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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\\u2019s 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\\u2019s 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, \\u201cHere. Go out and sell.\\u201d
• I finally met one old guy who came out and said, \\u201cOkay, all right, well then, tell me how your drill bit is better than the one I\'m using now.\\u201d 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, \\u2018I\'m going to learn everything I can about technology and sales.\\u2019 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\\u2019t how we sell that matters. It\\u2019s 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\\u2014and I can\'t tell you what they are, unfortunately, because, you know, it\'s our thing\\u2014but 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\\u2019s'