Listen to Lee McQueen's experience of winning The Apprentice series four
Last night Lord Sugar fired the eighth Apprentice candidate so the series is now at the halfway point.
BusinessWings interviewed Lee McQueen, who won the series two years ago and went on to help Lord Sugar set up Amscreen, a digital screen media advertising company. After two years, McQueen - famous for his reverse pterodactyl impression - left to set up his own venture, Raw Talent Academy, which he believes would have been difficult to start without the benefit of the Apprentice as a launchpad.
You can’t get a degree in sales; it doesnt exist. Why do they need a degree to go and sell?
Lee on why he started Raw Talent Academy...
I founded Raw Talent academy based on the fact that for the last seven years I’ve been an employer of salespeople and it’s very difficult to find good salespeople who are what I would call 'off the shelf'.
I’ve notoriously had my fingers burnt for hiring people who say they’re good at something and then turn out not to be very good. And I understand this pattern for hiring people is very similar from a recruitment and advertising point of view.
The aim of raw talent academy is to produce internal sales academies for businesses, both small and medium enterprises but also corporate organisations. To encourage them to take on entry-level salespeople through my organisation and actually set up an academy whereby we can give them learning and development in order for them to progress into a fully-fledged sales consultant.
On what Raw Talent Academy can offer businesses which they can't do themselves in-house...
With salespeople – and again, this is just from my experience – it’s so easy to interview somebody face to face, get on with them really well and think they’re really fantastic because they’re a salesperson.
But it really does matter what they deliver. Time and time again people who I speak to always hire people that don’t work out, and that’s why in sales you have such a high rate of staff attrition.
What my company’s actually all about is bedding them in, getting them loyal, selling them the solutions, selling them your products, the way your company actually wants them to sell based on a syllabus I’ve written myself which is based on my last 10 years’ experience [in managing salespeople]. I’ve put the training and development courses or workshops together myself based on how I believe good salespeople work out.
And it’s about raw talent, it’s about honing in on the raw attributes, that ability to sniff a deal. That work ethic, that desire, that competitive edge within people’s personalities.
And phase two of my academy showcases to potential employers exactly the attributes candidates – or 'the talent' – can bring to the table. It’s almost like 'try before you buy' if you want to be that basic. But that’s effectively what it is; audition days or assessment centres that allow us to put candidates through business tasks so candidates can see what they’re actually buying.
On why there's more to a candidate than their CV and qualifications...
There’s so many training schemes that focus on graduates and so many employers look at university degrees as a way of sifting through. So they use it as a sifting tool to say: “you know what, if I hire a salesperson they need to have a degree.”
Why? You can’t get a degree in sales; it doesnt exist. Why do they need a degree to go and sell?
I’m not trying to begrudge education at all. You need degrees to do certain jobs but not in sales. What you need in sales is that hunger, that desire, those raw attributes that I talked about before.
That common sense that intellect, the ability to build relationships with people over short and long periods of time. The ability to probe and identify and understand the client’s needs.
So for me, the whole point of setting up Raw Talent Academy, of putting everyone in the one pot if you like, is it’s a level playing period. It’s saying to everybody: “you know what, I want Mr and Mrs market trader to go up against Mr and Mrs psychology graduate.”
I’ve used that to say: "Well, look: Anyone can write anything on a CV; it’s about backing that up with actual ability." I think Lord Sugar proved that when he hired me for the Apprentice.
So lets hire based on ability and personality, not on qualifications or words written on a piece of paper.
