Goals of Research Salespeople

Yesterday, we walked through the activities of research salespeople. So how does management measure the work they do? In five ways:

1. The broker vote of their client base
2. Internal vote from research analysts
3. Market share
4. Commissions
5. Cross selling

The first two indicate how well they are marketing the firm's research capabilities. Market share and commissions are the tangible results. Market share studies are run by third party firms and will be handled later. Cross selling is harder to measure. In large institutions, management encourages referrals to other product lines. In practice, this is hard for salespeople to do because they are staking their client relationship on another person who may or may not provide excellent service.