The Sales Apprentice: Sales training tips from the hit TV show, The Final

After last week’s flashback to what interviewing might have been like in “Life on Mars” with it’s sexist questioning tactics aimed at proving woman with children have to make their case to work, tonight’s episode was back to business as normal with a task..

This was billed as the “head to head” between Simon and Kristina but turned out to be more of a battle of egos between many of the “bit “ players. This was Rosencrantz and Guildenstern centre stage and it wasn’t pretty. Not so many sales training tips tonight but many personal development and career lessons for how not to achieve success in life, business and sales.

The specialist task tonight was to come up with a landmark for London. SAS wanted a conceptual idea for the replacement of a £120m building he had just bought. It has to be meaningful, innovative and … make him some money. They were not actually going to “do” this project – it’s all about creativity and in 4 days time they are going to have to present their vision to an audience of “top” property executives.

SAS is looking at this as a test of their organizational skills, how they can run a team of people and how creative they are. Their teams will be be made up of ex-apprentices. This should be a spectacular car crash of personalities if nothing else. Simon picks Tre, Rory, Jadine and Lohit whilst Kristina chooses Natalie, Naomi, Adam and Paul.

Sales training tip: Sometime teams have history together. Sometimes there are frictions at play. Sometimes different sales personalities do not “gel” well together. As a sales leader or sales manager your role is to get the most out of the team that you have. How can you arrange teams to get the most out of the individuals and the team as a whole?

Simon and Tre are the first to come up with an idea. They want to work with a “boat” theme. Jadine and Rory are quick to start muttering in the corner. Rory thinks this is idea is uninspiring and Jadine is willing to play along.

This kind of behaviour is common in underperforming sales teams. How many times do we see this kind of behaviour? What can we do to stop it? How can you prevent it? This kind of behaviour is childish, immature and counter-productive. It’s not something that can be countenanced and it needs to be nipped in the bud sharpish.

Meanwhile Adam and Naomi are sent off to look for design ideas. When Kristina later asks Adam for feedback, Natalie and Paul exchange knowing glances. The ideas are rejected. And there is my problem with this whole show…

Tonight had nothing to do with business and nothing to do with team work. What it did have a lot to do with was ego, personality clashes and “one up manship”.

Upstairs Simon and Tre try to float their boat idea. Rory looks unimpressed and dives in with his own vision. Rory even admits that he wants to upset Tre… just not so much that he punches him. Wow! I must have missed out with the teams I have run and managed. What’s wrong with working together and getting on with the job in hand?

Next day the two teams sit down with the experts to talk about their design ideas. Paul and Adam discover almost immediately that the chosen Phoenix design agreed by Kristina and them the night before is too formalistic. So they change it. They don’t, however, bother to tell Kristina until it is too late for her to do anything about it.

Still at the house, Simon calls a meeting to lay into his team. Yesterday was a shambles he declares. Stop sitting around like children and get on with it. Rory says that there is no incentive for them to work hard. Really? You were thrown out for looking like a duck in week 2, you’re on national TV with a chance to redeem yourself but you can’t see any incentive? Get real!

Sales training tip: When I do sales consultancy, working on the motivation and dynamics of proactive sales teams, individuals often say that there is little or no incentive for them to work harder. I find this hard to swallow. For sure, sometimes the management and (external) incentives could be better thought out but ultimately these are the excuses of sales wannabees not sales winners.

Sales winners are self-motivated and self-driven as are successful individuals in all walks of life. If you make excuses such as these, challenge yourself to stop blaming others for your own lack of motivation and get out there and find a way to motivate yourself!

Rory meanwhile is on his soap box about Tre being self-taught and not having a grounding in design. Ironically, Rory himself later decides to choreograph a group of dancers to introduce their presentation and has to admit to Tre that he has no experience or skills in this area.

Meanwhile, Kristina is doing “due diligence” on her building, finding out what the exact split is between commerical and residential that will allow her to recoup maximum revenues. After a conversation with Paul on the phone about the changed design that he had not told her about she questions whether she can trust him or not. She conculdes that maybe she can’t.

Sales training tip: Trust is essential in sales and selling. Without trust, sales success will not happen. In sales training seminars, many salespeople tell me that they think that selling is all about being “friends” with their clients. Interestingly, I would suggest that personal rapport without trust does not carry over into sales and business scenarios. So, I can have gone to the same school as you and we can chat about that happily but the moment I move to business conversations you sense the change and rapport is broken.

What we need is trust. Trust and credibility. Two qualities that seem somewhat lacking in many of our Machiavellian (…as pertaining to Niccolo Machiavelli, Florentine Statesman, or denoting the political principles of craftiness and duplicity advocated by him) business wannabees.

After a day of preparations our two teams arrive to make their presentation to 100 “hard-nosed” property people and SAS.

Rory’s dancers dance into view to the strains of Nessun Dorma with Simon (?) doing a poor voice over. After a few words from Jadine, Simon came on. He made a reasonable sales presentation and took a few questions but it all felt “Apprentice Lite” until Kristina made her sales presentation.

Now I know this is TV and they may well have cut these sales presentations to make the decision that SAS was about to make better TV but from what we saw of her presentation, Kristina was more impactful, she seemed to have better content and she seemed more structured and thought through. Certainly SAS’s nods, smiles and (even a) thumbs up would imply that he was thinking that way too…

Back in the board room, and after SAS has dismissed the ex-Apprentices, SAS talked to Nick and Margaret.

Nick thinks Kristina will slog her guts out for SAS all day long. He thinks Simon may well get distracted. Margaret thinks Kristina is more focused, more mature and can be left to get on with things. From what we have seen I think we can add to that the fact that she has more business acumen too.

But this is SAS TV and only he is going to deliver the final verdict. No room for sales training lessons now. What is he going to decide?

After a build up about how difficult this decision is he commends them both saying that they are both employable. They both make final pleas about what they can offer SAS and the ball is with SAS…

He tells Kristina that she has the background and the experience and Simon that he is a risk but the devil in him won’t let him go…

“Simon do you know what a bloody old fool I am, I am going to take that risk. Simon you’re hired.”

Wow! Certainly not the decision that I would have made…

Was it the right one?

Only time will tell. I’m sure Simon will work hard and get some great results and he certainly really wanted the role. But so did Kristina and I think I would have put my money into her!

Why not let me know what you guys think? Click on comments and post your thoughts.