Jefferies Research Sales - Cash Equity

(Sorry in advance for any errors/typos; will try to write this quickly. Please (anyone) correct me if I am mistaken anywhere, or leave out anything significant.)

Put simply:

Your job is to help bring institutional investor trading business to your firm, as their broker/dealer (i.e., to convince PMs to trade with you). Generally speaking, your firm wants to capture a larger share of his (the PM's) overall trade volume. Your particular role is to draw in his trading business via the firm's research product, which is available only to trading clients.

More detail:

The underlying rationale is that institutions will more or less trade cash equity product no matter what, and that institutional equities sales is a commodity product, with very tight margins due to increasing inefficiencies in the global cash equities marketplace. Thus firms link a differentiated research product to the sales product, which can effectively change the business of cash equities sales into one of research sales. It works in part because the clients (e.g. PMs) may not be especially sensitive to price (i.e. execution commission) given the overall efficiency of the market, and so are willing to direct their equities trading volume based on the perceived quality of the broker/dealer's research product.

This arrangement is mutually beneficial because of the synergies of the research product, particularly among full-service investment banks. For example, a robust research effort can serve to establish the credibility of the entire firm across all of its efforts, it can help inform the corporate finance coverage effort (note: this is uni-directional for regulatory reasons), etc.