While watching late-night television this past weekend I fell prey to a barrage of ab machine type commercials, each showing an overly happy and well built spokesmodel extolling the gut flattening benefits of one machine, pill and potion after another. 

Each ad displayed small print low-lighting two critical points:  1) results in the ad were not typical 2) a sensible diet and exercise program was required to get results.

Marketing and lead generation programs are essentially the same.

As business people, we like the idea of revenue success being as simple as one sales training, copywriting, web design, brochure or print ad project away.  We like the idea there is a secret to attracting new business, but it just doesn't exist.  There is no magical format, training program or tactic that's a surefire success.

Please don't get me wrong, things like sales training, signage, well designed websites, and good ole' branding activities are valuable.  In many cases, retooling your business, sharping your staff, and getting greater exposure is the wise thing to do.  Just be aware these are the ab machine programs of business growth - they create untypical results and need the business equivalent of diet and exercise to be effective on a consistent basis.

While there is no secret to sales success, there is a formula that's guaranteed to grow revenue every time.  The formula is simply telling the right story to the right person at the right time.  If you do that, you're guaranteed sales success.  It's the diet and exercise of predictable and consistent revenue growth:

Right Story - The right story is the story the recipient recognizes as compelling - something they value as a benefit they're willing to invest in, both time and money.

The right story has two main elements:  format and content.  Format is the order, style, and skill in which the story is told.  Content is the story itself - the benefit, difference, reason to believe, guarantee, and offer.

When marketers speak of testing within a lead generation campaign, they most often mean testing the story, tweaking the format and content for best response.

Right Person - The right person is the recipient of your story who can act on the call to action you offer.  Depending on your market and complexity of selling environment, this may be the person to request, vote, direct, or organize a response to advance an opportunity.

Given your sales process and target market, the right person can be several different people over time - each requiring a matching offer and call to action that differs from the other.

Right Time - The right time is presenting your story within your prospective customer's window of opportunity to act.  If your offer arrives too late or too early your prospect will ignore your story.  This can be the case whereby you have a great meeting and a lot of agreement, but no action.

At different points of a purchase cycle, different calls to action and offers will be met with different levels of success.

As mentioned above, most testing of lead generation and marketing campaigns occurs around the story.  More testing should take place with the right person and right time.  The more we understand about our prospective customers, their interests, and their process - as it presents a window of opportunity and greater openness to specific offers - the greater our success in engaging with them in a meaningful way.

If you misfire on any three of these elements - right story, right person, right time - you're sure to under perform.  And all the sales training, web design, copywriting, and branding in the world won't make a difference.  It's like working yourself to death on the ab machine and then eating pizza and drinking beer every night.  Those six pact abs will look more like a keg.

What do you think?