Episode 5

Selling Photographs

This week we were tasked with picking a photographer and selling photographs from an art gallery in Hoxton. I was in the losing team and was also taken into the boardroom for the first time.

I am so embarrassed at how this task concluded. We were all against Adam's hard-sell technique, and in the end I was beaten at sales by Adam and Simon! I'm very competitive and was really not happy with my results. I tried very hard all night to close a deal, and a number of times I came quite close, but of course, close enough is just not good enough.

There was a lot of friction between Adam and Natalie. A prime example was that initially he was not interested in calling people from Vanessa Warren's (Columbia/Moroccan photographer) contacts list. He could not see how he could sell the photos over the phone. Simon and I coached him and gave him phrases he could use - in the end Vanessa's list was key and we knew that. This is why Natalie was getting frustrated with him in the gallery. And then he claimed he was helping me with the gallery layout, when in fact he only helped me for 5 minutes.

One of the main reasons both teams chose Elisabeth Hoff (lips photographer) was because she said she had a list of 300+ contacts. However, after we’d chosen her, she announced that she didn’t want us to have access to the mailing list and that she would contact her people herself. We don’t know if this happened and if all 300 were contacted and this was one of the key contributing factors to our loss.

In my opinion, the labels were a non-issue, but perhaps a sore point for Natalie, especially after the candy task. The reason we didn’t sell enough was because we didn’t have the right people in the gallery (perhaps attributable to the lack of control over Elisabeth’s list) and because of our softly-softly sales approach. Not because one photographer wasn’t happy with the labels!

With regards to the labels, I was given no budget to create them, so in the end, I created simple and neutral labels that we printed at the house and cut up ourselves. This is why Natalie took me into the boardroom. Natalie explained that she found it difficult to take me into the boardroom, but I feel that she was being strategic in her choice. I feel she wanted to tighten the noose around Adam's neck, and if she'd taken Katie, SAS would have had another suitable target.

In the boardroom, I spent a lot of time explaining to SAS why I shouldn’t be fired. I explained the value I had added in this task, the previous tasks and also that I could bring to his organisation.

Next week, I'm PM!!

Lohit Kalburgi