Meet Bill Bice Bill Bice has always been an entrepreneur, starting his first company at age 14, putting on road races with corporate sponsors. At 18, he started ProLaw Software, the first integrated ERP for law firms. After selling the company to Thomson Reuters, Bill became a VC as a founding partner in the Verge Fund, investing in high tech, high growth companies in the Southwest. Bill is the CEO of boomtime, the Word of Mouth marketing company. So you've built and invested a lot of businesses what's been the biggest challenge? It really is that good of market I mean, that's the reason I started Boomtime which was my frustration in getting great marketing for the companies that I started. I mean, it's a tough thing to do really well. And it's really tough as business owners to make the necessary commitment behind marketing because just like always spending money and not getting results, and there's some key reasons for that. What are some of the most common mistakes that you see people making in their marketing? I think there's two really big ones. So what I consider the biggest mistake in marketing is talking about yourself because nobody cares. And marketing is so much more effective if you flip that around, and really pay attention to what your audience cares about. If you instead turn it into insight, perspective driven help that you're giving to your audience, it becomes so much more effective. And then you get to the really hard part, which is the second step, which is that you've got to do it consistently. There is no magic trick in marketing. It's actually really hard work that has to be done day in and day out for it to be effective. You've done a lot of work in B2B sales, applying the challenger sale, what have you learned in doing that? The challenger sale is all about creating new sales opportunities that wouldn't otherwise exist. If your business works where you can just be an order taker, then that's great. But if you're doing something that's complex and has multiple decision makers as high value, then then you need to be able to create new sales opportunities. Let's be consultative, let's make everything in our marketing have this perspective, insight driven approach, get your audience to think about the things that you're really good at, give them a different perspective. And if you do that you'll create new sales opportunities that didn't exist before. Can you share with our listeners, one of your favorite networking stories or experiences that you've had? I'm very much an introvert at heart, but yet to do what I want to do, I have to go out in the world and talk to people. I love LinkedIn for this very reason. Because it's like the perfect cocktail party, it's going to be a room full of only exactly the people I want to meet, I get to do it under my control, I don't have to eat horrible food at the same time, and I get to build a network of exactly the right people that I want to talk to. I found that if you treat that the same way that you would that cocktail party where when you meet somebody, you just don't dive into a sales pitch, you have to build a relationship first. If you do that same thing on LinkedIn, that works really well. It's been the perfect way for me to build my network and be able to get my message out. How do you stay in front of or best nurture your network? If you do a regular flow, and this is what's really hard, quite frankly, is because 90% of the effort is great content. And most companies have a really tough time doing that internally, you've got all the ideas, but actually executing on it day in and day out is really tough. You got a business to run and sitting in front of a blank screen doesn't get you there. So you know what, the only way to solve that problem is to build a network of subject matter experts who are able to write that stuff. So I think you have to outsource it. The ideas have to come from you. The really hard part is getting the voice,...