Kristin Zhivago is an expert at matching a company's selling efforts to their customer's buying process. When the selling and buying processes are in sync, a buyer will find the company's product in the first place they look, get all their questions answered to their satisfaction, find the product easy to buy, and will be glad that they bought it. The entire process will be easy and pleasurable for them.

Zhivago has perfected a works-every-time research method to determine what is working and what is broken, and uses her findings to guide managers in creating customer-centric companies, websites, products, and services.

Because she has a very strong technical background - having worked with tech companies for over 40 years - she is often hired by companies that sell complex business-to-business products and services. She also works with companies in the health, travel, and food industries.

Zhivago's approach is very logical. Customers have a buying process they follow. The company that does the best job of supporting the buying process is the company most likely to make the sale. What does that actually mean?

• Their products are where their customers expect to find them when they first go looking.
• The customer's questions are answered, promptly and to the customer's satisfaction - regardless of the method/medium used (websites, emails, blogs, forums, social media sites, salespeople, ads, PR, etc.).
• The customer can easily complete each step in the buying process, no matter how complex that process might be.
• Nothing the seller does impedes the progress of the buyer (there are hundreds of ways that a seller can impede the progress of a buyer - just try calling any company, for example, and see if a real, live, helpful person answers the phone!)
• The website is easily navigated; everything is obvious. The customer never has difficulty finding anything.
• The company's leaders understand what the customer wants and the entire company is set up to deliver it, in a way that is easy and pleasurable for the customer.
• The salespeople are knowledgeable about their products (unfortunately, in today's Google-based buying environment, many customers know more about the product than the salesperson does!)

Zhivago has perfected the art and science of removing the barriers to the sale. First she interviews customers, employees, and/or business partners. Then she works with top managers to make the necessary changes. These can include:

• Company positioning. The hour-long customer interviews that Zhivago conducts always result in a clear understanding of the promises that customers expect the company to keep. She then works with top managers to further identify the promises that the company can keep, given its unique products, processes, people, and policies. These promises become the company's brand.
• Product positioning. Zhivago works with top managers to position the product so it is in alignment with what customers want to buy. She then writes the seminal pieces, to set the tone for the website, emails, and all other marketing/selling materials. She then "works herself out of a job," by helping the company find and then training the writers who can continue to generate appropriate materials.
• Optimizing teams. Zhivago helps identify the right tasks, makes sure the right people are assigned to those tasks and are organized in the right structure, and supervised properly. If new personnel are needed, she writes job descriptions, recruits candidates, screens resumes, interviews and assesses the candidates, calls references, helps with negotiation, and trains the person after hiring, as needed. 
• Coaching and training. Zhivago has coached CEOs and entrepreneurs, and trained and managed salespeople, marketing people, copywriters, product managers, customer service people, and business partners, worldwide, for companies of all sizes, including Fortune 500 companies such as IBM and Dow Jones.
• Website strategy, navigation, and content. IBM has hired Zhivago a number of times to redesign various sections of the IBM Business Partner websites and other portals. Redesign activity included in-lab and online user testing. Zhivago has written more than 10,000 pages of marketing and selling content, for online and offline use, including deep technical pieces (a LAN to WAN Guide and a guide to designing integrated circuits, for example), white papers, online ads, web pages, landing pages, and emails.
• Vendor identification and management. In addition to finding, training, and helping to manage employees, Zhivago can find the right outside vendors who will help create the company's website, and online/offline marketing and selling materials.

Zhivago is a business management consultant who started out selling, shifted into marketing as she became increasingly frustrated with the tools that marketing should have provided but didn't. She founded and ran a high-tech advertising/PR agency from 1979 to 1991, then shifted to helping companies market in-house when the Macintosh computer made it possible for companies to do their marketing in-house. She worked exclusively in the high-tech industry (computers, software, telecommunications and networking) until the Web emerged as a platform for commerce in 1994.

Since then she has helped companies increase their revenues in the technical, travel, health, publishing, food, and consumer goods industries. She spent a number of years as a "rent-a-VP," and then finally settled on her current role as Revenue Coach.

In her "rent-a-VP" assignments, she was brought in to perform departmental turnarounds. She has managed and reorganized sales, marketing, product management, and customer service departments. She increased efficiency while improving employee morale and increasing sales. She also has extensive HR experience, which helps her serve as a recruiting and reorganization strategist for her clients.

Zhivago founded Zhivago Management Partners, Inc., in Silicon Valley in 1979. The company now operates out of waterfront location in Jamestown, RI. Clients range from thriving young start-ups to those in the Fortune 500, including Dow Jones, IBM, and Johnson&Johnson.

Zhivago speaks and teaches frequently, worldwide, on the subject of the customer's buying process. Her articles and monthly columns have appeared in numerous trade and business journals since 1984. She is launching her second book, Roadmap to Revenue: How to Sell the Way Your Customer Wants to Buy, in 2010. She is the author of the blog RevenueJournal.com.