She blazes consulting trail wherever market leads

REVENUE STREAM: A self-described “revenue coach,” Kristin Zhivago uses her company, Zhivago Management Partners, to help broken enterprises get “fixed.” / PBN FILE PHOTO/CATIA CUEN
REVENUE STREAM: A self-described “revenue coach,” Kristin Zhivago uses her company, Zhivago Management Partners, to help broken enterprises get “fixed.” / PBN FILE PHOTO/CATIA CUEN

Revenue coach Kristin Zhivago says personality counts when selecting clients.
“In my coaching work, I always work for CEOs, except at the very largest companies such as IBM and Johnson & Johnson, where I tend to work for more of a VP level,” she said.
“I refuse to work for jerks. They never take good care of customers or employees, so it’s not worth working with them,” said Zhivago, owner and operator of Zhivago Management Partners in Jamestown.
Zhivago interviews clients’ customers to find out why they bought, how they describe what they bought, and how they describe the company. “It’s everything they say about you when you’re not in the room.” She then analyzes it, summarizes and quantifies it for the management team.
“We go to work fixing what’s broken, and promoting what they are doing right in a way that will resonate with future customers,” she said.
One example Zhivago points to as a common mistake among her clients is the “About” section of the company’s website. “Potential customers will almost immediately go to a company’s website and ‘Who are they?’ is the first question a potential customer asks, because ‘Who are they?’ will determine how they behave when I’m their customer,” she said.
Zhivago says more often than not the people don’t get their questions answered because there is no “About” section, or the section is all text, leaving the potential customer unable to, “really look into the eyes of the team running the company.”
Zhivago began trailblazing in the field from the get-go. “I really started my career in high-tech. I was selling machine-shop tools. … I was working for Pratt & Whitney, and that experience taught me what not to do selling. They didn’t train me, I just went out there and started to sell, so I learned the hard way what didn’t work.” Despite being a woman in an extremely male-driven industry at the time, Zhivago says she didn’t experience much in the way of sexism. “I found, and what I continue to find, is that they really don’t care where the knowledge is coming from, if it’s good knowledge. So if you’re still whining about somebody not paying attention to you, it’s probably because you’re not saying things to them that make them want to pay attention to you.”
Prompted by the lack of tools she thought that marketers were giving to the salespeople, Zhivago quickly underwent her first career redesign, shifting her focus to marketing. At 28, she started her company, Zhivago Management Partners, with her husband in Silicon Valley in 1979, focusing on marketing services for the high-tech industries in the area.
The next career redesign came in 1991 when Zhivago’s husband decided to retire. She slowly began to convert her business from an outside marketing firm to one that helps in-house marketing efforts at companies. But that quickly progressed beyond marketing.
Zhivago also branched out and began working for businesses beyond the high-tech sector. Spurred by the development of the Internet as a platform for commerce, her clients began to run the gamut from travel and health care businesses, to sellers of food and consumer goods.
It was also during that time period when Zhivago and her husband decided to relocate to the East Coast, settling in Jamestown in 1996.
“I will go where the market is,” she said. “When something new comes out, I’m like a leopard on the back of antelope.” &#8226

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