It took the client at least an hour to give me a quick overview of what the company does, but I'll try to sum it up in a nutshell--they do a lot of things. Here are just a few of them:

Direct sales management. To put it simply, let's say you're HP and you want to sell more laptops. You call up MarketStar and say "I want to sell more laptops." They set up a program that includes all the necessary people with the necessary skillsets and they deliver sales. The alternative is to do it yourself, but do you really want to go through all the cost and hassle of building and managing a huge sales team when MarketStar already has it down to a science and can start immediately?

Channel training and marketing. If you don't know what the "channel" is then you can go learn about it somewhere else, but essentially one of the things MarketStar does is manage the channel for their clients. Your competence might be manufacturing, or supply chain management, or one of a hundred different business activities, but if you're like most other companies, your core competency is putting all of them together, because as time goes on you might end up outsourcing everything but the management of those you outsource to. Most companies outsource their mass media advertising and marketing to an ad agency. Most companies outsource manufacturing to companies in China. Many companies outsource customer service to firms that specialize in customer service, either on home soil or in other countries like India. And if you're looking to outsource the marketing and sales you do to the channel, then MarketStar is your company.

Those are just two examples. MarketStar also manages mystery shopper programs, product demos, and event marketing.

One thing I learned is that I've already met a lot of MarketStar employees and I didn't even know it. For example, I was looking at buying a wide-format color printer a few years ago, and I went to an HP office in Sandy to see a demo. They had a whole room set up with all sorts of printers and a guy walked me through the ones I was interested in. Turns out that guy didn't work directly for HP, even though he had an HP shirt on, he was actually a MarketStar employee.

Another thing MarketStar employees do is go around and train retail employees. If Verizon is getting a new Blackberry model in and their retail employees don't know anything about it then they can't do a very good job selling it, right? So MarketStar has reps who go around and train the Verizon employees on how to use the new devices and how to sell them. As far as the Verizon employees know these people are Blackberry employees, but they're really on the payroll at MarketStar.

Anyway, that's a very brief overview of the company's services. MarketStar mostly seems to work with large companies like HP, Microsoft, RIM, Sony, Motorola, and the like, but I found out they work with smaller companies as well. Maybe not companies with just five employees, $500K in revenue, and projections for $550K next year if things go awesome, but they seem to be willing to work with any company that can truly benefit from their services and scale.