Joe Wanner was only 19 when he left the student-athlete life at Jesuit Portland for the unknown of Wisconsin. Written off by family and friends, the three-event varsity track athlete pivoted into a world of peak performance coaching … and hasn’t looked back.
What is a ‘Cold Calling Coach?’ Well, according to “The King of Cold Calling” Joe Wanner, it’s a mixture of training high-performing entrepreneurs and sales professionals in a way that has them mirroring the habits of world-class athletes. “I help sales athletes turn their cold audience into their first $1m and build their dream body,” he shares. Wanner’s Peak Performance Prospecting program helps transform sales burnout into peak performance systems, and is inspired by Wanner’s background in high performance athletics and his resilience through embracing the uncomfortable.
“I got comfortable being uncomfortable real quick,” he quips, a sense of pride fills him up as he shares the initial six months of cold calling at 19. It took a few years of grit and failure in his early 20s before he earned ‘Rookie of the Year’ honors and hit his first $1 million in cumulative income before the age of 29. He has also wracked-up an incredible 258-month streak of physical training. “I truly believe I honed my craft of sales by coaching tens of thousands of reps across 160+ industries for a 9-figure sales training firm that has been recognized in the Top 10 sales training companies globally,” he told Hollywood Times Mag. “Along with that I’ve spent the last 21 straight years in the gym without missing a month, it’s the Mamba Mentality.”
Having initially grown up in Portland, Oregon, Wanner embarked on an academic life at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin honored with the coveted men’s basketball internship, an honor only 2 out of 1,000+ applicants get selected for. Moving away from Portland meant stepping into his greatness alone, but his desire to have the drive idols Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan personified kept him on the right track. “I became very aware of creating my own reality from an early age,” he opens up. Along with what was a perceived ‘lack of love’ growing up, not intentionally, but simply because “my parents had too many kids to look after,” Wanner suffered unimaginable loss when – within one month he lost his mentor in a motorcycle accident, along with his aunt through suicide. On top of that another aunt attempted suicide, his grandpa was diagnosed with Stage 4 Cancer, and his girlfriend broke up with him. “Resilience is built out of two things,” he shares candidly in an interview with ‘The World’s Abundance Teacher’ Natasha Graziano. “One aspect of it is how you act when life happens to you, the other is the positions you put yourself in to manipulate your mind when getting past your own self-limitations.”
Upon creating his own reality post-graduate Wanner admits to making his own connections through an intensive networking initiative which resulted in over 100,000 cold calls, 1,000 B2B door knocks, and over 3,000 cold networking in-person approaches across a 14 year period. “This experience across 18 industries helped me build the systems and expertise I share today with sales people and entrepreneurs across over 160 industries,” he shares. “Put me in any market without knowing anyone and I’ll learn how to cold call, network, get referral sources, and within six months I’ll have a full pipeline.”
So what are his ‘keys to victory’ for a methodology that has long been seen as passe? “Well,” he says, “you have to put prospects in a moment in time and use childlike curiosity to ask deeper questions.” He continues; “then I start to layer in emotion in a way that builds trust while also eliciting doubt as prospects start to self-incriminate.” Wanner cites this as prospective partners reflecting on the decisions they’ve made and the limiting beliefs that need to be unseated to put them in a position to buy. “When you help people see the unforeseen – not where the puck is currently at, but where it’s going to go (i.e. helping clients prepare their business or brand for the next two years and not just right now), you can sell them anything.” This is because you’re helping them see a future state they didn’t think was possible to problems they didn’t even realize they had yet.
Referring his transcendence from “Average Joe turns to G.I. Joe,” Wanner insists that sales is a skills game, rather than a numbers game. While he emphasizes that you have to ‘know your numbers,’ the skill is in getting prospective clients to lower their guard. “Like a professional athlete who knows how fast they run, you have to know how many calls you’re converting into meetings, how many meetings are going into proposals, how many proposals into deals, etc,” he points out. “Today we have gone from the ABC methodology (Always Be Closing) to the arena of ABD’s: Always Be Disarming” as he’s learned from one of his favorite mentors and who he believes to be the GOAT of today’s sales environment, Jeremy Miner. In an interview with Hollywood Times Mag, Wanner shares that this is because ‘trust in salespeople is at an all-time low – especially post-Pandemic, and therefore our methods have to change.”
Pivoting strategy isn’t alien to Joe Wanner. In 2023 he was flying high with five promotions amassed in three years, and was courted by several companies to lead their sales teams. Leaving a body of work in commercial insurance for the glamour of leading an entire enterprise division, Wanner immersed himself in his ‘once in a lifetime’ opportunity. Within only three weeks, the division he was in charge with dissolved, and thus any chance of keeping the highest salary he’d ever received. With the only feasible option at the time to return to his old company, albeit in a junior sales rep role, Wanner began to rebuild from zero. “I was so determined to get back on track that I was making 200 cold calls on Saturday mornings on top of what I was already doing within the week. Within a couple of months building my book to a $1 million premium, I was promoted to management and relocated to Phoenix, Arizona to help run the west coast headquarters.”
Joe Wanner’s elasticity when life bounced him around is testament to his Mamba Mentality mindset and forward thinking. Despite his numerous setbacks he lives by an abundance mindset which includes visualizing a ‘3x’ goal so that you’re seeing past the finish line. “Significance in life isn’t about what happens to you, it’s what happens through you,” he shares. “It’s who you become in the process of pursuing what you consider to be a worthwhile goal.”
“If you want to build resilience you first have to distinguish your own goals and purpose … never lose sight of that.”
Joe Wanner is the ‘King of Cold Calling’ and currently channels an athletic methodology into a training system for high-performance sales professionals. Follow him across his socials to see how he helps others build systems … and resilience.
Written in partnership with Tom White
