Follow Here To Purchase Roadmap to Revenue: How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy

Author: Kristin Zhivago

ISBN: 13:978-0-9749179-2-4

Publisher: Bristol & Shipley Press

Kristin Zhivago's contention is that vendors of goods and services are searching in the wrong places to find answers as to why they are not succeeding in attracting potential buyers to purchase from them and thus increase their revenue. They don't recognize that their customers are the only ones that know the real answers. Posing the right questions to their customers will inform them what their customers want and how they want to buy it.

With her clear-thinking approach through verbiage that can be described as superb in its economy, Zhivago in her Roadmap To Revenue: How To Sell The Way Your Customers Want To Buy advocates a change in the usual way companies conceive about sales and marketing. In fact, Zhivago is quite forthright in her contempt concerning some of the existing marketing techniques that hammer consumers with a great deal of noise and clutter about products and services that cost companies millions of dollars with little to show for it. She further affirms that most of the time marketing and selling are out of touch as to what your buyer really wants from your product or service and as she maintains: “Marketing and selling is what you do. Buying is what your customer does.” After all, is it not the buyer that determines whether the company will succeed or not? Consequently, to improve revenue, Zhivago advocates a different approach-one which she describes as shifting from a company-centered approach to a customer-centric one. Her fundamental message is to engage your customers and listen to their needs wherein you align your organization with your customer’s buying process.

After presenting her readers with a general overview, Zhivago breaks down her process into three fundamental steps which she fully treats within chapters three, four and five of the book. It is here where we learn how to interview customers, create reports, and what to do with all of the information we have accumulated. The three steps are as follows:

1) Discover: Interview your customers, find out what they want and how they want to go about buying it. This can be accomplished through the use of in-depth, one-on-one phone interviews. It is here where readers will learn whom to interview, how to interview, questions that should be posed to your customers, transcribing the interview, creating a conversation report, and distributing the report to the individuals that will be involved in a subsequent brainstorming and planning meeting

2) Debate. Resolve the differences between what they want versus what you have to sell, and how they buy versus how you sell. In this step, you arrange whom you wish to be present in the brainstorming and planning meeting, which should be conducted over a period of two days. The participants should come from a broad spectrum of areas in your organization as marketing, sales, websites, systems operations, and customer service. The first day would emphasize all the important issues that are important to your customers and this would be followed by building your promise by using the information garnered from your customers.

3) Deploy. Document your customer's buying process so you can support them every step of the way, then build an action plan. This step is covered in day two, now that you know what exactly you have to deliver to your customers.

The remaining chapters of the book analyze more closely how to support your customers's buying process, the four levels of buyer scrutiny which Zhivago breaks down into light, medium, heavy and intense, and finally the way to keep your company on the right path to increasing revenue.

Roadmap To Revenue is certainly a maverick book containing act-on-it-today advice rendered by an acknowledged master who has meticulously presented information that she has garnered from her many years as a Revenue Coach to CEOs and entrepreneurs helping them increase their revenue by understanding exactly what their customers want. Moreover, the book provides great insight relevant to viewing the customer purchasing process as a whole and the need to change our attitude if we hope to increase revenue. It is one book that should be a top reading priority for CEOs and entrepreneurs who, as Zhivago states in her opening dedicating remarks, “feel a strong sense of responsibility to their customers, employees, and stakeholders, and who want to grow their businesses without resorting to the deceptive techniques used by the manipulative world.”

Follow Here To Read Norm's Interview With Kristin Zhivago