00:00 - Creative Business Podcast: Top 25% Milestone
Brad Eather: Hello and welcome to the Selling is Creative podcast, a podcast exploring creativity's role in sales and business. I'm your host, Brad Eather, a digital communication sales strategist helping established businesses and sales teams sell on social.
Before we start, I want to acknowledge a small milestone in the podcast's history. We've officially reached 10 episodes, which surprisingly puts us in the top 25% of podcasts globally. Over that time, if you've been following along, we've learned a hell of a lot from some really fantastic minds. I feel deeply humbled that Selling is Creative has been acknowledged by the Australian Business Journal as one of the top 10 business podcasts to watch out for. For those who have been listening along, I just want to say thank you. If you haven't yet subscribed to the channel, do so now so that you don't miss out on any future episodes.
My next guest is a very well-traveled sales trainer who has trained over 10,000 sales professionals across 37 countries. He's a wearer of orange hats, a three-time author—and we'll be talking about his most recent book today, Ethical Selling—and more recently, he's had a brief moment of virality as a parody rapper. Welcome to the show, Fred Copestake.
Fred Copestake: I love that in the order of importance, you've put wearing orange hats above writing three books. That's funny and it sets the tone for where we're going.
01:22 - Leadership lessons from sports: Rugby refereeing frameworks
Brad Eather: Fred, I mentioned in the intro that you're quite well-traveled. I wanted to ask, how many times have you been to Argentina?
Fred Copestake: Let's see: one, two, three, four times. The first time was as a rugby referee, so that trip had nothing to do with business. Then I went back for work—once with a chemicals company and once with a flavors company. I think two were for the chemicals company, so four trips in total.
Brad Eather: I know we're a sales podcast, but I actually want to talk about that first time you were there as a rugby referee, because we are both passionate rugby fans. The role of a referee in rugby union is unique. They interpret laws—there are no "rules" in rugby—and they communicate almost exclusively through the team captains. What skills or lessons has refereeing taught you about communicating with leaders or about leadership in general?
Fred Copestake: It's an interesting parallel. When you mentioned Argentina, it reminded me that the Spanish word for referee is dirigir, which actually means "to direct". You direct a game because you're applying the laws to make sure the game flows the way it needs to.
Thinking about your question, it's a very similar thing to what we try to do in business communication. We communicate in a way that directs people by giving them a path and a flow. We're taking all the stakeholders—players, spectators, or business partners—to the place that is going to be best for everyone involved. I've never actually considered it like that before, so that's a great question.
Brad Eather: I've been on the receiving end of a referee's whistle, and I certainly didn't want to talk back. I find that the team cohesion in rugby is something you don't find in many other sports, largely because of its physicality. Everybody plays a highly specific role. Without each role, you cannot exist as a team. You're never going to win if you don't have the big guy out front willing to take the ball up, or the speedy winger who can run past the defense. I always see direct parallels between rugby and business, and I'm wondering what your take is on that.
03:32 - Why ethical selling beats traditional high-pressure sales scripts
Fred Copestake: I think that's completely fair. In both arenas, people are there to perform a particular job, but if you go off and just do your own thing, the team won't be successful. You have to contribute to the collective effort. Everyone needs to be pushing in the same direction and executing the same game plan.
In business, we sometimes see individuals who say, "Well, I've got my own way of doing things, so I'm going to play like this." If the rest of the team isn't aligned, the whole thing falls apart. Everyone has to be on the same page.
Brad Eather: Let's move on to the core topic of today: ethical selling. It's the most recent book you've written, and I had the pleasure of reading it recently. I want to start with a few high-level observations. One of the core purposes of the book is to challenge the stereotype of the sleazy salesperson. A key takeaway for me is that it's really about a seller having the self-awareness and propensity to continually improve their practice, essentially aligning their personal values with the work they do. That means shifting your focus from short-term wins to long-term relationships.
Another element I really liked is that the book outlines a history of sales, borrowing from various methodologies and texts, and applies those pieces within the context of ethical selling. If there are salespeople out there who have never read a sales book before, this is a fantastic place to start because it provides an excellent framing. Beyond that, you provide a wealth of resources so readers can dive deeper into topics they enjoy. Let's talk about this stereotype you're challenging.
07:08 - Overcoming the caricature of the sleazy salesperson
Fred Copestake: You're spot on. The book was written for salespeople to challenge themselves, but also to show customers that professional salespeople aren't actually like that caricature. The premise for choosing ethical selling is pretty simple. First, customers prefer it; second, the alternative simply doesn't work.
People are far more open to an ethical way of operating. Trying to use high-pressure tactics, or mimicking the Wolf of Wall Street style, is neither effective nor best practice. The book tackles the issue from both angles: it opens the eyes of customers to recognize the professionals who want to work collaboratively, and it encourages them to start filtering out the people who don't operate that way.
Brad Eather: It's a very relationship-driven approach that puts the customer first. I think many salespeople struggle because they just fall into the role carrying that legacy perception of what a salesperson is. They fall into a caricature of what they think they should be, rather than taking true, self-directed ownership of the profession. Professional sales isn't something typically taught at universities.
Fred Copestake: That's exactly right. People fall into this caricature of, "I'm in sales, so I have to behave a certain way." They mimic what they've seen in dramatic movies. But those things are in films because they're dramatic and cause reactions.
The sleaziness typically comes from people who haven't actually been trained in professional sales. It's ironic: people claim sales is sleazy, but when push comes to shove and they have to generate revenue for their own business, they end up resorting to sleazy tactics themselves. They would be devastated if they realized that's how they were coming across, but it happens because they've rejected learning how to sell properly. They end up doing things that just look a bit crap. Conversely, someone who genuinely studies the profession operates in a successful, collaborative, and entirely non-sleazy way.
10:00 - Corporate sales training: Corporate vs. individual responsibility
Brad Eather: What's your favorite thing about selling?
Fred Copestake: Making a difference. It sounds like a scripted, cliché answer, but if you're doing it well, you are making a tangible difference for someone. For example, when I sell sales training, it changes how someone goes out and does their job, making their working life better. If you're selling something that solves a core problem, it has a meaningful impact. There's a specific outcome the customer is looking for. If you're just pushing stuff that people don't want or need, you'll never experience that fulfillment.
Brad Eather: For me, it's about forming those deep relationships alongside the outcome. I love working together with a client in a way where you're moving in unison. At the end of the project, you can high-five, look back, and realize you've become true friends because you've been on a real journey together.
Fred Copestake: In that journey, the customer is the hero, right? They are the person stepping out of the known into the unknown, and our role as a salesperson is to act as their guide or mentor to help them come out the other side better for it.
That's why I focus so heavily on collaborative selling. I concentrate on partnering skills, which are the elements we need to bake into our daily operations. It takes two to tango; we are trying to set up a dynamic to collaborate, co-create, and do the work together. If you find yourself in a position where the other party refuses to collaborate, things become very difficult. You'll find yourself misaligned and uncomfortable, and it's entirely fair to qualify them out and say, "No, I'm not going to work with you because we aren't a good fit, and I can't do a great job here."
14:45 - Managing target-driven internal pressure in sales organizations
Brad Eather: Qualifying a prospect out is a completely foreign concept to a lot of salespeople. Something that highlighted itself to me while reading your book is that there is an ongoing battle between the seller and the organization regarding the tools the company provides to enable ethical selling. Taking it back to the training aspect, what are your thoughts on the role of the organization to train versus the role of the seller to proactively seek out self-improvement?
Fred Copestake: People hold very strong opinions on this. Some believe growth is entirely down to the salesperson, and to a degree that's true because the individual must possess a growth mindset. However, I'm not convinced that salespeople should be digging into their own pockets to pay for formal professional training. There is a mountain of free resources out there, and of course, they can buy the book.
Ultimately, the organization needs to define, "This is how we operate; this collaborative approach is our way," and then fully stand by it. The company should provide the tools, techniques, and structural support to allow their people to execute to the best of their abilities, because the sellers' behavior reflects directly on the organization.
Brad Eather: It felt to me like you were pitching the organization to adopt an ethical selling framework just as much as you were pitching the individual salesperson. Would you agree with that?
Fred Copestake: Yes, that's completely fair. An ethical employer has a fundamental responsibility to look after their people and set them up to do their best work. I am absolutely telling sales leaders that this is the superior way of operating. If you look closely at your successful cycles, you'll find you're doing a lot of this collaborative work already. I'm highlighting those positive behaviors and showing the small shifts that can make them even more powerful.
I intentionally took a tactical, technique-based approach in the book. I found that most people who talk about ethical sales tend to drift up into high-falutin, cloud-based conversations about morals and values that people on the ground find difficult to apply practically tomorrow morning. I wanted to establish the principles quickly but then move directly into prescriptive, actionable tactics: try this, think about this, and do this.
18:46 - Navigating the modern B2B buyer journey in an online world
Brad Eather: I understand why so many salespeople rush to close deals; sales organizations are traditionally set up around rigid month-to-month, target-driven goals. How can a salesperson navigate that landscape so they can actually own the customer relationship, rather than being forced to destroy it at the end of the month just to get cash through the door?
Fred Copestake: It goes back to my original premise: what does the customer actually want, and what actually works? If a sales leader says, "Well, we can't sell ethically because we have short-term targets to hit," my question is: how are you going to hit those targets long-term if you're doing things the customer hates and that don't work? You're setting yourself up on a fool's errand.
If you believe the best way to hit a target is to pressure and push the prospect, you will inevitably just push them away. Research shows that buyers respond far better to a collaborative way of operating, and those tools will get you to your goal at a sustainable pace. Applying artificial end-of-month pressure for your own benefit is a massive trust buster.
Trust is foundational to sales. As the trust equation outlines, self-orientation is the denominator. If the cycle is entirely about you and your quota, it drags the level of trust down to zero, meaning you've literally set yourself up to fail.
24:44 - Mastering the collaborative selling process and partnering skills
Brad Eather: Sales is inherently a pressure-cooker environment. The internal pressure put on people can make them feel like a rat in a cage. If a salesperson genuinely wants to do right by the customer and is confident that their collaborative approach will yield a great result, but they are facing intense internal management pressure, what advice do you have for them?
Fred Copestake: You have to look seriously at why you're tolerating that positioning. To use a rugby analogy: it's like a coach telling a player to execute a game plan that is completely illegal. You know you're going to get caught, give away a succession of penalties, spend the match in the sin bin, and lose the game. Ultimately, you'll lose your job anyway because management won't take responsibility for their broken strategy; they will just claim their game plan was brilliant.
As a professional player, you have to look at that situation and say, "Hang on, this is crazy." Playing that short-sighted game reduces your long-term value as a professional, stops you from getting picked for the international squad, and damages your reputation when the team gets relegated. You are being set up to fail, so you shouldn't play that illegal game. You have to stand your ground internally, express the core values you hold, and communicate your strategic reasoning to management. If the coach simply barks, "I'm the coach, do as you're told," then it's time to call your agent and find a new team.
27:19 - Guide to early-stage B2B account qualification tactics
Brad Eather: In the modern online world, buyers no longer rely on a salesperson to guide them through the early stages of basic product education. Buyers are doing extensive independent research. How has the market fundamentally shifted from the customer's point of view, and how do sellers need to reposition themselves?
Fred Copestake: At one stage, salespeople were the absolute custodians of information. They would rock up to a meeting and think, "You need to talk to me because I hold the data sheets." Today, the customer already knows your product specs, and thanks to the internet, they know your competitors' specs too. If a salesperson shows up just to regurgitate what's already on the corporate website, they are failing, because websites are far better at being websites than humans are. My first piece of advice to salespeople is: don't be a bloody website.
What a professional salesperson can do significantly better than a website is bring deep perspective and insight to the conversation, helping the buyer think through their problems as a trusted "sense-maker." The raw information is already out there. A salesperson adds value by using high-level questioning skills to help the customer get their head around complex data. When you do that, the customer actively wants you in the room because every time they speak with you, you help them make sense of their business challenges. If you just turn up to read from a catalog, they will cut you out of the cycle completely.
27:59 - Co-creating a unique value proposition in B2B sales
Brad Eather: I completely agree. There is so much information noise out there that buyers get entirely inundated. The modern onus is on the seller to discover the customer's hyper-specific problem and clarify it within the context of the wider market. This means sellers must constantly educate themselves on economic trends, sales techniques, and their customers' specific industries to position problems holistically. Without that macro context, you fall right back into lazy features-and-benefits selling, which is useless to everyone. The selling role is becoming significantly more sophisticated; it is way bigger than just raw outreach numbers.
Fred Copestake: You are bang on. As a professional salesperson, you have to immerse yourself in the customer's world more than ever before. Unfortunately, I don't see organizations properly preparing their sales teams for this. Companies keep feeding their people internal product training, teaching them to talk about themselves, and arming them with corporate presentations full of global maps, dots, and client logos. As a result, salespeople are in a terrible position to co-create a true value proposition because their training forces them to focus entirely on their own company.
When you know how to actually step into the customer's world, you research the major external macroeconomic drivers affecting their specific business. You look closely at the political, economic, social, technological, environmental, and regulatory (PESTER) drivers shaping their industry. These external forces demand a corporate response, which shapes the customer's internal objectives and creates operational challenges.
If you possess that macro data, you are in a powerful position to initiate collaborative conversations right at the very beginning of the buying process. You don't wait until procurement has already written a rigid specification document and just wants you to submit a commodity price. Sprints to the bottom driven by "tell me the price" are a stupid conversation.
When you engage early based on macro insights, the buyer realizes you've done your homework and recognizes you as a peer they want to collaborate with. That is real selling: initiating deep, strategic conversations early, rather than chasing automated intent data to pitch the top 3% of active buyers.
33:31 - Why customer value is a mystery you must solve together
Brad Eather: That circles perfectly back to curiosity. Being curious about the macro world provides multiple entry points to a business discussion and establishes the groundwork to guide your customer's decision-making. Even if a conversation initiates around a tech solution, the root problem or final solution might not be technology-related at all.
Fred Copestake: If your conversation starts strictly at the technology solution stage, you are likely too late. It means the customer has already done the heavy diagnostic work without you, either on their own or with a competitor. If they've done it on their own, they already hold a rigid opinion of what they want, and trying to reverse their thinking is incredibly difficult.
Alternatively, if they've been working with a brilliant, consultative salesperson who guided them through the entire discovery process, they are only reaching out to you because corporate policy requires them to secure three comparative prices. The final specification has their preferred partner's ink all over it. Salespeople get excited thinking, "Look, I'm on an RFP, they must love me!" No, you're just column fodder because you came in too late.
35:15 - Consultative questioning strategies to drive buyer clarity
Brad Eather: Many sellers mistake value as something that lives exclusively inside their product features. How should a salesperson take personal ownership of value creation?
Fred Copestake: A common issue is that salespeople explain the value of a product purely based on what internal product training told them to say. But that's not what true value is. My friend Mike Wilkinson taught me a fantastic phrase while we were traveling. He looked at me and said, "Fred, value is a mystery." Because value is entirely defined by the customer, it's like beauty—it lives in the eye of the beholder. Often, the customers themselves don't even know how to define what they need yet. The collaborative mission for the seller and the customer is to solve that mystery together within the buyer's unique context.
Standard product training might tell you that typical clients face problem X, so pitching solution Y will make you look like a mind reader. But in a complex B2B sale, there are far too many moving parts for that simplistic approach to work.
If your sales model relies on making 100 cold calls a day across 100 reps to catch the tiny percentage of people who happen to have that exact problem at that exact second, that's just a game of pure numbers. But in complex engineering or enterprise SaaS solutions, you must dedicate your creative resources to working things out alongside the organization as part of a shared journey.
36:20 - Moving from siloed outreach to end-to-end sales ownership
Brad Eather: If you spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, the SaaS sales crowd is the loudest voice in the room, but they operate in an environment that is very different from the rest of the commercial world. If LinkedIn is your primary source of learning, you must be highly intentional about who you are learning from and why they are posting. Adopting a high-velocity transactional tech sales approach in a complex relationship-driven industry will cause you to shoot yourself in the foot.
Fred Copestake: I 100% agree. That rapid-fire advice is right for that specific high-churn tech environment, but it represents only a small sliver of the global sales landscape. While that echo chamber is massive on LinkedIn, it accounts for only a tiny fraction of real-world business transactions. Salespeople need to be careful about adopting repetitive, narrow arguments like debating "permission-based openers" all day long.
Go out and master skills that actually help you engage with customers deeply and early. Most businesses require teams to configure bespoke value propositions around complex customer needs, rather than pushing rigid, single-feature products via high-velocity scripts. Understand the specific game you are playing; the advice meant for a high-volume tech sprinter won't help an enterprise marathon runner.
38:09 - How to harvest real customer insights from face-to-face conversations
Brad Eather: Let's refocus on the idea that value is a mystery. It completely reframes discovery: you aren't just running through a checklist of self-serving questions; you are digging to uncover hidden treasure that is uniquely valuable to them.
Fred Copestake: Exactly. Are your discovery questions self-centered frameworks like BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timescale) designed merely to confirm your solution is a good fit? Or are you there to act as a consultant to help the buyer clarify their own thinking?
When you ask questions that provide the customer with sudden operational clarity, you add massive value to the conversation before you even mention your product or service. The customer experiences a moment where the scales drop from their eyes, they see their path forward, and they want to continue the conversation with you because you provide immense diagnostic clarity. That is a completely different take on questioning compared to legacy sales methods, which were all about extracting data to set up a pitch.
Brad Eather: Modern organizations have often siloed sales functions so aggressively that they've made a mechanical assembly line out of it, causing people to lose sight of the end-to-end relationship. I am excited to see the pendulum swinging back the other way: teams are becoming leaner, and highly effective end-to-end sales professionals are coming out on top because they take personal ownership from initial conversation to final execution. It does the customer no good to be passed like a baton to three or four different internal departments.
Fred Copestake: Buyers absolutely hate that assembly-line experience. Organizations claim it's done for internal efficiency, but that is a completely self-centered focus. In an ideal relationship model, the primary account manager has full strategic ownership and pulls in specialized technical or financial resources at exact moments as the buyer moves through their journey. They maintain the relationship from the very beginning.
39:45 - How authenticity online impacts modern professional sales
Fred Copestake: I recently had a conversation with a tech-sales enthusiast who couldn't comprehend that many high-value business deals don't record discovery calls because the conversations happen live in boardrooms, on factory floors, in laboratories, or over lunch. They literally didn't get it, which I found quite sad. They hadn't seen the wider business world where a massive amount of highly sophisticated, real-world commerce takes place face-to-face.
Brad Eather: That is the exact space I aim to support. Valuable commercial execution is always informed by foundational relationship principles. We are at a converging point where professionals are trying to blend modern digital tools with traditional human communication. Post-COVID, people are having more real-world conversations over coffee than they have in years, meaning we still need elite interpersonal skills.
When you communicate or prospect on a platform like LinkedIn, you cannot afford to be anything other than authentic, otherwise the market will smell you out like a rat. Putting yourself out there via digital content forces you into an ethical approach because you must communicate what you truly believe and quantifiably know. You have to position yourself as an authentic part of the value equation.
44:44 - Using content creation as a tool for team professional development
Fred Copestake: It comes down to a simple psychological test: do you show up online as a decent, authentic person I would actually want to have a business discussion with, who talks about insights that can help me achieve my goals? When people post obviously fabricated corporate stories, audiences stop reading immediately.
This is where video content is exceptionally powerful. Anyone can ask ChatGPT to churn out a generic cheat sheet and post it on Canva, but it doesn't prove you actually know anything. But when you hold up your phone and speak directly and naturally about your field, the audience can see that you genuinely inhabit that world. It proves you aren't just recycling generic noise. I strongly urge salespeople to overcome their camera shyness, get past that initial reserve, and put their authentic thinking out there. If you focus entirely on the real-world problems your customers care about, it becomes incredibly straightforward. You don't need to be performance-funny or hyper-clever; you just need to make practical sense.
47:14 - How to improve sales performance by making a real client impact
Brad Eather: LinkedIn is an incredibly low-effort way for small sales organizations to maintain consistent business development activity. A major theme in your book is the commitment to continuous improvement and habitual learning. Pushing past the discomfort of content creation builds communication skills, self-confidence, and self-reflection habits that map directly back to ethical selling.
Fred Copestake: I completely agree, which is why it is vital to do your own critical thinking. If all you do is ask an AI to write your posts so you can copy-paste them to look active, you aren't learning anything and you probably aren't even reading the output.
The creative process of structuring your own thoughts—making them concise, punchy, and valuable for an audience—directly improves how you communicate in real life. It trains you to get to the strategic point quicker in boardrooms and coffee shops. If you just fake it using entirely external automated help, you will never develop your skills.
Brad Eather: I view content creation as a powerful core professional development function. If I were pitching a business on why their sales team should be active online, it would be as professional development to force them to explore market concepts that align with the company's ambitions.
Fred Copestake: Yes, but if the company just forces their reps to blindly reshare corporate press releases, the team learns nothing and customers ignore it because it's completely self-centered marketing noise. The top operators in digital sales understand psychology and human nature deeply. Investing time into understanding what makes people engage gives you a double benefit that serves you just as powerfully when you sit down in a physical boardroom.
50:29 - Practical frameworks for applying creativity to corporate sales
Brad Eather: If someone is looking to pick up your book, what is your ultimate sales pitch for Ethical Selling?
Fred Copestake: Because it is exactly what customers want, and it quantifiably works. In the book, I take the common excuses people use to avoid ethical selling and call them out as total bullshit. I address what I call the Goldilocks Effect.
Some sales leaders claim ethical partnering is "too hard" or structurally complex, which is false because they are likely doing components of it already. Others mistake ethical selling as being "too soft"—assuming it means being a passive pushover who gives away discounts and margins in the name of transparency. That is completely wrong. Ethical selling requires you to be highly challenging and incredibly tough. It requires navigating difficult commercial conversations.
The ethical framework overlays whatever corporate process you currently use, whether it's MEDDIC or Miller Heiman. It injects actionable tactics around empathetic communication, transparency, integrity, and informed decision-making directly into your daily routine.
Brad Eather: To bring us to our final signature question: given your extensive global experience, what is your definitive definition of creativity?
Fred Copestake: I define creativity as the process ability to generate something that is both novel and useful. I purposefully call it a process ability because creativity is not an exclusive, magical trait that some people naturally possess while others don't. There are explicit, structured processes anyone can follow to achieve innovative, useful ideas—such as Edward de Bono's Six Thinking Hats framework. My orange hat is simply a fun spinoff of that structured creative framework. Methods like SCAMPER, mind mapping, and structured brainstorming allow you to reliably bring something unique and highly valuable to the commercial party.
Brad Eather: That aligns beautifully with tools that give professionals a repeatable roadmap to achieve creative outcomes. Creativity is not about pulling random ideas out of thin air; it has a clear process from start to finish, and value is generated in how you strategically deviate from that process to solve a client problem.
Fred Copestake: Exactly. Instead of just training salespeople exclusively in rigid product features, we should train them in how to deploy creative thinking and elite questioning processes alongside the customer. By the time you finish that collaborative process, you've co-created an innovative solution that sets the customer apart in their market and cements your position as an indispensable partner —or, as I said, you could have just shown up and been a website.
Brad Eather: LinkedIn is the best place for people to get in contact with you.
Fred Copestake: Yes, despite everything we've said about the platform, that's where I hang out. Connect with me, mention this conversation on the podcast, and send me a personal message.
Brad Eather: Ethical Selling is widely available on Amazon. Thank you for joining me, Fred, and to everyone out there listening, thank you for tuning into the Selling's Creative Podcast. Remember to like and subscribe, and in the meantime, happy selling.
Fred Copestake: Cheers!
