Hmm,

Q. What have been the two most naive business transactions this series so far?

A. The £5000 with 24 hour hotline offer and the exclusivity deals severely limiting the manufacturer.

Q. Whats the connection with these two events?

A. Both involved Lindi and Jennifer.

Hmm, co-incidence?

Lindi we know is out of her depth and devoid of business acumen, so what's Jennifers excuse, particularly as this involved sales and marketing which were supposed to be her strengths. Could somebody clarify whether the customer requested exculsivity as part of the deal or if it was Jennifer who offered it?

Was, presumably? :0)

Dave

Jennifer offered it without being asked. That was bad enough - but she didn't even attempt to use it as a tool to increase the order. So much for the best salesperson in Europe.

Lucinda didn't need to micromanage the people in her team, this is a common mistake made on The Apprentice. Raef and Jennifer were professional sales people, Lucinda was not. She stayed with the production team (As in the people making the ice cream) as this is where they were likely to run into the most problems. I'm assuming none of them had prior experience in ice cream production.

The role of the project manager is not to take on each of his team members' individual roles, it's to assign tasks and ensure they are being carried out and oversee the project as a whole, ensuring her assigned tasks as being carried out. Lucinda did this, for example when she called the sales team to tell them to stop visiting ice cream parlours as they are a dead end. She assinged a task to the appropriate people, checked they were carrying it out and corrected them only when she saw they were making a mistake.

She did a good job as a project manager. However, I still think she should have had more authority on her team and she should have gone with her idea of mixing up her team.

Her intelligence is in no doubt, she is clearly intelligent. I think that perhaps she may have thought subconsciously that a recipe for ice cream that they had invented off the top of their head would just be a fleeting and minor item in the farmer's product range and therefore its exclusivity was of little value.

I think she has demonstrated being a team player in contrast to your suggestion.

Rather contradictory I think - and surely someone as successful in Sales as she claims to be should be fully conversant with Agency Law and the implications of tying the farmer to a legally binding contract.

From the footage she seemed to abdicate many of the responsibilities of team leader, she didn't provide objectives for the sales team or any sort of guidance or strategy. Her project management simply consisted of allocating teams and leaving everyone to their own devices, that is not a recipe for success or a team leader's option.

And selecting the dim-witted, proto-beautician to head up her sales team was a terrible decision

Circus Frown put it perfectly.

http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/forums/s...7&postcount=54

The role of a project manager is, as you say, about assigning roles and tasks and not to micromanage, and alas it is by most of these criteria she failed.

She did not assign well defined tasks, she gave no objectives such as the number of the leads she wanted or in what markets she thought should be targeted, and of course she failed grossly in giving free reign to neuron-free Lindi as her second in comment.

You claim she assigned a task and checked it was completed, but that is exactly what she didn't do! She simply accepted the leads given and when she turned up at the appointments she found she was trying to sell ice cream to ice cream makers and then she complained to Lindi. There is nothing perceptive or demonstrative of business acumen or anything else in her response to the situation, a blind idiot would have done just the same thing!!!! I really can't believe you are suggesting she demonstrated some skill here.

Oh come on - you're clearly dismissive of Lucinda's skills (in the minority I suggest) - but should any apprentice, much less one who claims to be highly successful in Sales, need telling not to try selling ice cream to manufacturers of the product. Some things are just plain common sense.

Oh I agree that Lucinda wasn't at fault and could have expected the leads to have been of better quality and shouldn't have to explain basics to the beautician Lindi, but I never suggested Lucinda was at fault. I was disputing with the poster above as to whether Lucinda had been monitoring the performance of the selling team, the poster suggested she was and the evidence suggests otherwise as all she did was moan when she got to the appointment.

She said that Helene (I think) had also made appointments, and hre first question to the people was 'Are you interested in buying ice-cream?'
Lucinda would therefore have assumed that the self-proclaimed 'experts' would have done the same thing. Surely it's the first thing anyone would ask.

Great analysis. I 100% agree with you.

One of the first things you said was


I still don't see, in this task, what Lucinda actually did wrong which would warrant dismissal. You are claiming (I think) that she should have been monitoring the sales team to make sure that the contacts they were conjuring up were good. I can't see how you could do that as the teams once split up have to stay together. I wouldn't think it would cross any manager to ask "by the way are you fixing up appointments with people who make their own ice cream?". As the top sales person in Europe Jennifer should have volunteered to take the 3 ice cream producers as her own appoinments and proved she could sell to them! Then we would have been impressed.

If Lucinda was a professional sales person then I would agree with you, however I think the fact Jennifer describes herself as "the best sales person in Europe", and the fact that despite what has happened both Raef and her appeared to be very competent sales professionals at the beginning of the task, begs the question: "What valuable sales input did you expect Lucinda to have?". The amount of leads needed was clearly "as many as you can get", and a competent sales team would have scheduled their day in order to fit in all the appointments they could get. The target market is again something a sales professional would have been able to judge (And barring the ice cream parlour all their other leads were good).

The only criticism you could apply to Lucinda with regards to sales was the bit about trying to sell ice cream to ice cream makers. But then, you'd expect the best sales person in Europe and a clearly educated sales professional to have spotted this first.


So your criticism is that a non-sales professional accepted leads from a sales professional? I think it's likely Lucinda questioned the logic of approaching ice cream makers to sell ice cream, but she rightly trusted the people who are professionals in the field with their leads. Once she approached the first ice cream vendor and saw this was a dead end she immediately contacted the other team to correct them. This was the correct way to go about it.

Again, I'd agree with you if she had sent a solicitor, PA and IT manager to get sales leads because clearly they're going to need extra help and guidance, however there is nothing wrong with trusting a sales task to a group of sales professionals.


Well then in that case clearly Jenny should still have been fired as she was the most qualified in the area and also failed to spot this, no?

Again, the PM's job is not to be better than her team at everything. I'm not better at technical issues than our IT department, I'm nowhere near as skilled in marketing as our marketing department and if you gave me my company's accounts, well, better not dwell on that. However, when managing projects I don't need to be better than these people, I need to be able to act as a facilitator so that they can do their job. I need to assign them tasks and trust that they carry them out, because they're the experts.

I do concede that placing Lindie in charge was a rather odd decision at best.

No I was not claiming that Lucinda should have to monitor the quality of the sales leads, although given the format of the apprentice where everyone is in a novel role and liable to make mistakes one could make a very good case that she should have been. She certainly should have laid down guidelines for the sorts of leads she wanted or asked what the strategy was of her sales team. And in fact if I had the IQ challenged Lindi in any way responsible to me and in a vital role I would be checking everything she did because she is guaranteed to do something stupid because she is stupid.

As I stated in my last post, someone else was claiming that Lucinda's role as project manager was to assign tasks and check that they were completed, I then pointed out that she did neither of these things, she didn't assign any tasks, just roles, and she didn't seem to check up on anything. Now I would agree that checking up on the minutiae of someone's activities is not a useful activity in most work situations, but I was disputing whether Lucinda had performed the project manager tasks that an earlier poster had implied she had ( whether or not they were desirable tasks is irrelevant as to whether she had performed them as had been claimed by the other poster ) .