When Karen told him that Helen's pitch had pulled in the biggest sales figures in Apprentice history, all he said was 'Wow'. Compare this to Liz Locke's performance last year, and he was much more congratulatory - couldn't praise her enough. IMO there should have been much more fanfare around Helen's achievement - 200,000 sales is amazing!

Maybe Lord Sugar is getting harder to please!

I disagree, but only from the point of view that Liz Locke should never have got all that praise.

At the end of the day, no-one spends 6 figure sums because of a 'good pitch'.

I also very much doubt when they raised the issue of cost and Helen said 'Yeah but think about your childs safety blah blah.', that the shop went ...... 'Yeah youre probably right, Ok we'll spend 200k thanks'.

I have to agree with our antipodean friend here.

People buy a lot because they think they can sell a lot.

Helen's pitch was superb but, in the end, all that does is maximise the chances that the company will 'get' the product and order what they think they can shift.

Unless ... the producers ask the companies involved to come up with a score between 0 and 1 for the presentation and multiply that by the number of products they think they can sell thus getting an amount that reflects their opinion of the candidate's performance.

That would make sense but would still only allow you to make like for like comparisons - as far as that is possible.

To be honest, I'm not sure her pitch was brilliant. Now, it's true that Susan's pitching was awful (honestly, who responds to the question "isn't it a bit pricey?" by saying "look, I'm small enough to sit in it myself! Weeeee!"?), but "people pay for convenience" isn't really as good an answer as "it's already sold 140,000 units within 1 year of sale in the UK (or however many it was that the designer actually said) and it's won 36 industry awards" is a better one. Helen gave them empty rhetoric, whereas businesspeople are more likely to be impressed by learning that something they're being asked to sell already sells well.

He was probably woundering which one Helen was

We did not see Helen's pitch in full.

No but Karen seemed extremely impressed and, no matter whether the sale was real or scored, her customer 'bought' a shed load of what she was selling.

this!!

Well, it wasn't difficult.

If his attention span was really as short as some of the ADHD posters here:

She was the one who wasn't Suzan, Zoe or Jim.

I agree about it not being really to do with her pitch, like the item Liz sold a lot of last year, the carseat/backpack sold itself really.

Maybe Helen is Karren's love child. LOL.

Helen is good. Fair play to her. But in some of the first tasks where her team won, she didn't actually do much. I only recognised her as Helen when they said she was the lucky mascot, before that she was just the woman with the tiny neck.

It was €214,000 worth of sales rather than 200,000 units.

I really do wish people would stop saying this about any candidate.

What you see is what the editors decide you see. The programme is only an hour long and when you get rid of all the preamble, postamble, boardroom and scene setting they don't have much time to work with.

Any candidate who just gets on with the job, particularly in the first few episodes is not going to make the edit. You'll only really get seen if you're customer facing of make some amusing gaffe.

I thought the second sacking was very unfair - it seemed to promote the idea that you should not do your best as a team member but should spend time making sure you get noticed. It may be the required strategy for TA but it's unlikely to work in the real world unless you have a very weak manger because there's always 'grunt' work to be done in team activities and people who won't shoulder their share of that burden are a pain to both their coleagues and managers.

Good point, well made - and one that people keep forgetting!!

Check out http://www.bbc.co.uk/apprentice/series7/workings.shtml

and you will see there are 2 crews per team, filming all the time - so the 20 mins MAX that you see in a week of each team has been edited down from approx 40 hours of DVD.