Million Dollar Sales Secrets: Learn From A Pro Who Closes $2M+ In High Ticket Sales Every Year w/ Caitlin Cogan Doemner
Ever hear of a “miming camp for Jesus” before?
Neither had I…
But as interesting as that sounds, that’s where today’s podcast guest Caitlin Cogan Doemner met her future husband, Michael, when she was 14.
Today, they are co-CEOs of SalesMap.me where they have generated over $10,000,000 in new revenue for their clients within the last 7 years… and Caitlin personally closes about $2M in high-end coaching sales each year.
In today’s episode, you will learn:
- How Caitlin is going to travel the world to all 7 continents with her 3 kids… while running her business remotely
- How to create and sell products that people actually WANT… with heart (and what that means)
- How YOU can develop unshakable optimism and turn bad experiences into transformative springboards for growth.
Choose The Best History For You
Caitlin met her future husband (Michael) when she was 14 years old and they immediately became best friends.
But eventually, Michael started dating someone else, they got pregnant, and one of the worst days in Caitlin’s life was when she ended up being a photographer at his wedding. In her head, she wasn’t good enough and Michael had chosen the prettier, more popular girl.
Many years later, after Caitlin had a broken engagement and Michael got divorced, they had a conversation where Caitlin asked Michael, “What’s the story you tell yourself about what happened to us back in high school?”, to which Michael responded:
“You were the only girl I ever met who I thought was too good for me.”
In that moment, Caitlin realized the power of paradigm shifts. The same set of facts can have two completely different interpretations, and those interpretations become a reality.
“In the absence of definitive truth, always tell the story that protects your confidence, self-esteem, and self-worth… because nine times out of ten, that is the true story. And that’s what’s going to help you become the person that you need to be to persevere. Choose the best history for you… It’s a beautiful way to reclaim power, rewrite your story, turn you from a victim into a victor and to completely change your future as a result.”
Find Your “Seeds Of Genius”
Sometimes you can find little “seeds of genius” embedded in your earliest memories that you can use to build a business that’s naturally in alignment with who you are.
The more alignment you have with your strengths, the faster your business will grow and the happier you’ll be throughout the process.
“When other girls were playing with Barbies, I was playing Empress and building my empire. Now I build companies and it’s just on a grander scale.”
On Creating An “Irresistible Offer”
“In my very first business, I spent three months developing this amazing curriculum to help you start your business from scratch. When I took it to the market, it was crickets and two people bought it. [To avoid that mistake] what we do now is we go to the market first and we start asking them what they want and need and we identify what the gap is.”
To create an irresistible offer, start by identifying 3 things:
- What you know and who you are
- Your experience
- Your passions
“As an entrepreneur, your job description is to go find problems and create profitable solutions for them. You’re a problem hunter.”
In order to create a profitable business, you have to solve the right problems. Caitlin teaches that we need to identify problems to solve that check three boxes. The problems must be:
- Pervasive
- Urgent
- Expensive
In other words, you’re looking to solve a problem that is pervasive, urgent, and expensive that fits naturally with your experience, passions, and personality.
Once you’ve identified this, your next step is to interview 10 people and get their feedback.
“Not only will they tell you what they want, but then you can go ahead and sell it to them so you have an immediate infusion of cash. Then you go build it because they’ve just told you what they wanted. Don’t waste time guessing and building something that nobody wants.”
“Also, if you’re a good listener and take copious notes, they will write your copy for you. All of your marketing material will have the copy written because all you’re doing is transcribing your target market’s words for them.”
BF: A famous adage from copywriting legend Robert Collier is to “enter the conversation already occurring in the prospect’s mind.” When you know your customers better than they know themselves, they will trust you implicitly and be excited to buy any products you create.
How To Scale & Find The Perfect Pricing Strategy: Sell It Thrice, and Raise The Price
“My rule of thumb is to sell it thrice, and then raise the price. After you sell something three times, you’ll know what you’re really selling, what they really want, and what you’re willing to give. One of my clients went from a $5,000 program to a $20,000 program in six months by just selling it thrice and raising the price.”
“Eventually you’ll find a plateau where you find where the value you’re giving and the value that’s perceived levels out. And that’s usually where your price point is.”
Once you’ve identified the price, then you have to shift to keep the price the same while replacing yourself from within the offer.
But it all boils down to selling something first. THEN build it. THEN put marketing behind it. THEN create a business plan around it.
BF: Many people make sales incredibly complicated when it doesn’t have to be. You don’t need a sexy website or crazy funnel to sell. At the time we recorded this episode, Caitlin was selling her $50,000 coaching package using a Google Doc, and has also sold a $300,000 offer without a website.
Learn How To “Flex In Your Knees”
In February 2017, Caitlin was on top of the world.
She took her family on a two week vacation to Hawaii and watched as her company had the biggest revenue month ever while she sat on the beach sipping mai thais.
But then in less than two weeks after coming home, they had had one client fire them, one client cancel a contract, and one client stole their team out from under them and didn’t pay them $100,000 in commissions.The entire company imploded in less than a month.
“I remember sitting and doing dishes, and just bawling… like ‘what the FUCK?’ [That situation] made me realize that it was time to go back to the basics.”
“What you learn as an entrepreneur is that you need to flex in your knees. You must learn to bounce a bit because there’s something freeing and exhilaratingly terrifying about being in control of your own income at all times. [This situation] wasn’t something that was happening to us, it was happening for us, and there’s always a breakdown before the breakthrough.”
“[To get out of that situation] it was a matter of thinking very logistically, I was like: ‘OK, well, we need money. What do I do better than anything else? I close deals.’ So I reached out to a former client and I was like, ‘I know I built your sales team, but any chance you need a closer?’”
“So I went on her team and I closed for her for two and a half years and got our family to a comfortable place financially. I personally closed $2.5M in one year for her. Sometimes you need very strange experiences to stretch you and to get you accustomed to something completely different. But once you’ve stretched, you don’t go back.”
On Optimism & Being “Cosmic Babies”
“I struggled with suicidal depression growing up. I almost didn’t make it to my 16th birthday. What really helped me shift was a quote from Albert Einstein when he said, ‘The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or hostile universe.’”
“I genuinely believe that everything is always working out for my highest good and the highest good of all involved… This is what I tell my kids: ‘if you can’t see how this is serving you, take heart because you are not at the end of the story.’
“If you’ve ever read a story and nothing bad happened to the hero, that story actually sucks after age five. So we need to have the whole “hero’s journey” that Joseph Campbell talks about. It goes into depth, depression, and deep darkness. And it’s the coming out that makes the story fascinating, interesting, and relevant.”
“So I actually believe that we choose our lives. I know this is a little odd, but I think we choose our lives like little cosmic babies. We look down and we say, ‘that’s the life I want.’
“We pick out the abusive parent and the narcissistic husband. I had a miscarriage. If you can just use this as a thought experiment and say, ‘what if what if I actually chose this to happen to me, through me, and for me?’”
“Your brain is a solution finding machine. If you assume that it’s working for you, your brain will figure out how to interpret the circumstances so that you understand why this is happening for you as opposed to why this is happening to you.”
“So really, if you can believe whether you have evidence or not a priori, like just make a decision that everything is always working out for your highest good in the highest good of all involved, it just takes so much pressure off your shoulders. It allows you to interpret everything — positive, negative, like good, bad — and you give everybody the benefit of the doubt, including the cosmos, and it really ends up usually playing out that way if you just give it long enough.”
Sales Isn’t Evil, Icky, or Sleazy... It’s Love.
“Ten years ago when I started my business, I hated sales. I just thought sales was evil and icky and sleazy. The mindset shift I had to make was to believe that sales is an act of love and service.”
“Traditionally, if you’re good at sales, you might have a three in ten chance of closing them. That means that you lose 70% of the time. But if you get on the phone call and your objective is to love and serve the person on the other end of the phone, it puts the ball completely in your own court. There is nothing that they can do to keep you from loving them and serving them. So you are guaranteed to win 100% of the time.”
“And loving and serving them sometimes means letting them go and saying ‘this isn’t the right service for you, but let me refer you to somebody who can help you.’ And sometimes it’s fighting for them.”
“So when you’re having a sales conversation, if you really believe that this is what’s going to change their life, you have a moral obligation to take a stand for them — not to push them into a closed deal because you want a commission check, but to stand for them against their own demons and say, ‘This is possible for you. I believe in you. You can do this.’ And when you can get that rooted in your love and service of the other, you become unstoppable.”
How To Use Sales To Wrestle Your Own Internal Demons
Sales forces you to come up against your own limiting beliefs and demons in every sales conversation.
You know what you believe because you see what you buy into. So if somebody says they don’t have enough time, money, or they have to talk to a specialist… you let them buy into that, therefore you subconsciously buy into that objection yourself.
So you have to get past your own limiting beliefs about money, time, what is or what is not possible for yourself. And then you can fight for your prospect on the call with them.
How To Use “Triggering Experiences” To Evolve
The next time something “triggers” you or pisses you off, lean into it and get excited.
Use the experience as an opportunity to figure out how to detach from the emotional experience, gain deeper self-awareness, and love the world in a different way than you had been loving it previously.
Action Items:
Journaling prompts:
- What stories are you telling yourself that are damaging your confidence, self-esteem, and self-worth? How can you rewrite the story and choose the best history for you that gives you the most power?
- Journal on your earliest memories. What did you play with as a kid? What did you love doing? Sometimes you’ll discover your “seeds of genius” were apparent before the age of seven. Are you using those strengths in your business today? If not, how can you? And if you aren’t, how can you use more of your strengths?
- The next time you get triggered, turn inside and ask yourself why? Why did that trigger you? What part of your ego do you need to let go of? Use the triggering experience as an opportunity to journal and evolve.
Create an irresistible offer, “sell it thrice, and raise the price”, and then remove yourself from the process to scale your business:
- Identify a problem that is pervasive, urgent, and expensive that fits naturally with your experience, passions, and personality.
- Interview 10 people and get their feedback. If they like what they see, sell it to them on the spot. If you get enough interest, THEN you can build the product. As a bonus, take copious notes on how they articulate their problems and use it in your sales copy.
- Sell it thrice, then raise the price. Do this until you hit a plateau where you find where the value you’re giving and the value that’s perceived levels out. That’s your price point.
- Next, shift to keep the price the same while replacing yourself from within the offer.