocating that for years.

Lee Kantor: [00:25:30] What makes people afraid to try that?

Kristin Zhivago: [00:25:34] Well, there is this mentality that sales works, that if you get a guy on the phone pounding the phones, a guy or gal, and they’re just going after the cut, that it’s going to work. It makes perfect sense. It’s way less complicated than marketing. So people just do it. But it’s it’s it’s so broken now. I mean, how many of us see spam possible spam on our cell phone and we don’t answer the phone? You know, how many of us avoid salespeople? And we’re getting really good at it with all of our technology and everything. The usual pushy sales methods do not work and haven’t worked for years, and we still do it. It’s crazy.

Lee Kantor: [00:26:19] Now, is there a lesson that stands out for you in your kind of career in helping so many folks increase their revenue? Is there kind of one big aha or one big message you’d like to share?

Kristin Zhivago: [00:26:32] Yeah, the message is what I’ve been saying, which is your customers will help you sell if you are humble enough to listen to them and ask them the right questions in the right way, they will absolutely help you sell and the information you get will be a big AHA to you. And sometimes I bring the information back in. The CEO says, Well, I knew that. But I didn’t know it was that important. I didn’t know that was the main reason that people bought from us, for example. So you might sort of know it, but you don’t realize until I’ve talked to these people and they come back with a report and you say, Oh my goodness, everybody said the same thing. So it does require humility. You do have to be willing to listen. But, you know, customers are where money comes from. So it’s a really good idea to to listen to them and take their advice.

Lee Kantor: [00:27:29] Now, who is your ideal client? Is it the the company or is it an agent? Do you work with other agencies? Like how do you how do you get your clients?

Kristin Zhivago: [00:27:43] I have been marketing myself for decades, writing blog articles, appearing on podcasts and so on, and I just keep getting this message out there. And every so often somebody listens to it and says, Oh man, this woman gets it. I got to talk to her and it makes sense to them. And we’re just off and running or people read the book or whatever. My perfect client is an established business that is not having much luck with digital marketing, which is why I started this agency back in 2017. Now, I’ve been in business before that for decades, but this was obvious to me as a revenue coach that so many established businesses were suffering because they’d hired a social person and it didn’t work. Or they tried SEO and it didn’t work, and they’re just super frustrated and they just they they’re worried because the marketing is all digital now, and if they can’t make that work, they’re really in trouble. So that’s that’s my that’s my perfect client. My only other rule is that I don’t work with jerks. I have no clients and no jerk workers. So we’re all we’re doing all day long is helping each other. It’s a wonderful environment. I’m happier working now than I’ve ever been in my life. It’s just so much fun.

Lee Kantor: [00:29:04] And it doesn’t matter if they’re B2B or B2C.

Kristin Zhivago: [00:29:07] No, we do both.

Lee Kantor: [00:29:10] And then the outcome that they would get by working with you, you would help kind of hone in on the proper messaging and also even to the point of executing the knowledge, they’re into actionable marketing pieces that can be rolled out.

Kristin Zhivago: [00:29:25] We build, we build digital marketing campaigns, we do some non digital stuff, but basically we build digital campaigns that work and bring in qualified leads. That’s another thing. We’re not we don’t just want to bring in lots of leads, we want to bring in the right leads. And so that’s we just fine tune it. We use a variety of methods, whatever is appropriate online advertising, SEO, content marketing, email, marketing, social, all of those things, whatever is appropriate, whatever supports the customer’s buying process, that’s what we do.

Lee Kantor: [00:30:01] And if somebody wants to learn more, what’s the best way to get a hold of you or somebody on the team?

Kristin Zhivago: [00:30:07] All they have to do is either just Google my name, Christine Zhivago, I’m going to be all page one. They can go to Zhivago Partners, Dotcom. Everything they need is there, including my phone number and other ways to get in touch with us and very accessible. And I have a team of about 2025 people.

Lee Kantor: [00:30:27] And that’s the HIV Argot Partners.

Kristin Zhivago: [00:30:32] Yep, exactly. Well, can get the book on Amazon road map to revenue. How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy.

Lee Kantor: [00:30:39] Well, Kristen, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Kristin Zhivago: [00:30:45] Thank you. Good questions. I enjoyed it.

Lee Kantor: [00:30:47] All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you next time on High velocity radio. And.