Blog Posts

When the holiday season rolls around, most of us have the 'Busy Dial' turned up to 10, or even 20 on some days.

For those of us who sell specialty products, customer education has always been part of the selling process.  Sometimes we’re offering products that most customers have never heard of. Other times we have items with familiar names but vastly superior ingredients or construction. Almost always the prices that we charge are higher than what is being charged somewhere else in our market for something that can SEEM to be the same thing. Our success depends upon customers understanding the differences between our products and the competition’s.

Do you like handling customer complaints? Why or why not?

We are big believers in visioning at Zingerman’s. We’ve seen firsthand how it can improve our organization and the personal lives of those who use the vision process.

When business owners run into challenges that they’re not sure how to address—or know they can’t resolve on their own—they often start looking outside their organizations for expertise and resources.  Two common places to look are consultants and trainers.

"You can say ‘no’ to customers!”  feels like an outrageous thing to advocate, especially when your organization is known for delivering great customer service...

Training is a big investment–a worthwhile one (!) but can be accompanied by a price tag that makes some folks nervous.

As far as ways to approach your business' finances, Open Book Management has a lot going for it - the numbers! The transparency! The shared sense of ownership! The accountability!

In addition to offering training on-site at our training facility and on the road at client businesses all over the country, did you know that we also have a line-up of leaders from around the Zingerman's Community of Businesses who present at events on a variety of different topics - be it the values we hold dear, the system we use to streamline our operations or our recipes for giving great customer service?

Zingerman’s didn’t invent the idea of Servant Leadership - we learned our approach from Robert Greenleaf and have adapted his thoughts, along with the thoughts of many other leaders we’ve admired, into our approach to Servant Leadership.  The basic idea of servant leadership is that, first and foremost, we are here to serve the organization. The higher we move up in the organization, the more people we are there to serve, not the more people who are there to serve us.