Kristin Zhivago is a business growth consultant who started out selling and marketing software and hardware products in 1969. She founded Zhivago Management Partners, Inc., in Silicon Valley, in 1979. The company moved to Jamestown, RI in 1996. Clients range from thriving young start-ups to those in the Fortune 500, including Dow Jones, IBM, and Johnson & Johnson.

Zhivago worked exclusively in the high-tech industry (computers, software, telecommunications and networking) until the Web emerged as a platform for commerce in 1994. She then started also applying her revenue growth methods to companies in the travel, health, publishing, food, and consumer goods industries. She spent a number of years as a "rent-a-VP," performing marketing and sales department turnarounds for CEOs, and then settled on her current role as Revenue Coach.

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.

Kristin Zhivago is an expert at matching a company's selling efforts to their customer's buying process. She has perfected a works-every-time research method to uncover the barriers to the sale - and to identify what is working and what is broken. She then uses her findings to guide managers in creating customer-centric companies, websites, products, and services. Services include:

• Increasing sales. Once the barriers to the sale are identified, and the customer's buying process is mapped, the appropriate changes and additions are made to the company's marketing and selling efforts. Marketing messages are adjusted and utilized in the correct places (including social media, online and offline, sales pitches/presentations, etc.). Marketing and sales people are coached.
• Company positioning. The in-depth 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 is one of the companies that has hired Zhivago to redesign various sections of the IBM Business Partner websites and other portals. Redesign activity includes user testing.
• Strategic and marketing/selling copy. 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.