Having started her working life as a shop assistant at John Lewis Mary Portas discovered a talent for transforming big-name brands like Harvey Nichols. With true entrepreneurial spirit she later went on to write about retail therapy and in 2007 launched her TV career with the popular Mary Queen of Shops. You can find out more on her great website here.

In ‘Secret Shopper’ Portas starts by tackling fashion stores and company Pilot. The programmes contain a lot of nuggets of wisdom for wanna-be retailers or as Mary calls it ‘Fast Fashion’, I’ve listed some below:

Episode one: Fashion

• Keep your store tidy.
• When helping customers with enquiries, show people where products are, don’t just tell them.
• Train your sale staff properly to be polite and helpful. Make sure they know the status of stock.
• The culture of a business comes from the top.
• Put customers not profits first.
• Make sure the fitting room’s are staffed.
• Mary’s three golden rules of retails- A smile/A ‘hello’ and service.
• Keep fittings and fixtures clean and in good condition and build changing rooms big enough to dress in.
• Don’t let customers wait more than 3 minutes to pay, reduce queues.

Episode two: Sofa superstores

• Don’t use ‘hard-sell’ tactics, be senstive.
• Avoid misleading customers by lying about dates that sales end, and don’t make empty price promises.
• Sales people shouldn’t use a script, robots can’t sell and becomes problematic when they have to discuss something unusual.
• Don’t put sales on if they’re not genuine sales.
• Treat customers as individuals.
• Help customers find the best product for them don’t just push them into inappropriate buys to make sales.
• Ask the right questions to understand your customers lifestyles.
• Answer enquiries on the web.
• Invest money in customer service.

Episode three: Phone shops

• Don’t use confusing jargon.
• Listen don’t just tell people what they want to hear.
• Don’t baffle people with statistics.
• Show working examples of products.
• Consider new shop layouts to make people engage more with the product.
• Embrace change.

Episode four: Estate Agents

Wednesday February 9th, Channel 4, 9pm

Internet and mail order firm Toys Direct has left its base in Stokesley for a new 46,000 sq ft warehouse on Thornaby’s Teesside Industrial Estate.

The family run firm is owned by the Parrish family, original owners of the Romer Parrish toy store on Middlesbrough’s Linthorpe Road.

They ship toys and playtime favourites all over the world from their Teesside base – and business is growing.

“We were operating out of four units at Stokesley and needed somewhere bigger,” said assistant manager James Parrish.

“This warehouse has 46,000 sq ft and is a lot bigger and better. “We’ve also taken on two extra staff members to help with packing orders and labelling.”

Biggest sellers, he says, are children’s favourites including Playmobil and Thomas the Tank Engine and orders go out to families in the UK, Europe and worldwide daily.

“A lot of business goes to the UK but we ship all over Europe and all over the world,” added James.

Toys Direct started in 1995 when James’ parents Brian and Linda launched the mail order business from their Nunthorpe home. It launched on the internet three years later and they moved stock to a 5,000 sq ft warehouse in Stokesley in 2003 as the business grew.

The Parrish family has been in the toy business for 40 years.

A niche tender and lead notification service has just launched in the UK. TelcoTenders.co.uk provides daily leads via email of any telecommunication tender or lead for an annual fee of £129.99 (£99.99 special offer for Sept 08).

Its finally good to see a niche tender notification service focusing on a particular sector. The UK market is flooded with tender notification services and some can charge up-to £800 per year!

If you are a telecoms company offering any type of telecommunications services, then the £99.99 is worth it!

Visit TelcoTenders.co.uk for more information

Key Facilities Management chairman and CEO Stan Mitchell has found setting up an outpost in Egypt similar to launching his company in the UK 18 years ago.
Key was one of the first facilities management businesses in the UK market.

Mitchell has linked up with local partners to spearhead the Egyptian venture. He explains: “The culture is completely different, the economy is completely different and there is very little understanding of what we do in facilities management. On the positive side, there is a hunger to learn and there are a lot of very good people willing to do so.

“There is a market there to develop. Many corporate and international organisations are coming into Egypt and they’re looking for something that doesn’t exist until now.”

Key currently has over 50 employees and revenue of more than £5m. Mitchell formed the company with his wife in 1990. “I worked for an American corporate beforehand and got introduced to facilities management as a recognised discipline. For me, facilities management just makes sense. It professionalises all the support activities for the core business which after all represents the highest overhead for almost every organisation,” he says.

“The American corporate I worked for closed down so I decided I was going to have a go and started up my own business which at the time was a very new discipline in a nonexistent marketplace.” The company is currently restructuring in order to take its approach and experience to other parts of the world beyond Egypt and anticipates launching in two more countries by the end of 2008.

The facilities management sector in the UK is worth an estimated £90bn. Mitchell adds: “There now exists the British Institute of Facilities Management, which is the biggest national organisation of its type in the world; there are eight universities where you can get a degree in facilities management; there is a facilities management committee within the British Standards Institute; and more recently there is now a Standard Industrial Classification Code, which means that the government is now able to recognise that it exists!”

Yes, infomercials can be cheesy, seemingly the lowest common denominator of salesmanship. But they are also a bona fide American art form. When you study the masters, there’s much you can learn. And as Web videos increasingly figure in marketing plans, more CEOs will seek to channel their inner Ron Popeils. To help them, I recently went best-practice hunting at a business that mints video sales stars: HSN.

HSN (formerly Home Shopping Network), a pioneer of TV retail, has come a long way from the days of disembodied voices extolling cubic zirconia. The $3 billion, 4,000-employee company now aims to entertain and educate rather than simply “take customers to the till” — Andy Sheldon’s description of the network’s former hard-sell approach. Sheldon, HSN’s senior vice president of television, says part of the network’s appeal derives from the personal styles of its guest presenters, many of them entrepreneurs representing their own brands and businesses. “They are passionate, they are experts, and they connect with the audience,” he says. “They believe in their products, so they create trust.”

I asked HSN to send me DVDs of programs featuring some of their top-selling entrepreneur-presenters. I also enlisted two experts — Anita Elberse and Michael Norton, both marketing professors at Harvard Business School. We met in an HBS conference room on a damp April afternoon to view the discs provided by HSN. Our mandate was to identify what made the presenters effective — we were not passing judgment on the products. Neither Elberse nor I had previously watched Home Shopping Network, so I sat through two marathon viewing sessions earlier that week. (I drank espresso during one session and wine during the other — a fascinating experiment I plan to duplicate on video and post to YouTube.)

Of the four presenters we watched, we were most impressed with Joy Mangano, founder of the company Ingenious Designs and inventor of the Miracle Mop and Huggable Hangers. (She sold her Edgewood, New York, business to HSN itself in 1999.) Mangano can be overwhelming — watch her with wine, not espresso — but “she has an intuition about what is important to consumers,” says Norton. The other presenters were Wolfgang Puck, hawking his eponymous cookware; Jennifer Flavin-Stallone, co-founder of Serious Skin Care; and Andrew Lessman, whose Henderson, Nevada, company, ProCaps Laboratories, manufactures and sells vitamins and dietary supplements.

Here is a look at the marketing concepts that underlie their powers of persuasion:

But wait, there’s more: Mangano reveals product features gradually, performing a home-ec version of the dance of the seven veils. Her hangers are unbreakable! They are ultrathin, so they take up less closet space! They keep a lock grip, so clothes don’t fall off! As these lessons unfold, viewers have time to absorb one before being presented with the next — the argument is like a wave, growing inexorably in power. “She makes a clear link between the feature and the benefit, and she piles them up,” says Elberse. “So if you are not convinced by the first benefit, then you are convinced by the second or by the third. At some point you think, Wow, this is really an unbeatable combination of things, and you go for the phone.”

Be glamorous — but accessible: Puck is a celebrity chef. Flavin-Stallone is a former model, current wife of Rocky. But in selling mode, they feel as if they could be your friends or maybe even…you. Puck never tries to dazzle: He tells stories about his children and keeps the chefly flouncing to a minimum. Flavin-Stallone, who could give a hypnotist lessons in eye contact, blunts the glam with a dress-down sweater and exudes an all-girlfriends-together coziness. Her set looks like a makeup counter in the least-intimidating boutique on earth, and she mixes flesh-tone advice with confessions of her own struggles with acne. “She’s like the popular senior in high school when you were a freshman,” says Norton. “These people are aspirational, but they don’t seem too far beyond customers’ reach. The product becomes a bridge to bring the customer toward them.”

You can’t sell solutions unless people realize they have problems: With her dramatic before-and-after visuals, Mangano is convincing that packed closets, clothes-strewn floors, and peaky sweater shoulders are major quality-of-life issues. “She seems to have spent weeks watching people hang things in their closets,” says Elberse. “You feel she understands everything that can go wrong.” As Mangano demonstrates the transformation from unseemly jumble to rainbow-hued regimentation, the promise becomes a metaphor for something grander. “The real problem she is addressing isn’t hanging clothes,” Elberse says. “It’s getting rid of the mess in your life. The solution to all that is bothering you.”

Reassurance sells: Selling vitamins and dietary supplements is a tricky business. The government regulates health claims, and scary stories about ephedrine and Chinese imports have rendered the public twitchy. Against that backdrop, Lessman’s company, ProCaps, claims to be the purity provider, ensuring safety by manufacturing all its own products. The segment we watched was filmed in the ProCaps plant, which could double for the spaceship in the movie 2001. The effect was reassuring: Viewers saw a real company, complete with solar-paneled roof that demonstrates concern for planetary as well as customer well-being. “The unique selling point is that this is safe,” says Elberse. “We have this fully under control: There is nothing you don’t want in there. He is taking away the negative.”

Expertise sells, too: Puck, of course, has the advantage of legitimate celebrity. And by recounting stories of being accosted by fans in the airport, he doesn’t let you forget it. Nor does he let you forget how he attained that celebrity. Puck is all about the food, preparing Gourmet-gorgeous dishes with consummate ease while maintaining a low-key shill for his cookware sets. He is also an educator — generous with cooking tips and recipes — and a bit of a poet (long strings of caramelized sugar are “angel hair”). That combination of reputation and demonstration carries huge credibility. Who would know better about the merits of stainless steel? My Harvard friends, neither of whom cooks, expressed doubts that “ordinary people” chop fresh herbs. Well, I do cook. And Puck had me when he deglazed a steak pan with wine and the caramelized bits came right off the bottom without any scraping.

Chew up the scenery: Mangano can barely keep still. Her face is expressive, her hands are expressive, her hair is expressive. She talks over her co-host; she seems almost to talk over herself. The cognitive dissonance between her mundane products and the evangelical fervor with which she describes them dissipates as you watch. Passion is passion. Mangano’s is contagious. “The founders of companies often are terrible at selling, because they believe their product is better at a gut level,” says Norton. “They don’t understand they need to communicate that, to get the customer to see what they see. This woman understands.”

September has been a momentous month for Carphone Warehouse. It today joins the hallowed ranks of the FTSE 100 – the top echelon of British business – and by way of celebration co-founder Charles Dunstone spent yesterday in the company of Apple boss Steve Jobs, as his high street chain was named as the sole independent outlet that will stock this year’s must-have gadget, the iPhone, on behalf of O2.

No sooner had the ranks of technology journalists left the launch event at Apple’s leading London store than Carphone Warehouse’s American joint venture partner, Best Buy, gave Dunstone a resounding vote of confidence. The group has spent $183m (£92m) to acquire a near 3% stake in his firm.

From its 1989 beginnings in a faceless mansion block off London’s Marylebone Road with £6,000 of Dunstone’s savings, Carphone Warehouse has become Europe’s largest independent retailer of mobile phones and the UK’s third largest provider of broadband internet access, with more than 2.4 million customers.

For the 42-year-old Dunstone it has been a meteroric rise. Leaving his public school – Uppingham in Rutland – with a clutch of poor A-level grades, he spent his gap year working in a computer firm in Cambridge. He always seems to have had entrepreneurial flair. At school he sold cigarette lighters and pens to the other students, employing fellow student Johnny Vaughan. Having got a taste for commerce in Cambridge, he declined his place on a business degree course and ended up at NEC who moved him from selling computers to mobile phones. Initially irritated by the decision he quickly realised how popular they were becoming and the idea of Carphone Warehouse was born. He drafted in fellow Uppingham alumnus David “Rosso” Ross – who remains non-executive deputy chairman – and set up shop in London. In the early days he was advised by Ernest Saunders after bumping into the daughter of the disgraced former Guinness boss on a skiing holiday.

It took four years to grow Carphone from the first store to 20. Now the company opens one every working day across 11 markets including the US and sells more than 13 million phones a year. Revenues in that first year were £1.2m – mainly because the price of the early brick-like mobile phones was upwards of £800. Last year Carphone Warehouse made nearly £4bn.

“I know everyone likes to have humble stories but genuinely we had no possible idea it would get this big,” admits the genial Dunstone. “I can remember nail-biting moments when we were thinking how are we going to make the payroll next week – but we always found a way.”

It has not – to use a term from one of workaholic Dunstone’s few hobbies, yachting – been plain sailing. And now, as the company looks forward to the appearance of the major pension funds and top-notch investors on its share register that come with a place at the City’s highest table, there may be storm clouds on the horizon.

Needing to cut costs as their core European markets become saturated – with everyone already owning a phone – the mobile phone operators are increasingly looking to deal directly with customers. Carphone Warehouse’s first ever customer – Vodafone – has already taken its contract business to rival Phones4U. O2 has stayed fiercely loyal to Dunstone.

That relationship undoubtedly gave him an edge in the fight to stock the iPhone, a gadget he believes will shake-up the mobile market when it goes on sale on November 9.

“It’s an amazing product and Apple uniquely have a way of being able to change markets for ever,” he said. “For us and O2 not only is it an amazing business opportunity but fantastic for our brands to play a part in it.”

Meanwhile competition in the broadband and home telephony market, which Carphone Warehouse did so much to shake-up with the launch of the TalkTalk brand in February 2003, and its “free” broadband offer three years later, is becoming ever fiercer. While there has been consolidation – not least with Carphone Warehouse buying out One.Tel, Tele2 and AOL to give itself scale – new entrants have emerged. In the past year Vodafone has joined Orange in offering residential broadband to its customers while O2 will follow suit next month. Sky, from a standing start a year ago, has already snatched well over 700,000 broadband users.

After Carphone’s rocky start in broadband, when its call centre and website were overwhelmed by demand, and the bad publicity, the key is what happens next month when those first TalkTalk “free” broadband customers are released from their 18-month contracts.

As for the stores, Dunstone wants them to become a one-stop shop for the multimedia home of the future. He has even imported the Geek Squad from America, a band of socially adept techies who will visit a customer’s home to get them rolling on the digital superhighway. The move begs the question how impartial can the advice be from a company that also supplies broadband.

O2 boss Peter Erskine admits that while the outward appearance of Dunstone and his team is affable, they obviously drive a hard bargain. “You don’t get to be as successful as they are by being a soft touch,” he said. “And once they agree something, by God do they deliver.”

Carphone Warehouse has also been able to adapt to changes in one of the fastest moving markets in the world, sometimes leaving the City to play catch up. When Carphone listed back in July 2000, traders balked at the £1.6bn valuation on what they thought was a pure retail play and when the shares floated at 200p they sank over the following months. In fact Carphone commanded a higher valuation because of the substantial recurring revenue stream it generates by being paid a slice of ongoing revenues by operators on to whose networks it places contract customers.

Slowdown

Sensing a slowdown in the mobile market in early 2002, the business started looking for new sources of recurring revenues and brought former Orange boss Hans Snook on board as chairman for help and advice. The following February TalkTalk was born and the market has never been the same since.

And these are markets that Dunstone still clearly loves with almost boyish enthusiasm. “The mobile phone marketplace, even though it is maturing, keeps changing – we have the iPhone coming for instance. We are now right in the centre of a new, fast growing pioneering marketplace and truth be told no one really knows where it is going to go and where it will end up. That’s fun.”

But he remains characteristically understated about the fact that success in this market has elevated Carphone Warehouse into the FTSE 100. “It sneaked up on me actually so I have not got any great plans to celebrate but I’ll have a glass of wine. Until it happened I had not realised the significance of it.”

There are many tender notification services out in the United Kingdom for small to large projects. One company B2B Quote Ltd have made it easy for you to find potential work.

Suppliers sign up for a yearly fee of just £99.00 and then companies looking for services or who have projects can submit them FREE to the site which is then sent out to all the registered suppliers in that particular sector.

Let the work come to you, the site already has around 14,000 registered suppliers and is used regularly by a number of companies looking for suppliers for their projects.

B2B is also holding a number of tender training workshops with the next course in November.

Visit B2B here.

Looking to increase sales? Encourage “brand sirens” to sing your product’s praises online in blogs, on social networking sites, your own Web site’s comment section and other Internet locations.

Favorable word-of-mouth advertising is a proven sales booster, of course, and the Web can spread the word to millions of potential customers.

OK, so what are brand sirens, and how do you get them to endorse your company’s offerings online?

They’re satisfied customers who love your firm’s products or services. Some will wax enthusiastic on the Internet and elsewhere without any prodding, happy to share their good fortune with buddies as well as strangers.

Others may write you to express their happiness and would be happy to go public if you ask them to.

Social networks are a good marketing tool.

Among popular social networking sites that can go a long way to stir up major product buzz are MySpace, Facebook, LiveJournaland Buzznet.

Besides piggybacking onto an existing network, building your own network is also an option that more businesses are considering.

Businesses and brands should be using social netwoking as another way to get to their taregt market.

After meeting up with a friend this weekend the conversation turned to business, my friend runs a facilities management company and although he has been going only 2 years has 4 blue chip clients he looks after.

His business has just gone through quite a tough expansion phase over the past 6 months and to keep up with the workload and maintain some form of quality he has been taking on more and more staff.

This then left him with the task of either promoting existing people or bring in new management. I remember offering him some on advice on this some months back and we agreed the best way would be to promote people within the business that have been doing well.

My friend being a self confessed crap manager gave this task to somebody else. The problem he has now is the wrong people managing and who think they have more power than Super Man! The result? The good people could not work under this poor manager and have left leaving my friend in a right mess!!!

It goes to show the true meaning of power and promotion!!!! Its like this old story i have heard at many business talks on people management and power:

A young business man was finally promoted, with this promotion came a private office all to himself, finally he had got himself out of the open place office from the rest of the workers, where eagle eyes watched 9 to 5.

On his first day he sat proudly in his chair in his office. Feeling proud and full of power he sat there not doing much work until there was a knock on his door. Eager to impress and present his ‘power’ to the world he shouted “come in” and then quickly picked up his phone and began speaking:

“Yes i appreciate how big this problem is, i totally understand the seriousness of this issue but please don’t worry, i am the right man that can sort all of this out, please don’t worry, leave it with me …”

He then slammed the phone down and said to the man standing at the door “and what can i do for you?”

The man at the door replied

“Nothing, i have just come to connect your phone up …..”

This post is about a good friend of mine, Steve Wells. Steve is an amazing guy and a true entrepreneur. After having three failed businesses (that’s nothing, ive got 5 under my belt!) he jumped right back to it and has finally made it.

Steve had a recruitment firm that didn’t do well at all, in such a competitive market he ended up losing £37k, £37k which he didn’t have. He was at an auction one day auctioning his car for cash (he has 2 kids to support!) when he found himself bidding on some cleaning equipment. The deposit came from the sale of his car and the rest he found from family, begging and borrowing.

He started straight away cleaning local offices and pubs, he then took on staff training each and everyone to his standard. After 2 years he had built up quite a customer base and then tragedy stuck when his main client sold up and the business was relocated. That’s when i suggested Steve take advantage of the Public Sector opportunities.

I worked with Steve over 9 months, Steve invested in turning his company into a Ltd and also obtained his ISO 9001 Quality accreditation. Steve also did a lot of research on his competitors and then changed his business to better theirs. One thing Steve did was to go completely Environmentally friendly with all of his products, cutting his impact on the environment significantly.

It took Steve 4 attempts at tendering for local authority contracts until he landed a £870,000 contract. Steve then took a sales capacity within the business and has now 8 Public Sector contracts under his belt with his 3 year old company turning over an impressive £5.3 million pound.

Steve’s company has come in the most expensive in the contracts he has won but the quality and environmentally friendly angle has given him the advantage. Steve is not only debt free, but also mortgage free and with another kid on the way!

It pays to go Public Sector!!!!