3 Cold-Calling Secrets From Sara Blakely, Founder of Spanx
These three cold-calling tips can help your salespeople become wildly more productive on the phone
By | David Walter | www.entrepreneur.com
There’s a reason why Spanx founder Sara Blakely can teach us so much about cold calling, and it has nothing to do with how great she is at creating inventions. Before becoming an entrepreneur herself, she sold fax machines in Florida for seven years, where her insight into this specific skill set became invaluable when starting up.
It was her knowledge of cold calling that turned out to be pivotal in landing her first sale of Spanx, as she cold-called the buyer for Neiman Marcus and landed her first large order of Spanx. She also used cold calling to find her patent lawyer and apparel manufacturer, which were both critical to her ultimate success as an entrepreneur.
Here are three specific cold-calling lessons we can glean from her experiences on her entrepreneurial journey.
1. The power of visualization
When her dad left the family, he gave her a collection of cassette tapes featuring motivational speaker Wayne Dyer. Later on, she followed Tony Robbins and other famous speakers who taught about visualization. This helped lead to her cold-calling success. She even credits the power of visualization to getting her on the Oprah Winfrey Show.
However, many of those that want to succeed remain skeptical about the power of the Law of Attraction — even though countless entrepreneurs who have attained success attest to the power of visualization and manifestation as the key to their success. So let’s learn from Blakely’s example and start listening to motivational speakers.