11. How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy - A Talk With Kristin Zhivago (Zhivago Partners)

Listen, and get insights into How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy in this talk with Kristin Zhivago, President & Founder at Zhivago Partners. We talk about her bestseller book RoadMap to Revenue: How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy, named one of the Top 6 Marketing & Sales Books by Forbes. In this one-of-a-kind revenue-growth how-to book, Revenue Coach Kristin lays out the method that she has used to help hundreds of business owners and managers reverse-engineer their successful sales so they can manufacture new sales in quantity.

Guest Info

• LinkedIn: Kristin Zhivago

Resources

• Roadmap to Revenue: How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy (Kristin Zhivago)
• Zhivago Partners - Digital Marketing Management

Chapters

• 0:04 Intro
• 1:10 Kristin's inspiration to write the book Roadmap to Revenue: How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy
• 2:41 Three steps: discover, debate, deploy
• 2:55 Step 1 - Discover
• 9:19 Step 2 - Debate
• 18:42 Step 3 - Deploy
• 22:21 Success Story Example: IT Company
• 28:38 Kristin's rule: I don't work with jerks
• 34:35 The Best Source of Power in Your Career is the Customer
• 35:30 Outro

Transcript

Intro 00:04
Hello, Welcome to the Women in Big Data Brussels and Berlin podcast, where we talk about big data, analytics and career topics. We do this to connect, engage, grow and champion the success of Women in Big Data.

Kristin Zhivago  00:17
I should say one thing. All these years when I've been doing this, CEOs will say: well, why do we need to interview our customers, my salespeople are talking to customers all the time. So, I look at the CEO and I just say: okay, when was the last time you told a salesperson what you were really thinking while they were selling to you?

Desiree Timmermans  00:36
In this episode, we talk with Kristin Zhivago about her bestseller book Roadmap to Revenue: How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy. For decades, Kristin has been helping CEO's, entrepreneurs and business managers to increase their revenue. Since 2017, Kristin is President and Founder at Zhivago Partners, a Digital Marketing Management Company.

Let's start.

So, Kristin, welcome to the podcast.

Kristin Zhivago  01:09
Thank you.

Desiree Timmermans  01:10
You wrote the book Roadmap to Revenue: How to Sell the Way your Customers Want to Buy. And in it, you describe a proven method to satisfy customers and increase revenue. What inspired you to write his book?

Kristin Zhivago  01:24
Well, everybody's got the same problem. I thought, when I have a solution that works, you know, it just got to the point where I had to write the book. So I did.

The big problem, overall, is that when we're buyers, we know what we want, and we know how we want to buy. And that's all good. But when we're sellers, we put on our seller hat and we don't think like the customer anymore. We just want to make sales. And you kind of lose track of what I call their mindset, which is their desires, their concerns and their questions. So there's the mindset when they set out to buy. And honestly, I think that's more important than personas or anything else because it gets to the heart of: why they're coming to you; what's the problem they're trying to solve; and then what else have they tried to do to solve the problem, and how has that worked out for them; and what questions that they have. And if you know those things, you can set up your website and everything else so that when they come to your property, digital or otherwise, they just say; oh, yeah, that's me, that's what I'm dealing with, they get me, okay let me stay with this.

Desiree Timmermans  02:41
And then how you get this data? What I understood is you have a process with three steps: discover, debate, deploy. And how do you prepare yourself and your company for the process to take these steps?

Kristin Zhivago  02:55
Well, the first thing you do is you actually just set up this interviewing process. So the discovery process is actually a pretty easy method that anyone can do. And it's basically asking open-ended questions of people who have already bought from you. So they already know what your strengths and weaknesses are, they are happy to talk to you because they have a vested interest in your success. So they will in fact, spend a half an hour or an hour.

And I interviewed a lot of people for IBM over the 12 years that I consulted to them. And they are happy to tell you what their concerns were, what their questions were, what their buying process was, the biggest challenge they have in their work. And you can then reverse engineer that buying process and make sure that you support it at every step.

Kristin Zhivago  03:27
I had a woman, I worked for IBM for a long time, and I was interviewing one of their partners, and she cancelled her flight so she could stay on the phone with me, because she knew I was telling the truth to power, so to speak, that I was going to be taking this information back to people who actually made decisions about the partner programme. That's what I was hired to do.

One of my clients is particularly brilliant, and is always pushing to be as sophisticated as possible with marketing. And one of the things we're doing now is we're mapping the whole process the before and after process of when they get a customer and what more the customer needs afterwards, and what more they might want to buy. And everybody should do that. But it's a lot of work. You have to be dedicated. So you interview these customers, you ask open ended questions. I've interviewed 1000s of customers for hundreds of companies. And I've worked out these questions over the years to extract as much data as you can during the conversation.

Desiree Timmermans  04:57
Can you give an example of the questions?

Kristin Zhivago  04:59
Sure. As I said, they're very open-ended. So you want them to just talk and talk and talk. So the first question is: tell me a little bit about yourself. So you kind of get them in the right mood, and they know that you care about them. And you really do want to know, the context of the conversation.

And then the next question is: just tell me about your experience - buying from us using the product, what you were thinking, when you started out, you know, what were your concerns and questions. And you don't have to say this, because they'll tell you what their concerns and questions are.

And then there are sub-questions that you will ask. As they give you that data, there are things you will say: oh, wait, I want to drill down on that a little bit. Like, they might say: oh, it was okay. And what they're doing is testing you to see if you will then say: well, you don't sound completely convinced, can you tell me a little bit more?

Other questions, one of my favourites, which is: if you were the CEO of this company tomorrow, what's the first thing you would focus on or fix? So if you don't get an answer to the essence of what your strengths and weaknesses are, you'll get them from this question. What trends do you see in your market? What's your biggest challenge in your work? What else did you look at, when you were buying us? And what did you think of it? How did you feel about our selling process? And I outline all of this in chapter three of my book. I give away all my secrets of how to get this information.

The last question that I tend to ask is: is there anything I should have asked you that I didn't ask you? Which is a really awesome question. First of all, they love the fact that you asked that because it shows that you're being humble, and you really do want to know what they have to say. But what they do is they either say: no, that's you asked everything, or they say: yeah, you asked everything, but let me just reiterate about that particular topic. So you find out what they think, is the most important thing that you need to know. And the real high level strategy that you get from these answers is you find out what you're really good at which you want to promote. And you find out the things that you're not so good at that you need to fix in the background. And then once you fix those, you can promote those as well.

Desiree Timmermans  07:24
And how do you fix things, because that's not an easy thing to do?

Kristin Zhivago  07:31
Well, that gets into the debate and deploy. The debate is difficult, because marketing is so subjective. And everyone's an expert on marketing. And the reason they're all experts on marketing is because they're experts on buying. We're all consumers we buy all day, every day. So somebody who's a financial person, or a manufacturing person, or an engineer, will dominate the conversation in the room, if that person is respected for who they are and what they do. And they will argue with the marketing person about what they should be doing.

Kristin Zhivago  08:10
The beauty of this process is if the marketing person either makes the calls themselves, or has somebody do it that they've hired, and they're managing. And by phone call, by the way, I really mean Zoom audio, you know, videos you don't do in person, the Zoom aspect allows you to record the conversation and have it transcribed and then you can summarise it.

Desiree Timmermans  08:34
And why shouldn't you do video?

Kristin Zhivago  08:36
It invites body language that you don't really want. It just introduces an element, or a layer of interaction, that has nothing to do with what you're trying to get: their heads. The other thing is that if you do audio only, then they can be in a taxi or driving their car or whatever. And they can call in. And you can get them in their comfortable environment where they're happy to talk. And even if they're in their office, they won't mind talking about this. If somebody walks past their office, like if the boss walks past their office and hears them talking about business, then they'll be okay. They aren't wasting time.

Kristin Zhivago  09:19
So the debate, you create this conversation report where you're putting all of the answers in that 'questions section', so it can be anonymous. And you tell people that when you start the recording, you say: I'm going to record, I'm going to take notes, but this is going to be an anonymous report, because I'm going to take your answers and put them categorised by subject so that nobody knows who's speaking. The people in the meeting will still try to guess who it is. And they'll say: oh, that's Bob, he always says that. But interestingly what Bob is saying is the same thing is Sally and John and Joe are saying because Bob is trying to tell you something that everyone else is feeling.

The beauty of this conversation report is it's like a big bunch of, you know, at the end of a football game, they dumped the Gatorade on the head of the coach. At least, they do that in the States. It's like that it's truth.

And they may say: oh, we knew that already. But they didn't think it was that important.

Desiree Timmermans  10:22
I understand.

Kristin Zhivago  10:23
And honestly, when you asked me, you know, why did you do this? The thing that really forced me to write this book is as a revenue coach, trying to help people turn around their companies and start making money, I would find out what they thought was important to customers. And then I would interview their customers and find out that what they thought was important to customers was not what the customers thought was important. And so there was this big gap. And they were spending all this money on things that the customer didn't think were important. So I knew that we had to get rid of that gap. Because all that marketing money and effort was going for nothing, it was not working.

So there's the conversation report. And then there's something I call a summary and recommendations report where you pretty much bullet ties, everything that the people have said. So it's very concise, and you can really see the trends. The shocking thing about this process is that by the fifth or seventh conversation with people of a given type, like maybe it was a user of the product, or maybe there's a purchasing agent, or the CEO or something. You have bankable trends, they all say the same thing. They might even use the same phrase. They might say: oh, they're really good at this, but they're not so good at that.

Desiree Timmermans  11:43
So for the customer, it's very clear what is lacking.

Kristin Zhivago  11:46
Yeah. And you know, when you think of it as a buyer, if somebody called you up after you bought something that you thought about - and it was a specially a high scrutiny, what I call a high scrutiny purchase - they're gonna say: well, you know, what did you think of this, and you're gonna have opinions. Like, well, it was easy to order, but then I had a question, I couldn't find the answer. That was a problem. Or, I got it and it was super disappointing because I thought it had this. How many of us have bought a software product, downloaded it, tried it, and said: okay, it has this, this and this, but oh, golly, this is the thing I really need and it doesn't have it. It's a game changer, it happens all the time. So you really do have bankable concepts with this. It's something you can take to the bank, you can actually work on it. The beauty of it for the marketing person is that it makes you the expert in the customer's buying process. So the next time you're in a meeting, and the finance guy says: well, that's not what we did at our company two years ago, and this is not going to work. You can say: well, wait a minute, I asked, you know, 37 people, I talked to all these people. And they all said the same thing. This is what they want. So you can debate with confidence. Marketing people, they're overruled way too often. Because they don't have an answer, they don't have something to stand on.

Desiree Timmermans  13:13
It's strange, because the finance guy has something to stand on the sales guy, why not marketing?

Kristin Zhivago  13:19
It's the nature of the beast, if a CEO, and nobody works in the company anymore, but in the old days, when people were actually working in companies, the CEO would walk past that manufacturing process. And he would see that things were being made and people were doing your job. He could actually see it, and you go past the finance and they're working away at their computers, and they've got their spreadsheets up and, and they're giving you reports and everything, you know, things are happening. He walks past the marketing person's desk, and they might have their feet up talking to somebody. And also marketing people never ever do a good job of tracking and then tracing leads to ROI to return on investment. Because it's hard. It's really hard customer might come in from six different channels. Which is more important the first channel they came in, or the second or the third or the fourth, which actually made the sale and made the conversion? So it's very, very difficult. It's not impossible, but it's difficult to have that kind of proof where you can take that to management and be confident about it.

Desiree Timmermans  14:33
It almost sounds like marketing isn't willing to do a hard job. It needs to be easy.

Kristin Zhivago  14:41
Yes, marketing needs to be much easier if that's what you're saying. Right? And it isn't because we're selling to customers, but we're not finding out what customers really want. It's very simple. That's why it's broken. You can test you can A B test. Okay, that's good. So market are good and they do that. But you're still shooting in the dark.

Desiree Timmermans  15:04
Yes.

Kristin Zhivago  15:05
If you're guessing. Even a persona isn't going to help you. And my best example of that is, well actually have two good examples. One is that an 80 year old guy is going to buy a blender for the same reason that an 18 year old guy would. So the demographics and all that it's a waste of time.

Kristin Zhivago 15:25
The other example is, there was a woman named Derek Lampkin, I think. I was speaking at a conference in California a few years ago, and it was a internet marketing conference. And one of the speakers was Derek. And she got up and she said: okay, I want you all to close your eyes, and I'm going to describe someone, and then I'll have you open your eyes. So we closed her eyes. And she said: okay, this is a mother of two, she's living on government assistance. And she said a few other things, but the main thing was the government assistance, and so on. So we had an image of a person. And then she said: okay, open your eyes. And the person on the screen was Princess Di.

Desiree Timmermans  16:13
Nobody expected that.

Kristin Zhivago  16:15
Nobody expected that. So you're sort of sitting in a windowless room describing who you think your customer is. But if you don't get down to their mindset, when they sit down to buy their desires, their concerns and their questions, which by the way, is not in the book, because I came up with that later. But I do have a guide to mindset driven marketing on my site. So you can download that. It really helps you understand what you're trying to find out from these interviews.

So you do the debate, you give people report upfront, so they have time to read it. And you would be shocked. I've had big companies and come back with a 150 Page conversation report, they read every word. Because as they start to read, they're going: oh, oh, they know that about us, oh, wait I didn't think that was a problem, why is that a problem? So it's like reading your life. It's like a fortune teller telling your life.

Desiree Timmermans  17:13
And what to fix.

Kristin Zhivago  17:15
Yeah. So there's that. And then there's the summary and recommendations. And because you now have this data in your head, you can make good recommendations about what you should do and what you shouldn't do, and what you've been wasting money on that you don't need to do any more, things like that. So the debate is actually, because it's guided by this information, and they have it ahead of time, it's pretty civilised, by the time you get in that room together. And what I used to do is - that now we would use visual, virtual whiteboards and stuff- but I used to have these big poster size post its, and you would write on them and then put them up on the room around the wall. And they would be surrounded with this customer mindset. And so then they would start to make good decisions. And then you can say: okay, we agree now; this is what the customer wants; and here's the list of things that we should be doing and promoting because we're good at this and then even described it, you know, they might give us a phrase that we hadn't even thought of before; and then here's how we're going to deploy it. And the marketer pretty much knows the various channels they have at their disposal, and which channels will work better because of the way the customer responded. It just gives you a knowing that you didn't have before.

Desiree Timmermans  18:42
And if you go deeper into the deployment, what exactly are we doing there?

Kristin Zhivago  18:47
It's just the message. In other words, what is it that they want when they come to our site or social? What do they care about? And how are we helping them in a way that nobody else is helping them? So that's your positioning, basically.

And then you decide which channels you're going to use to get that message out there. And you might decide that: yes, we've been doing social, but we haven't been giving them the kind of information they want. But social is interesting. In the B2B market, it's mostly people looking at your feed to see what you care about. They don't buy off social, but they do go to your feed. You got your little icons on your website, and they click over and they just want to see what you care about.

Two of the most successful social campaigns that we've done or are doing. One is that brilliant person I was talking about, we don't have salespeople, they're their customer support people. And they help the customer buy, believe it or not, that's their job. They're not on quota. They'll just help the customer. And they're really good at it. So we have these little scenarios where the customer said: I have this problem, and I came in, and I need this. And they figured out how to help them, and get the thing to them the next day and solve the problem. You know, here I come to save the day kind of thing. You're the hero. And we turn those into little stories. Just short little stories. We put them out on social: so and so came to us, this was their issue, this is what we did, it was so exciting. And then we also post them on the website, an area that we call behind the scenes. You could call it whatever you wanted, but it's basically proof of performance.

One of the big questions that people never answer that every buyer has, is what's going to happen to me after I buy? Everybody wants to know that, and nobody answers the question. So this is one of the ways to answer that question. If you buy from us or even in the process of buying from us, here's how we're going to treat you. So that's one way to do good social. Another thing is, it's quite interesting, we have a food manufacturer. And the most popular social posts - yes, we do recipes and everything for them, that's a constant - showing the jars and saying something about them. It turns out to be something that people okay, if that's interesting to know that. This is a company that sells beans in glass jars, which is very rare. And they're already cooked, so you don't have to soak them. So they have some definite advantages. And just people are interested in what's happening.

So anyway, each channel has its own benefit, and the way you can use it. And as a marketer, you have to decide how you're going to leverage those channels to get the maximum benefit out of them. And you're gonna have to measure what kind of traffic you've gotten how it led to a sale. And that's where the hard work really comes in.

Desiree Timmermans  21:56
Okay. But you also have tools to do that.

Kristin Zhivago  21:58
Yes, it is possible. You have to have a good CRM system, you have to make it easy for people to say: here's, you know, ask the question, here's how they came in, or be able to do it with the CRM system. You're running ads, and they go to a particular landing page. And that landing page then leads to the additional interactions with the customer.

Desiree Timmermans  22:21
Okay, I understand. And do you also have an IT example where this process worked very well, and where the revenue was increased?

Kristin Zhivago  22:29
Yes. One of the best examples is a company that was selling software for companies who sent people out into the field to do maintenance work, and that kind of thing. The name of the company was Pioneer Interactive, I think, definitely not a good description of what they did. The company was run by a really smart guy who looked very technical. And he had a good team of people. They thought that their big claim to fame, and the reason that customers bought from them was because of their integration with QuickBooks.

I went on to interview their customers. And they all said the same thing: well, yeah, everybody integrates with QuickBooks, what's the big deal? To them, it was something I call a baseline industry promise like boats are supposed to float, and aeroplanes are supposed to fly, and restaurants aren't supposed to poison you. So to them, it was a baseline thing. Even though to the programmers it was really hard. And so they were very proud of it, how elegantly they integrated with QuickBooks. But to the customers just say: well, yeah, everybody integrates with QuickBooks, what's the big deal?

But then what they said to me was, the reason that they bought the programme was because they would enter data once when the customer first came to them. And it automatically populated the whole rest of the programme. So the invoicing automatically had that person's contact information, and the directions to the facility that the field people were going to, and things like that. They could run their whole business on this programme. And all of these things were, you know, here are the tools that you need at this particular place. All that stuff was pre populated. That was what excited them. Especially the smaller companies, because entrepreneurs hate entering data more than once. I mean, it's just one of the things.

So we came back and said: first of all, I need to change the name of the company because Pioneer Interactive isn't helping you. We changed the name of the company to Field One: enter the data once: field kind of companies is perfect name for them; and it was the best in the business, you know, Field One. And ultimately the CEO ended up selling it to Microsoft for many millions of dollars and stayed on for a while as a consultant that they really took off. When you get this right, you hockey stick, okay.

Desiree Timmermans  25:03
And by hockey stick you mean: your revenue goes up.

Kristin Zhivago  25:06
You go up. And it gets really exciting when that happens.

Desiree Timmermans  25:10
But it doesn't happen overnight. It's not like you do the interview, you debate, you deploy, and the results will come in. It's hard work, because I think you also need to have a kind of feedback loop.

Kristin Zhivago  25:22
Yeah. And sometimes it takes a little while to get that messaging just right. And it helps to continue talking to customers, because sometimes you get something in a phone call that surprises you, and makes you realise that everything you've been doing has been a little off the mark, or here's a better way of saying something.

Desiree Timmermans  25:42
So we have this example of the IT company. And I want to go a step back to the debate phase. Because who needs to be in this room when you're debating the conversation report and the summary and the results?

Kristin Zhivago  25:57
That's a very good question. I have this thing called the takeoff landing role, which is that the people who are going to be in on the landing, in other words the people you present to and get approval from, need to be in on the takeoff. Otherwise, you're going to have a mid course correction. You're going to come to them and say 'here's what we did', and they're going to be like: no, no, no, no, no, no, why are you doing that. So you really have to have anyone who has a say in the marketing process, even if it's just somebody like the finance guy who comments, and says: oh, those marketing people they know know what they're doing. You got to have that person in the room. Because that person is influencing the CEOs decisions, or the business owner. When I say CEO, I mean companies of all sizes, it is basically the person at the top, the top leader. And anyone who's influencing those decisions without the benefit of this process, without getting all that customer data in their heads, is going to come in from left field. And they're going to wreck the conversation in the process. It happens every time.

Desiree Timmermans  27:09
So we need to have the CEO, marketing, sales, finance.

Kristin Zhivago  27:14
Yeah. Anybody who's in the board meeting, or in management meetings, who the marketing people are presenting to and getting approval from.

Desiree Timmermans  27:23
And does it also sometimes happens that people or companies go through this process, and that they are not able to implement it?

Kristin Zhivago  27:31
I've never had that experience. But I will say this, I have a client who had a mentor who said: you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink. Everybody knows that. But then he looked at my client, he said; that's why I look for thirsty horses. I love that.

In fact, I just fired a client, a prospective client. We sort of fired each other at the same moment. He really doesn't care. He thinks he knows already what the customer wants. And he kind of bought the idea of the survey, but as he thought about it more he came back and said: you know, I don't see what we're going to learn from this. I said: okay, I'll just talk to a couple of people and give you the report. And he's not a thirsty horse. He doesn't care. And maybe he'll make it and good power to him. He's got a software company, and he's got 140 features that they've built into it. But he's having trouble selling, or selling to people beyond the people he's sold to himself. Good luck.

Desiree Timmermans  28:37
Okay. And, I understood, you also have a rule that you don't work with jerks. What is a jerk?

Kristin Zhivago  28:42
A jerk or a diva, female or male, have something in common, which is that they make life harder for everybody else. If you do a job with somebody who is a nice person who tries to help everybody and make things easier for everyone else, that's a nice person, the project will go well. If a jerk gets in the mix, the project will stall. Jerks has all sorts of methods where like, they'll tell you one thing, and then you present the results of the work based on what they said. And they say: oh, that's not what I meant, you got it all wrong. And then they give you a piece of information that they didn't give you at the beginning. So you look bad and they look good. Everything's about them looking good and you looking bad. I don't have time for it.

I have a completely jerk free environment here. My team is jerk free and my client bases jerk free. And I've even fired our largest client last year, because at the beginning he came recommended he was a good guy acted really well. But after a while, he became dismissive, and then he became rude, and then he became a jerk. Those were the sort of the three phases that he went through. And when I left him, I said: you know, I don't work with jerks. And that was the progression. And my people were just, it was stressful to work for him, because you never knew when he was going to say: well, why are you doing that, and I didn't say you should do that. And then he treated his right hand man very badly. And his right hand man was really nice, and we didn't like it. It just wasn't worth it for us.

Desiree Timmermans  30:27
Well, I think it's very good business advice. Don't work with jerks.

Kristin Zhivago  30:31
Unfortunately, the jerk quotient is a little higher than it used to be. I have ideas about why, but there are more jerks. I used to think in a company that it was one in ten, but now I'm thinking it's more like two in ten. It's kind of sad, but it's harder to avoid them, let's put it that way.

Desiree Timmermans  30:48
And what do you think is an explanation for this?

Kristin Zhivago  30:51
Well, I think people are worshipping narcissism. It's all about me. Everything is all about me. And when you're all about you, you're not all about the customer. You don't care.

Desiree Timmermans  31:06
So it's about ego.

Kristin Zhivago  31:08
It's the ego. And unfortunately, big companies have more jerks because - I can't say the phrase that people use - you're nice to the person above you and you're not nice to the people below you. And if you're a good CEO, you find out that if you're not asking the people at the bottom, you're never going to find it out.

Desiree Timmermans  31:28
Very interesting.

So going back to roadmap to revenue, we have three steps that companies have to follow: discover, debate, deploy. Is there anything else that they need to do?

Kristin Zhivago  31:41
No, actually, follow this process and stick to it. Even if somebody says 'well, what about this', and you don't have an answer, you say: oh wait, hang on, let me just do a little calling and see what that question is. You don't try to be the hero. You just keep going back to that source of truth, and the truth will set you free, as they say.

I've had people after speeches come up to me or send me an email two months later or something and say: okay, I did what you said and I interviewed the customers and I did the debate, and I can't believe what a difference it's made, nobody's arguing anymore, even the salespeople.

And I should say one thing, all these years when I've been doing this, CEOs will say: well, why do we need to interview our customers? My salespeople are talking to customers all the time. So I look at the CEO and I just say: okay, when was the last time you told a salesperson what you were really thinking while they were selling to you? And the CEO goes: oh, oops okay.  Because when we're buying, we're playing poker. We're not telling them what we're thinking. We might even decide we'll never do business with that company because of something the salesperson just said. But we don't say that. I do, because I feel sorry for salespeople. And, I tell them, you just lost the sale, sorry. So we let them think that we're fine. And they think we're fine, they go tell their boss they're going to make a sale and everything, they're all excited. And the buyer just goes back to their computer and, starts looking again. You can lose the sale and not even know it because they are so careful. That's why you interview people after the sale, because now they have a vested interest in helping you be successful and being there for them. And so they'll tell you all sorts of stuff, but they won't tell you while they're buying. So the salespeople don't really know as much as they think they do. And I have nothing against salespeople. I'm a recovering salesperson myself. It's just people don't like being sold to anymore. That's a whole nother subject that is really difficult, making life hard for salespeople these days.

Desiree Timmermans  34:00
I think you provide a wonderful framework to CEOs, entrepreneurs and, business managers with this roadmap to revenue and these three steps. It's very clear everyone can do it, it's not rocket science. So I think that's really wonderful. And I encourage the listeners to read your book and to start implementing it, because you will have a wonderful working life if you do it. And you come to Revenue City, as is mentioned in the beginning of your book.

Kristin Zhivago  34:29
Yes. End up in Revenue City. That's a good place to be.

Desiree Timmermans  34:34
Okay, we are coming already to the end of the podcast, but of course, the last question is: is there anything you want to say that I didn't ask you yet?

Kristin Zhivago  34:43
I think the main issue here is the best source of power in your career is the customer. Because that's your real job, is presenting the customer to management and helping management make the right decisions. That's what this is all about. And if you don't have a marketing person or your CEO, or if you're an entrepreneur or business owner, it's you knowing so that you can make, good decisions. It just makes sense and it works.

Desiree Timmermans  35:16
Well, thanks for that. That's really good advice. And also, thank you very much for all your insights and for being on the podcast. And, we will talk again.

Kristin Zhivago  35:26
Yes, I'd like to do that.

Outro  35:30
Thanks for listening to the Women in Big Data Brussels and Berlin podcast. For more information and episodes, subscribe to the show or contact us via datawomen@protomail.com. 

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