Hi Guys! I knew that I would be out this week and would not get to The Apprentice in time to write my review. Because of this I asked my good friend Andy Smith (who has been commenting on the series on my blog every week to write a review). Andy is an NLP, EI and AI expert so he has some interesting tips for us…
On that note, I can’t wait to get home… It seems I missed a decision from Sir Alan that without seeing it… Anyway…
Week 10 of the Sales Apprentice and we’re down to six candidates – three boys, three girls, and no place to hide. As usual the contestants are summoned to a damp Wandsworth Bus Garage (because “the red London bus is an icon of tourism”) and given the task of setting up and running a London tour company for the day, to get at the pockets of some of the 26 million tourists who visit London every year.
Stuart is moved over to join Stella and Liz in team Apollo as project manager, monitored by Karen, while Joanna joins Jamie and Chris as PM of team Synergy, shadowed by Nick.
So, Stella, Liz and Stuart on the same team! Stella and Stuart have crossed swords many times in the past, and after last week’s very uncomfortable post-boardroom moment, where Liz made it very clear how much she resented Stella having a go at her in the boardroom, should we expect fireworks there? Not a bit of it – the girls were back on friendly terms, while they were back to their usual relationship with Stuart – think “indulgent owners of a bouncy puppy who can’t stay angry with it no matter how many times it chews up the furniture or poos in the house”.
Sales training lesson: People sometimes snap at each other when they are under intense pressure. If that is a blip rather than a recurring pattern, professionals will not take it personally, move on, and not let it get in the way of the task.
Stella really wanted to do a Cockney tour of the East End. Liz and Stuart, obviously strangers to the delights of the jellied eel, aren’t so keen, but in the absence of any better ideas, go along with it. Stella would be the tour guide – giving Stuart the opportunity to make one of his trademark buck-passing comments to camera: “If we lose she’ll be responsible.” No Stuart, as Project Manager you’ll have at least some responsibility.
On the other team, Jamie elects to be the guide on a ‘Ghouls and Ghosts’ tour, which is fine with the other two.
There are essentially four parts to this week’s task: researching and planning the tour, negotiating with the London Visitor Centre so that your tour is the one they pick to sell, selling the tickets, and actually guiding the tour.
Joanna doesn’t have much faith in Jamie, so she accompanies him as he walks the route of his tour so that she could step in to the tour guide role if he doesn’t feel up to it. In addition to this vote of confidence, she chivvies and nags him every step of the way (or that’s what the show’s editing makes it look like anyway) to the point where he snaps and swearily tells her to back off. She says she feels threatened, although she doesn’t look it.
Sales training lesson: Don’t micromanage – it’s a waste of your time and it kills your staff’s motivation. You may want everything to go right, but you have to trust your team. Give them as much management as they need, but no more – if you pay attention to how they are reacting, you will be able to see the signs that they’ve had enough and head off any discontent long before it becomes a rebellion.
The other team make the somewhat bizarre decision to have the tour guide stay behind doing paper research while Liz and Stuart go round the route. As two of the posher contestants, the East End is not their natural stomping ground, and a bystander tells Liz off for patronizing a jellied eel stallholder as she asks him to cockernee it up with some rhyming slang when the tourists come round. Not walking the route will cause problems for Stella later when she doesn’t know how to find some of the East End’s meagre tourist attractions.
Stuart and Liz set the prices for their tour. “What’s your gut instinct, around £30-£35?” The guy in the London Visitor Centre is openly sceptical that anyone will buy it a tour at £35 (the going rate is more like £25), but they stick to their guns and offer the Visitor Centre a 25% commission.
Sales training lesson: Do some – any – market research before you set your prices! Stuart and Liz have set a premium price for a tour with no obvious premium features, and ignored feedback from someone who knows the market.
Negotiating the Visitor Centre for the other team, Chris adopts an ‘interesting’ strategy. He prices the tour at a reasonable £20, and offers only 20% commission – but on everything! All takings, whether the Centre or team Synergy actually sells the tickets. And 20% of the tips!
Project manager Joanna isn’t happy when she finds out, but did she set any negotiation guidelines with Chris before he went in?
On the day of the tours, the teams go out and sell.
As usual you can learn a lot of what not to do by observing Stuart. First he attempts to tout right outside the London Visitor Centre (until the scary manager lady warns him off), then with the whole of central London to choose from he goes head to head on the little bit of Trafalgar Square that is Chris’ pitch, then he tries to steal Joanna’s customers as she’s making a sale while making disparaging remarks. I’m not even going to dignify this one with a sales training tip…
Jamie’s final tour has no customers at all. It’s at three, while the other team’s last tour of the day is packed. Presumably because the later tour had more time to sell. The LVC doesn’t seem to be doing much. Could it be that because they are getting 20% of all sales, they are leaving it to the team to sell while concentrating on other tours that they get the standard 35% only on the tickets they sell?
In the boardroom: Apollo have made £834.30, while Synergy have made £1099.33! All of a sudden, giving the LVC 20% of everything turns out to be “innovative” in Lord Sugar’s words. Guess what he would have said about it if the team had lost?
Joanna, Jamie and Chris fly off to Jersey for an oyster and Michelin starred restaurant break, while Liz, Stuart and Stella mope in London’s gloomiest caff.
Back in the boardroom: get ready for one of the strangest boardroom decisions ever (and there’ve been plenty through the years). It looks like Stuart will go. What has he done really? What has he done throughout the show – his only demonstrated talent has been doing funny voices, his only demonstrated entrepreneurial quality has been bulletproof – no, nuclear-strike proof – self-belief. He upsets people, his sense of ethics is ‘different’, he’s bumptious…
On paper, Stuart also hasn’t performed. He’s sold £260 of tickets, while Liz sold nearly twice that at £505. It’s also not looking great for Stella as Lord Sugar describes her as “Steady Stella” – remember, he said at the start of the series “I’m not looking for Steady Eddies or Cautious Carols”. He also suggests that she had the easiest job as she didn’t have to sell.
Stuart and Liz, he says, were totally unprepared. He describes Stuart in very unflattering terms as “childish”. Surely he has to go? Stuart’s not going down without a fight, as he once again recounts how he has his own £3m business (he’s only twenty-one you know), and how he’s never had any financial boost from his parents – well they might have given him a tenner to buy a stock of yo-yo’s to flog at school. Lord Sugar is sounding very skeptical – has he done some research into Stuart’s real story and caught him out? No – the moment passes, and Stuart goes on to describe how much money he will make for the boss, and how he’s not a one-trick pony, he’s got a whole field of ponies. My favourite Apprentice tweet from last night really isn’t exaggerating that much:
@heatworld: “Stuart: ‘Lord Sugar: I’ll make you a unicorn made out of rainbows, together we shall run through meadows of joy forever’ #Apprentice”
(if you’re not familiar with ‘hashtags’ on Twitter BTW, searching Twitter on ‘#Apprentice’ will bring up most of the tweets about the show, and adding it to your tweets will make them visible in the wider Apprentice conversation)
Surely Lord Sugar will see through this nonsense. But no – he’s fallen for it! He gives Stuart another chance, and – amazingly – it’s Liz he fires, saying that she lacks a ‘spark of genius’. In the end, Liz just couldn’t come up with anything to challenge Stuart’s narrative. Even though it was all about the what he could do in the future rather than any results he’d achieved (although someone who has build a £3m turnover company at age 21 must have something about them), it was Stuart’s story that Lord Sugar bought into – possibly reminded of his younger self, though I suspect their starting circumstances were rather different.
What Liz could have said: Easy to be wise after the event I know, but Liz actually could have told a lot more convincing story: “No spark of genius? Well, if you want to set aside the record for the highest ever sale on The Apprentice (about £99Ks worth of heat-sensitive babygrows, if you remember). And my track record is based on solid achievements, week after week, rather than pie in the sky. And I get on with people rather than upsetting them….”
Sales training tip: This is actually more of a career tip. Everything you do is evaluated by bosses, customers and colleagues in the light of a ‘story’ about you that people stitch together in their own minds from what you’ve done previously. This story is not the objective truth – some facts will be emphasised, some ignored, to fit with what they think they know about you already. So what ‘narrative’ are you weaving about yourself? How are you seen by others, and what can you do to tell a better ‘story’ about yourself which will help them to judge your track record in a more favourable way?
Who’s going to win? It’s all up in the air now as Liz was previously looking like something of a favourite. What’s your prediction, and what did you learn from this week’s show?
