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EP336 Make It Easy to Buy - Fix the Friction Killing Your Revenue. · Profit With A Plan

• 0:00
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: mode.
• 0:07
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Before you spend another dollar on marketing, ask yourself this.
• 0:12
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Do you actually know how your customers decide to buy?
• 0:17
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Because marketing is a promise, and your brand is defined by whether that promise gets kept or broken.
• 0:25
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: In this conversation, we're gonna be looking at buyer's mindset, and why… and the moment that they decide to make their purchase, why friction often shows up at… bleh, can't get my mouth to work. Let's try this again.
• 0:42
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Do you know why your customers actually decide… whoop, let me go back to the top.
• 0:47
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: We'll try a third time. Third time's the charm.
• 0:50
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Before you spend another dollar on marketing, ask yourself this.
• 0:55
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Do you actually know how your customers, decide to buy? Because marketing is a promise, and your brand is defined by whether that promise gets kept or broken.
• 1:08
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: In this… in this podcast today of Profit with a Plan, we're going to be looking at the buyer's mindset and the moment they decide to make the purchase.
• 1:18
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Why friction often shows up when someone is ready to say yes.
• 1:22
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And what changes when you stop guessing and start listening?
• 1:28
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: We're also going to be unpacking why many companies avoid customer interviews, and even though revenue only comes from customers who buy.
• 1:37
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Today's topic often shows up in the work of Kristin Chivago, and it is challenging… it challenges how most businesses think about marketing, branding, and growth. So join us on Profit with a Plan today!
• 1:52
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Hey entrepreneurs, are you working too hard for too little profit? Well, welcome to Profit with a Plan podcast, where we help you scale smarter, increase profitability, and build a business that's worth more, whether you keep it or sell it.
• 2:05
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I'm Marcia Reiner, Business Growth Strategist and Profit Booster behind Infinite Profit.
• 2:11
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I've helped countless entrepreneurs to turn their businesses into highly profitable and sale-ready assets, so they enjoy more income now and a bigger payday later. So join me for practical strategies, expert insights, and proven steps that make your business more profitable, more valuable, and built to last.
• 2:29
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: By the way, today's episode is sponsored by Infinite Profit, where we don't just talk profit, we deliver it.
• 2:36
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: But before we dive in, I've got something special for you. If you're tired of flat revenue and marketing that doesn't pay off, then the new Profit Booster Growth Map might be for you. In just a few minutes, you'll learn exactly how to bring in more qualified clients and plug those profit leaks that are eating away at your cash.
• 2:55
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: You can get it for free, at ProfitBooster.biz, and start turning missed revenue into real money.
• 3:04
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Alright, let's jump into today's episode. My guest today is Kristen Zhivago. Kristen is the CEO of Zivago Partners, and is a leading authority on how customers actually buy, and not how customers wish they did.
• 3:18
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Her work centers on identifying what she calls sales stoppers, and the moments of friction that slow or stop buyers once they're already interested.
• 3:30
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: She has been interviewed by thousands of customers, or she has interviewed thousands of customers across hundreds of companies, helping business owners uncover why people buy, how they decide, and where revenue gets lost in the process.
• 3:46
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: She's also the author of The Roadmap to Revenue, which challenges businesses to align marketing, sales, and delivery around customers' buying mindset.
• 3:56
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: So this practical conversation is about promise, perception, and what really drives revenue when you stop guessing and start listening. Welcome, Kristen, I'm glad you're on the call, and you know, now that my mouth seems to be working, we'll make this one better.
• 4:14
  Kristin Zhivago: Glad to be here, thanks.
• 4:15
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Excellent, excellent. So, how in the world did you kind of come up with this idea that it's better to talk with the customer and get this kind of information? I mean, you know, some people would think, duh, but then nobody does it.
• 4:28
  Kristin Zhivago: Yeah, that's a paradox. It's sort of like, I used to give speeches all over the world talking about this, and when I stood up in front of them, I now do podcasts, it's easier, but anyway, I would always ask them, how do you lose weight? What are the two things you have to do? Everybody had the answer, you eat less and exercise more.
• 4:47
  Kristin Zhivago: And then I would say, how many of you are doing it?
• 4:50
  Kristin Zhivago: And no hands would go up, or maybe one or two. It's the same thing. We know
• 4:56
  Kristin Zhivago: That revenue comes from customers.
• 5:00
  Kristin Zhivago: We just… it just never occurs to people to ask customers, particularly people who have already bought from you.
• 5:07
  Kristin Zhivago: why they bought and how they bought, and ask certain open-ended questions, which I've worked out in, as you said, literally thousands of customer interviews.
• 5:17
  Kristin Zhivago: I spell them out in Chapter 3 of my book. Make it super easy for you to do this, and teach you how to get them on the phone, or in this… these days, it's Zoom audio. You don't want to do video because they get uncomfortable.
• 5:31
  Kristin Zhivago: And audio allows them to just call in and be anywhere and answer your questions.
• 5:36
  Kristin Zhivago: So there are techniques that work.
• 5:39
  Kristin Zhivago: And you only have to interview
• 5:42
  Kristin Zhivago: Five to seven people of a given type
• 5:45
  Kristin Zhivago: And you'll start seeing trends. I mean, absolute… people will even use the same exact phrase, although they've never spoken to each other, to describe things like the promise you're making, the promise they wish you would make.
• 6:02
  Kristin Zhivago: How well you're keeping the promise, or have you broken it?
• 6:06
  Kristin Zhivago: One of the… Basic principles of this whole method.
• 6:11
  Kristin Zhivago: is that… Branding is your marketing making promises on behalf of the company. That's branding.
• 6:21
  Kristin Zhivago: You're a brand, your brand…
• 6:23
  Kristin Zhivago: is how well you keep those promises or break them. That's what people say about you when you're not in the room.
• 6:32
  Kristin Zhivago: So, this whole thing, it seems like a soft concept, but when you think about it, it is about making promises, and it is about keeping them.
• 6:42
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Wow, that is really powerful stuff, because…
• 6:47
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: You know, we all know things happen. Some, you know, something… the delivery got missed, we opened a can of worms that we didn't realize when we… when we got into doing the service, or what have you.
• 7:00
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: So things happen, but how you handle those kind of moves is really where your promise is fulfilled, right? Absolutely. Because those things are gonna go. If you… if you ghost them or say, oh, it's now instead of, you know, $100, it's now $150,
• 7:17
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: To solve that problem, then that's where that promise gets lost, right?
• 7:22
  Kristin Zhivago: Yep, absolutely.
• 7:23
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: This is, this is really valuable, though, to think about your business in that manner.
• 7:29
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And…
• 7:30
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: So, how does… how does one, I mean, I'm thinking to myself how I would build that out, but I would love to hear how you align that brand in a way that is attractive to your ideal customer.
• 7:44
  Kristin Zhivago: Well, again, customers will tell you. That's the beauty of this. You don't have to use AI and build personas and all that stuff.
• 7:54
  Kristin Zhivago: Because personas are like stalking somebody. So, if you were stalked for 2 weeks by someone, you know, who was sitting in a car across the street or something.
• 8:06
  Kristin Zhivago: And they knew that you went to the store every Friday afternoon, and you typically bought these things. Well, okay, that's interesting.
• 8:14
  Kristin Zhivago: But it doesn't say what they had in their mind when they set out to buy your specific product.
• 8:22
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: What was their mindset when they set out to buy? And I've been… been…
• 8:28
  Kristin Zhivago: talking about this for some time now, I've written a guide on it, we can talk about it at the end, but…
• 8:34
  Kristin Zhivago: The mindset of the buyer consists of 3 things.
• 8:38
  Kristin Zhivago: their desires?
• 8:40
  Kristin Zhivago: Their concerns, and their questions.
• 8:44
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: These are hoops that you have to jump through.
• 8:46
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: But that makes it sound so easy!
• 8:51
  Kristin Zhivago: I've been trying to easeify marketing for decades, because people need to understand how simple this is. This is about human beings appealing to each other.
• 9:02
  Kristin Zhivago: I've just written a blog about something I'm calling, connectionism.
• 9:08
  Kristin Zhivago: I think capitalism and communism, which are two opposing ends of the spectrum, everybody's been focused on those for decades.
• 9:16
  Kristin Zhivago: I think what we now have is a completely new economy.
• 9:20
  Kristin Zhivago: And I'm calling it connectionism.
• 9:22
  Kristin Zhivago: I'm saying there are fake, false connections, there are almost, but not quite connections, where you promise but you don't deliver, or you somehow disappoint the customer, or they know that you don't really understand them, and so they just disappear. And then there's the connections that actually work.
• 9:41
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And they're relevant.
• 9:43
  Kristin Zhivago: They're… they give the customer what they want. And this applies to personal life, too. I mean, when you get married, you make promises. You stand there in front of the minister, or whatever, and you say, I do, I promise this, this, and this.
• 9:56
  Kristin Zhivago: And if you continue to keep those promises, you'll have a happy marriage. I know, I was married for 48 years before I lost my husband. So, this is just… you can stay in love forever, if you keep the promises that other person wanted you to keep at the beginning and continues.
• 10:14
  Kristin Zhivago: So… This whole commercial side of it is building a relevant connection with the customer.
• 10:22
  Kristin Zhivago: And it's not about relationship marketing. Nobody wants the car dealer showing up for dinner, okay? Unannounced. You don't shop to make friends.
• 10:33
  Kristin Zhivago: You shop because you have a need.
• 10:36
  Kristin Zhivago: And you want to go somewhere, and the first thing you see when you go to the website or whatever is that they get the need. They describe it in your own words. They know what you desire.
• 10:46
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Hmm.
• 10:47
  Kristin Zhivago: And then, you immediately address their concerns, because there's no such thing as a virgin buyer, and people have tried and been disappointed, and so they're saying, well, that's nice, that's a nice promise, but are you going to do this or that?
• 11:05
  Kristin Zhivago: Once you've jumped through those two hoops, now they will have very… they're still with you, and they want you to answer very specific questions.
• 11:14
  Kristin Zhivago: How big is it? Will it integrate with this? Does it match that? You know, am I… how good am I going to look in this? Or what… whatever the questions are.
• 11:24
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Those are kind of buying signals as well. When they start asking those questions, you know that they've already jumped through those first two hoops, and this person has really narrowed you down with other, you know.
• 11:34
  Kristin Zhivago: Very good observation, that is correct, yeah.
• 11:38
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: That's great. Okay, so, and you can get all this from asking questions to your existing buyers.
• 11:44
  Kristin Zhivago: Yeah. I mean, if somebody called you, and it was a product that you'd just purchased, or you've been using for a while.
• 11:52
  Kristin Zhivago: they don't have to prepare for this conversation. You do set up an appointment, you want to be courteous, and not just call them out of the blue. And again, I describe all of this, I give away all my secrets in the book, because I want everyone to do this.
• 12:05
  Kristin Zhivago: They will be prepared. They… I mean, if somebody said to you, why did you buy that car?
• 12:13
  Kristin Zhivago: How was the experience?
• 12:15
  Kristin Zhivago: What else did you look at?
• 12:17
  Kristin Zhivago: What were you most concerned about? You would have answers to those questions.
• 12:22
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Yeah.
• 12:23
  Kristin Zhivago: And you're happy to tell them that what's interesting is the people who've already bought from you.
• 12:29
  Kristin Zhivago: Want you to be successful.
• 12:32
  Kristin Zhivago: So that you're around when they have a problem, so they can come back and buy more of these, if it's a certain clothing brand or whatever, and they like it, and so they want more of it. They want you to stay in business. So they're actually happy to answer these questions.
• 12:49
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I love it.
• 12:50
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I love it, because, you know.
• 12:52
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I know that for a while their surveys were really, you know, popular, but I never found that they actually gave me the information I wanted, right? I felt like I was leading the witness a little bit to get them to answer the question the way I wanted them to, which…
• 13:09
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: tricks the data that I'm really needing to see on the other side. And then the percentage of people that did it, you know, it was less than 1%.
• 13:18
  Kristin Zhivago: People don't have time for that. They're bored by it.
• 13:22
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And… or…
• 13:23
  Kristin Zhivago: A survey, a survey is your assumptions Put in question form.
• 13:29
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I love it.
• 13:30
  Kristin Zhivago: You're trying to get confirmation of the validity of your assumptions.
• 13:35
  Kristin Zhivago: And they're… that's just boring. That's so boring. When you ask open-ended questions, and you treat them like a human being.
• 13:43
  Kristin Zhivago: And by the way, AI cannot do this. Not yet.
• 13:47
  Kristin Zhivago: Because.
• 13:48
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I didn't ask that one.
• 13:49
  Kristin Zhivago: For example, if a bot called someone and said,
• 13:55
  Kristin Zhivago: how was this experience? And the person would say, it was okay.
• 14:00
  Kristin Zhivago: Now.
• 14:01
  Kristin Zhivago: I've interviewed thousands of people. I'm not gonna let that rest. I'm gonna come in and say, wait a minute, there was some doubt in there. What… what… tell me more about this. And then… and then they trust me, because I heard them.
• 14:15
  Kristin Zhivago: They gave me a clue. They said, I'm not really thinking this is okay, but I need permission, I need to know you're actually listening. And when you pass that test, then they just start talking and talking. The bot would have said, in the report.
• 14:31
  Kristin Zhivago: They said it was okay.
• 14:34
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: They wouldn't have even…
• 14:35
  Kristin Zhivago: pursued it.
• 14:37
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: You're right.
• 14:38
  Kristin Zhivago: Now, I'm sure that someday bots will be able to identify inflections and things like that, but I also think that human beings would much rather talk to another human being than to a bot, and I have nothing
• 14:52
  Kristin Zhivago: against AI, I'm all over it. We immersed ourselves in it the last year or two, but…
• 14:57
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: But there's places for it. There's time and place, and this is the right use case for that, whereas you're asking for valuable, incredibly valuable information from an existing customer to share their viewpoints
• 15:17
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: That is a thousand percent a… an important human touchpoint that I think.
• 15:23
  Kristin Zhivago: And also.
• 15:24
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: fake.
• 15:25
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: People forget that they're unique. Right.
• 15:28
  Kristin Zhivago: Even in an industry that has a bunch of competitors.
• 15:33
  Kristin Zhivago: But your competitor is not you. They don't make decisions the same way you do, they don't have the right type… the same type of people, they treat their product and their service differently.
• 15:44
  Kristin Zhivago: Every company is a unique entity, and the reason that people buy from that company is very different from the reason they would buy from another company.
• 15:55
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Exactly.
• 15:56
  Kristin Zhivago: So this is why you have to do this for yourself, and not depend on personas or anything. Now, I'll make one point. If you are an entrepreneur.
• 16:07
  Kristin Zhivago: there's two things that come up here. One is, you need… you need to hire someone to do these interviews.
• 16:14
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: That was the question I was just gonna ask. If you're a smaller company, and the customer is, quote, buying from you.
• 16:23
  Kristin Zhivago: Yeah.
• 16:23
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: You need to be the person doing that interview.
• 16:26
  Kristin Zhivago: No, not you.
• 16:28
  Kristin Zhivago: You need to hire someone, because people are too polite, believe it or not.
• 16:33
  Kristin Zhivago: I mean, even for myself, with my own company, I have someone on my team do the interviewing.
• 16:39
  Kristin Zhivago: And my clients say things to me that, you know, they might say the same thing, but they would say it a little more strongly if I'm not in the room.
• 16:48
  Kristin Zhivago: Okay, if I have a weakness or something, or there's something that…
• 16:51
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I think I want to hurt your feelings, and if you're there writing down the answer, they're going, oh, I better be nice to her, rather than, wow, she was a handful, but she got the job done, right?
• 17:03
  Kristin Zhivago: Or whatever they're gonna say.
• 17:04
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Yeah. Well, I'm just saying as an example, though, right? They would… they would accept that with the third party, because you could always, like, kind of let that guard down and have that conversation more, more frankly.
• 17:18
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Yay.
• 17:18
  Kristin Zhivago: I can't remember the second thing I was gonna say, but anyway, it'll come back to me as we're talking.
• 17:21
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Oh, I'm sorry. That's the challenge of a conversation, right? Instead of a…
• 17:26
  Kristin Zhivago: Okay.
• 17:27
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: So I have a question for you. How long do these interviews often take? So, if you're planning and prepping the other person, hey, it's gonna be a 5-minute.
• 17:37
  Kristin Zhivago: 30 minutes. 30 minutes. Yeah. And they'll go for that. I mean, 20 minutes is the psychological number that people use when they're trying to keep you around, like if you're at a restaurant, and how long is the wait, and they say 20 minutes. They figure you'll be patient for that.
• 17:54
  Kristin Zhivago: But that's not what's going on here. It… it… I used to spend an hour with people.
• 17:59
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Really?
• 18:00
  Kristin Zhivago: But they've gotten better at getting to the point faster in the last 10 or 15 years. It's been interesting to see, they're more blunt than they used to be, and they don't talk quite as much.
• 18:11
  Kristin Zhivago: They try to say things succinctly, and that's a good thing.
• 18:17
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Thank goodness, right?
• 18:18
  Kristin Zhivago: Yeah.
• 18:19
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I don't know, as a customer, I don't know that I have an hour to spend, right? But a half hour, right? You know, if I can make an impact and this was worth my time, not that you're bribing me, but worth to the company, you know, that I felt, you know,
• 18:35
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: that I enjoyed the experience, or maybe I didn't enjoy the experience enough to take that time.
• 18:40
  Kristin Zhivago: Yeah.
• 18:41
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Talk to somebody about it.
• 18:42
  Kristin Zhivago: Now, one other trick is, and again, I spell all this out in the book, but you do have to tell them you're recording, and what I say to them is, I have to record this because I want to catch every word, and I can't type as fast as you talk.
• 18:57
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Exactly.
• 18:58
  Kristin Zhivago: But, I'm going to anonymize
• 19:01
  Kristin Zhivago: the report. And I do that by taking a whole conversation and splitting it up into the answers to each question.
• 19:11
  Kristin Zhivago: So, here's the question, and then in the report, I do a conversation transcription report. Every single person speaking on that topic is in their own little block.
• 19:22
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: No, not.
• 19:23
  Kristin Zhivago: And I further anonymize a little bit. I mean, just enough to make sure that nobody in the company… we do a lot of B2B work, business-to-business, and sometimes somebody will say, oh yeah, that's Bob, he always says that.
• 19:35
  Kristin Zhivago: Well, in fact, Bob is doing a better job of encapsulating and summarizing the issue.
• 19:42
  Kristin Zhivago: than a lot of other people, number one. And number two, Bob is usually right, it's just that everybody gets tired of him talking about it. But then if you see that 7 people said the exact same thing, now you've got a bankable trend.
• 19:55
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Right. It's not just Bob. Maybe it's us. Right.
• 19:59
  Kristin Zhivago: Yeah, exactly.
• 20:00
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: This is valuable. This is really valuable insights. I've taught… 7 years in the podcast, I've spoken to a few companies that do data research and this kind of stuff, and it always seemed to be like this.
• 20:13
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Gigantic, expensive project, you know, to go get this third party in to interview and ask the questions, and then you get this data back, and you're like, well, you know, it's kind of like…
• 20:25
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I often build plans for customers, and they get it back, and they go, oh, that's great, and then put it in the drawer, right? They don't use any of it, which is sad. But yeah, I think that this is information that really can help your company move in the right direction, and
• 20:45
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Make… make better service?
• 20:48
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Make a better product, make a better delivery of your product and service, get your customers happier.
• 20:56
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Bring your customers back for more, and you know that one question that nobody ever asks?
• 21:03
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: is, can you refer us? I mean, it seems like this is gonna, you know, and I'm sure.
• 21:08
  Kristin Zhivago: Yeah, you can do that.
• 21:09
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: great reasons why this is so valuable.
• 21:12
  Kristin Zhivago: You have to wait until you've done
• 21:15
  Kristin Zhivago: They don't want to feel like you're using them outside of the scope of what you say, and in the email, you don't say, we're trying to figure out the buying process, you say we're trying to figure out how we should improve.
• 21:26
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Yes!
• 21:26
  Kristin Zhivago: So, and they'll definitely want to help with that. But you can't… and one of the reasons you can't have a salesperson do this is it's going to be almost impossible for them not to react. If the person says, well, I wish you guys would do this.
• 21:41
  Kristin Zhivago: And the salesperson would be like, well, we already have, and we've been announcing it, and how come you didn't know about it?
• 21:47
  Kristin Zhivago: That's not good, okay? You can't sell in this conversation. They'll immediately put up their wall, and they'll be, playing poker. Buyers never tell you what they're thinking when they're buying from you, or negotiating with a salesperson. They never do.
• 22:06
  Kristin Zhivago: So, you're not playing poker here. You're getting information after. I know what the other thing was. If you are an entrepreneur, and you don't have any customers yet.
• 22:17
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Oh!
• 22:17
  Kristin Zhivago: How do you deal with that? And the answer is, you find people who would be…
• 22:23
  Kristin Zhivago: You ask around, and you try to find people who might be a good customer for what you're going to do.
• 22:30
  Kristin Zhivago: And you start there. And you still do the same thing, you ask the same questions, and in the case here, if they haven't had experience with your company, you would say, well, what other experiences have you had with similar companies?
• 22:43
  Kristin Zhivago: How were you disappointed? How were you pleased? Why did you hire them? That helps, okay? Sure. But it isn't until you get customers that you're gonna get the real value out of this, because then they've done business with your company.
• 22:57
  Kristin Zhivago: And they'll have a lot to tell you about that specific experience.
• 23:03
  Kristin Zhivago: But, again, it only takes 5 to 7 people of a given type, so once you have 7 customers.
• 23:08
  Kristin Zhivago: You can go back and do this research and get much closer.
• 23:12
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Love it.
• 23:13
  Kristin Zhivago: I was also going to talk about one other thing, which is that.
• 23:15
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Sure.
• 23:17
  Kristin Zhivago: You asked how I got into this. I… I was… I had an ad agency in Silicon Valley. I've been in tech for decades, and
• 23:26
  Kristin Zhivago: I would meet with the people that, you know, up front, the beginning meetings, and I would say, what do you think is important to your customers?
• 23:35
  Kristin Zhivago: And they'd give me a list.
• 23:36
  Kristin Zhivago: 5, 10 items, whatever.
• 23:39
  Kristin Zhivago: They were most proud of the thing that was the hardest for them to build.
• 23:44
  Kristin Zhivago: So then I would go and interview the customers, and the list was always different. Always. Which told me that they were wasting, I don't know, 90% of their budget.
• 23:54
  Kristin Zhivago: On promises that nobody cared about.
• 23:57
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Hmm.
• 23:58
  Kristin Zhivago: This is really sad, and I think this is going on all over the world, because people are…
• 24:03
  Kristin Zhivago: too, reluctant to interview their customers. They're worried they're gonna find something that they can't fix. I have never had that be a problem.
• 24:14
  Kristin Zhivago: I've usually found that the message is off, but the product is okay, or the service is okay.
• 24:20
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And I bet that that's happened more frequently than not, that the business owner thinks that this is why they bought from them, when in fact it was something completely different, as you just shared.
• 24:32
  Kristin Zhivago: Yeah, and the thing they've worked so hard to develop, you know, you'd say, well, what about this part? Because, you know, you'd ask the customer, you'd say, well, okay, I hear all of your answers, but what about this part? And…
• 24:46
  Kristin Zhivago: My best case study was when, basically, the, the, the… Customers all said, well, Everybody does that.
• 24:55
  Kristin Zhivago: Now, the programmers were super excited about how elegantly they did it, but it was completely lost on the customer because they just assumed it was like a baseline industry promise. Everybody's doing that, doesn't make any difference to me. It was some other aspect.
• 25:11
  Kristin Zhivago: that the CEO of the company didn't even realize was important to them.
• 25:17
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Wow.
• 25:17
  Kristin Zhivago: And we made… we ended up renaming the company, and he later sold it to Microsoft for a lot of money.
• 25:23
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Wow.
• 25:24
  Kristin Zhivago: very successful. Once we got that, that message right.
• 25:28
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Dialed in. I love it. So, question for you. When you're interviewing these people, right?
• 25:35
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I was gonna ask, and you kind of answered it,
• 25:39
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: But I'd love it in more of a concise, clear manner. You wouldn't interview these people, like, as an onboarding kind of question. Hey, you've just bought our product, tell us why you bought it. You kind of wait a little while, right?
• 25:54
  Kristin Zhivago: Yeah.
• 25:55
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: What's a good time? But do they need a frame to wait?
• 25:57
  Kristin Zhivago: It depends completely on the product or service. Now, I've identified… years ago, I figured out the buying journey
• 26:06
  Kristin Zhivago: Was different based on the amount of scrutiny that the customer applied to the purchase.
• 26:13
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Mmm.
• 26:13
  Kristin Zhivago: So, there are 4 types of products and services in the world based on that, based on the amount of scrutiny that they applied. There's light scrutiny, which is checkout counter, impulse purchase, doesn't cost much, nobody else is involved, no contracts.
• 26:30
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: No heavy decision-making.
• 26:31
  Kristin Zhivago: No heavy decision, you just see it, buy it, and that's it. Okay, the way you market that is going to be completely different, or I should say the way they buy it is completely different than they would buy a heavier scrutiny. So the next category is medium scrutiny, and in the consumer world, that's like clothing.
• 26:50
  Kristin Zhivago: You know, things that are $10 to $100.
• 26:54
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Make me look fat. Yeah.
• 26:56
  Kristin Zhivago: Exactly, exactly, the big question. And there is someone involved, but sort of on the side, like, may… is my boyfriend gonna like this kind of thing.
• 27:06
  Kristin Zhivago: Then, there's heavy scrutiny, which is there's a salesperson, there's a contract, and these are the bigger purchases, and again, in the B2C world, business to consumer, that's like cars and houses and things like it's pretty complex, documents, all that stuff.
• 27:22
  Kristin Zhivago: Intense scrutiny is the highest category, and that's all like the heavy. It's the same as the heavy scrutiny, but you get married. It's a long relationship.
• 27:32
  Kristin Zhivago: you're building an airplane, you know, it's Boeing building airplanes, or, you're hiring someone for service. Actually, I'm in an intense scrutiny area. I'm a revenue
• 27:43
  Kristin Zhivago: coach, I'm a… I'm calling myself a revenue growth architect these days, but it's all basically the same thing. I help people grow companies, and that's a very intense…
• 27:54
  Kristin Zhivago: collaborative relationship.
• 27:57
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And it often takes a while to get the momentum going, you know? It's a few months to get the wheels generating, and then it's the optimization and tweak along, so your relationship would be at least a year, if not many years, right?
• 28:10
  Kristin Zhivago: Yeah, we just keep improving it. Yeah, it is.
• 28:14
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Yeah, awesome. Well, I love the breakdown on that, because there is… you have to understand where your product fits in that scrutiny.
• 28:22
  Kristin Zhivago: level, right? Everybody I say that to, they know right away where they fit.
• 28:26
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Exactly! It's perfect mindset for, like, okay, now, how do I address when I'm marketing if you come from at that… at the scrutiny level? Brilliant, brilliant.
• 28:38
  Kristin Zhivago: You do things like… you wouldn't do a newsletter for chewing gum, okay?
• 28:43
  Kristin Zhivago: But people do this, or you wouldn't treat heavy or intense
• 28:48
  Kristin Zhivago: buying process as if it were a light scrutiny process. Like, you know, big, big balloons and banners and firecrackers and everything, and… or fireworks in your marketing. It's not… it's not a simple
• 29:03
  Kristin Zhivago: thing. It's a very complex, serious kind of purchase. And in the book, I say, alright, here are the three steps.
• 29:11
  Kristin Zhivago: that the light scrutiny thing goes through. These are the 7 steps for medium, and then these are, like, the 20 steps for heavy, and maybe 30 or 40 steps, and there's plenty of people, other people, involved in that decision, that big decision. So you can't market them the same. You have to know.
• 29:31
  Kristin Zhivago: Well, I mean.
• 29:32
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: along with the sales cycle, too. If it's… if you're putting, you know, RFPs together, and you're putting bids, and you gotta go in through this person, and you gotta showcase that one, and you get, you know, that's a heavier buying purchase decision, right? Because they're spending… could be spending millions of dollars, or having that long-term relationship with you, that they want to make sure it's the right one. You know, that typical story of, hey, you don't meet someone in the bar and say, let's get married.
• 29:57
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Right?
• 29:57
  Kristin Zhivago: Right. I mean, they often tell you very much.
• 30:01
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Yeah, you want the long dating cycle, you want to get to know them, you want to make sure you're doing your due diligence and all those great kind of things. That's right. But yeah, that makes total sense when you're looking at the price point.
• 30:14
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: For me, I have a longer price point, or a more intensive piece, but then I also have a super low entry piece, and as I'm launching that one right now, I'm thinking to myself.
• 30:24
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: well, yeah, that would be, you know, the little piece over here, and it's a quicker buying decision with a little bit of scrutiny on it, so it's, like, between A and B, you know? And so… but, of course, when you brought it to my attention…
• 30:37
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I can now see it in a different viewpoint, where before, you know, I may not have seen it in that level, and I think that's the challenge that most business owners have.
• 30:49
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Because they can't see the forest through the trees, they're looking at their.
• 30:52
  Kristin Zhivago: Well, they're thinking.
• 30:54
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: their idea.
• 30:54
  Kristin Zhivago: No, no, they're thinking like a seller.
• 30:58
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I'm talking to the buyer.
• 30:59
  Kristin Zhivago: The buyer. Yeah.
• 31:01
  Kristin Zhivago: So your job is to make it easier for your customers to buy from you. The subhead of my book, the book is Roadmap to Revenue, but the subhead is how…
• 31:10
  Kristin Zhivago: to make it easy for your customers to buy. That's fantastic. So what we try to do… That's a fantastic book idea. Yeah, and what we try to do is,
• 31:21
  Kristin Zhivago: With our clients, as you mentioned, we are now… we've now set up this sales stopper service, where we figure out where the friction is for the customer.
• 31:33
  Kristin Zhivago: And then work with the company to eliminate those, and just smooth out the whole buying process, so it's easy for a person to go right through.
• 31:42
  Kristin Zhivago: And…
• 31:43
  Kristin Zhivago: that's how you make more sales, and it could be anything. It could be a rude customer service person, or it could be… it's usually processes, I will say that.
• 31:54
  Kristin Zhivago: Yeah. And I did marketing and sales turnarounds for companies of all sizes. I did that for decades.
• 32:00
  Kristin Zhivago: Normally, the people were okay, the product was sellable and decently made, the policies of the company?
• 32:11
  Kristin Zhivago: We're only good if the… if the CEO was not a jerk. You have to be a nice person to make good policies.
• 32:19
  Kristin Zhivago: And I don't work with jerks, that's one of my big rules.
• 32:23
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: One of your value propositions, right? Yeah.
• 32:25
  Kristin Zhivago: And, processes?
• 32:29
  Kristin Zhivago: was part of it, and processes is where it always falls down. The reason Jeff Bezos is a million… billionaire is because he started
• 32:40
  Kristin Zhivago: with a process. He built a company on an infrastructure. He didn't care what the product was. He built.
• 32:47
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Yeah, it was textbooks originally. Yeah.
• 32:49
  Kristin Zhivago: Oh, books, period, yeah.
• 32:52
  Kristin Zhivago: And so he… he… the whole thing has been how to make it easier for people to buy, and nobody's even come close to the number of ways that he does that on Amazon.
• 33:02
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And he has set a standard for today's buyers, right?
• 33:06
  Kristin Zhivago: Yeah, yeah.
• 33:07
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Because we're in an economy now where we want it delivered on our doorstep in 2-3 hours, right? Yeah. So now, if you're talking about your operations or your systems that you have in your business.
• 33:19
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: that match the buyer's ideal situation, you almost have to think about how you're delivering your product and service in the age of Amazon delivery.
• 33:29
  Kristin Zhivago: Yeah, absolutely. Walmart's trying to catch up, doing a pretty good job, I think.
• 33:34
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Well, if you've got deep pockets like both of those companies, you can get going like that. But all of us little folks don't have that, or probably don't have that. But, I mean, we need to think this way.
• 33:46
  Kristin Zhivago: You can still figure it out. Exactly. I've helped entrepreneurs with very, you know, like the Etsy type of seller, but they all have to understand that they start by finding out what the customer really wants.
• 34:02
  Kristin Zhivago: And do they mean yesterday? They mean you will build infrastructure.
• 34:05
  Kristin Zhivago: Yeah, yeah
• 34:06
  Kristin Zhivago: Yeah. You know, what's the expectations that you're setting, and is that acceptable from the buyer's point of view when you're delivering the product or service to them? Exactly.
• 34:17
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Which is amazing.
• 34:18
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: You know, Kristen, this is a wealth of information, and it really is,
• 34:23
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Like, I normally don't have mindset people on my show, because I'm more action, tactics, strategy, let's put it to work and go do it. But this is so important to think about.
• 34:37
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: How we're doing this, how we're… how we're delivering to our customers and getting buyers by taking this different viewpoint of talking to them.
• 34:48
  Kristin Zhivago: Well, listening to them, yes.
• 34:51
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Listening to them, exactly, and asking the questions of why they bought, right? And I truly believe the real surprise factor is it's not what you think.
• 35:01
  Kristin Zhivago: Right, exactly. And you gotta be open to that, too. I mean, you have to take action on it.
• 35:06
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I love it, I love it. Yeah, so this was really, really enjoyable for me, and I know the audience is getting lots of juicy nuggets out of it. But we… and we can talk forever, but we do have to wrap this. So, Kristen, where can listeners find out more about you and Zivago Partners?
• 35:23
  Kristin Zhivago: So, our site is jivagopartners.com.
• 35:26
  Kristin Zhivago: You can Google me. I'm… I'm all over the place there, because, you know, pages and pages, because I've been out there
• 35:35
  Kristin Zhivago: In the, couple years.
• 35:36
  Kristin Zhivago: It's just a couple years. For a long time, been writing and teaching people how to think like a buyer instead of a seller. I've also written a guide to mindset-driven marketing in the age of AI, which is kind of hidden away, but it's shivagopartners.com.
• 35:56
  Kristin Zhivago: slash… Mindset Guide. So, Zivagopartners.com slash mindset guide.
• 36:04
  Kristin Zhivago: And also, that's a free download, spells this all out. Also, I've… my book is on Amazon.
• 36:11
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Amazon.
• 36:12
  Kristin Zhivago: In a number of different formats.
• 36:15
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Well, repeat the name of your book again, because I thought that was really fantastic.
• 36:18
  Kristin Zhivago: How… it's Roadmap to Revenue, How to Sell the way your customers want to buy.
• 36:23
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Wow. Which is truly in the mind of today's buyers and their, you know.
• 36:31
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I coin it Amazon, you know, buying habits, right?
• 36:35
  Kristin Zhivago: Yeah.
• 36:35
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: We have to change it. We have to make it so simple and easy for what they're used to in their normal day in life for us… for them to be able to buy from us, whether it's…
• 36:46
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Maybe it's simpler credit card processing, or, you know, invoice delivery, or, you know, there's a thousand different ways that we can take lessons from Amazon, and other companies to… and our buyers, right? And the way that they like to buy, and to make it easy for them to do that, so this is…
• 37:05
  Kristin Zhivago: Very good.
• 37:06
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: really, really helpful and valuable. So, thank you.
• 37:10
  Kristin Zhivago: Good, you're welcome, it's a pleasure.
• 37:13
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Yeah, alright, listeners, thanks for tuning in today. I hope you picked up some valuable insights and actionable ideas that can help you make your business more profitable, and I know looking at the way you sell from the buyer's side and the way they buy is going to be a game changer
• 37:30
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: This year going forward, and as we're just getting the year started in 2026, this is a perfect time for you to potentially revisit that.
• 37:39
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And I like to, you know, have my clients take a little planning time each month, or even each week, to think about ways they can improve their business and processes. Maybe this week's time for you is how the buyers are buying from you, and take some of Kristen's ideas.
• 37:58
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And reach out to her for that. I know that will help you.
• 38:02
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Alright, before you go, if you remember, and you're ready to bring in more of the right clients and keep more of the money earned, go grab my free Profit Booster Growth Map.
• 38:12
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: That's, that's my AI and GPT that is, enabling you very easily to answer a couple of questions that you should probably already know, and put those into there, and that GPT will give you the next 3 moves to grow your revenue and stop profit…
• 38:29
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: You can get it anytime, super easy, just go to ProfitBooster.biz and forward slash growthmap and get that free Growth Map.
• 38:38
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And don't forget to subscribe, you don't want to miss future shows. You can always find Profit with a Plan on any of your favorite podcast players. We're looking forward to my more profitable information and strategies on next week's show. And by the way, we're 7 years old these days, so yeah, there's lots of goodies in there.
• 38:57
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: So until then, make your plans and profit with them. Thanks so very much, Kristen, I appreciate this.
• 39:03
  Kristin Zhivago: Thank you.