I got a pitch today that got past my gatekeeper and despite my skepticism, I let him talk for 15 minutes (he’s obviously a better cold caller than I am…)  Anyway, I wanted to see if anyone else here had used them and if so, what kind of success rate was experienced.

  The gist of the pitch is this: There's a good-sized hospital in a community about 45 minutes from me with roughly 5,000 employees.  The hospital has what amounts to an employee discount card that lists various exclusive providers for different services.  Obviously mine would be for investment management & retirement planning services.  All providers have to offer a courtesy service, incentive or discount, which in my case would simply be a free initial consultation (whoopee...I do that now anyway).  they do some other nice things like link your website address to the employee portal and give you exposure in the quarterly employee newsletter, with the goal being that several retiring employees end up becoming clients, paying for the advertisement fee many times over.  I've checked them out to some degree and they appear legit.   While it wouldn't take much action to justify the fee, after considering it, I'm disinclined to participate, mostly due to the distance and the lack of my name recognition in the other town.  If it were here in town where I enjoy fairly good name recognition and am a 10-minute drive from about any resident, I would give it strong consideration, as it wouldn't take much extra action to justify it.  A $100K MF or annuity ticket would pay the fee several times over.   At any rate, if any of you have worked with an outfit like this, I'd be interested in hearing about your experiences...