Bruce Law left the New York advertising world, came to Utah and helped market Novell during its heyday. He soon found he had caught the startup bug when helping launch one of Novell’s spinoffs. After leaving Novell to help grow a number of Utah companies such as NextPage and Knowlix, Law saw a great need in the state for outsourced marketing teams and founded Sprout Marketing in 2002.

Law is now considered one of the brightest marketing minds in the state and has the data to prove it. In just over five years, Sprout Marketing has helped launch more than 400 products for 100 companies resulting in $250 million in increased revenues for its clients.

Business Connect: What first prompted you to launch Sprout?
Bruce Law: In 2001, I was working for NextPage as the VP of marketing and happened to sit on the Utah Technology Council (UTC formally UITA) board. UTC was struggling with its identity and decided to host a roundtable with about 30 key executives to see how UTC could better serve them.

The three main points that came out of the meeting were raising capital, finding talent and changing the business environment in Utah. A fourth item that came out of the meeting was the need for sales and marketing talent. For some time, I’d observed many Utah tech companies that needed help with sales and marketing, but the data point validation at that meeting gave me the justification I needed to launch Sprout Marketing. I went to all of the VCs in town to let them and their portfolio companies know about the new type of agency I was creating with Sprout Marketing.

BC: How is Sprout different from other marketing or ad agencies?
BL: Sprout is basically a marketing and PR team for hire. We are positioned to help small- and medium-size companies validate their market position, then launch their product or service. The VCs I talked to said that their companies were in need of such a service as they’d had a difficult time finding and hiring expensive full-time VPs of marketing who could work with limited budgets and get traction for their companies. So I said, “Let’s collapse it all including marketing budget, team, resources and head count — all into one affordable package.”

You can usually hire Sprout for less than it costs to hire a marketing VP and you don’t need the long-term commitment involved with hiring a VP. You can turn us off or phase us out at any time. It’s a way to wade into the pool without just plunging into the deep end.

BC: What types of companies are your ideal clients?
BL: Many smaller companies don’t have any type of marketing plan, but they know they need one. Sometimes, the company has focused mostly on sales and always planned to get to marketing, but just hasn’t had the time. Or, they may have a marketing plan they’ve cooked up in their heads but it doesn’t yet exist. We can bolt on to that kind of organization and take them forward.

BC: What mistakes do you most often see companies make?
BL: Too often I see what I call “random acts of marketing” — companies that get a bit of cash from somewhere and say, “Let’s try this.” Six months later, they’ve churned through $50,000 with nothing to show for it.

A random act of marketing is like starting a new book vs. adding a chapter to an existing book. With random acts, nothing builds to any sort of conclusion. It’s too easy to fracture your message instead of make everything feed into one specific theme.

At Sprout we like to show clients that if they can look at specific approaches then spend money in certain ways, the revenue growth will happen. If you don’t approach it that way, you’ll just spend a lot of money and be disappointed.

We have a three-pronged philosophy: 1) We help with the foundational elements — brand, customer, messaging, identity, Web site; 2) We then focus on the plumbing — all the ways customers interact with the marketing machine; and 3) Once the plumbing is in place, we’re ready to go outbound and get people to beat a path to the door because we’ll be able to catch leads in the plumbing consistently since the foundation is right.

I find companies forget the first two, then they try a swing-for-the-fence move like getting on the cover of The Wall Street Journal or launching a huge ad campaign. Without the first two items in place, it’s hard to track anything or be able to effectively act on inquiries. Too often, you just spend a lot of money but don’t see anything change after it’s all said and done.

BC: Your clients average a 20 percent increase in leads after 90 days. How do you get that success in a short timeframe?
BL: Once you get really good at doing this type of marketing you start to see similarities across almost all industries — the same principles still apply. The way we go about bringing these companies out of obscurity is often the same regardless of the product so we don’t have to start from scratch with each new client. This allows Sprout to be quickly effective while helping out their bottom line.

I don’t like to be the kind of consultancy who says, “Here’s your binder and your bill. Good luck.” I want to take everything from strategy to execution and see the revenue line go up. Any good marketer tracks his or her success by increased revenues.