An operations director at a growing ABA group once sat down to hire a marketing vendor and realized halfway through the first call that she could not actually describe what she wanted done. She knew calls were being missed. She knew families sometimes went a week without hearing back. What she did not have was a written brief: what the vendor should measure, what counted as success, or what happened if the numbers did not move. The vendor she hired built a plan around what he assumed she needed, and six months later neither of them could say whether it had worked.
This happens more often than practice owners admit. Marketing and intake vendors are hired the way a contractor might be hired to paint a room: based on a general sense of the problem rather than a specific brief. For a service as regulated and as high-stakes as ABA therapy, that gap between what is asked for and what gets delivered can cost a practice both revenue and its standing with the families it did not call back in time.
What a real brief actually contains
A useful brief starts with the current state, stated in numbers rather than impressions. How many inquiries came in last month, through which channels, and how many were converted to a scheduled evaluation. Most practices do not have these numbers on hand, which is itself useful information: it tells the vendor that part of the engagement needs to include building basic tracking before anything else can be measured.
From there, the brief should specify response time expectations, who owns follow-up when the vendor is not the one answering the phone, and how personal health information is handled at every step a lead passes through a vendor's system. A practice considering inquiry follow-up for aba practices as a specific line item, rather than a vague "marketing help" request, tends to get a proposal that can actually be evaluated against something concrete.
Asking for guarantees the right way
Contractual performance guarantees are reasonable to ask for, but they need to be about the right thing. A vendor should not guarantee clinical outcomes, insurance approvals, or a specific number of enrolled clients, because none of that is fully within a marketing vendor's control. What a vendor can reasonably commit to are lead generation and marketing performance metrics: response time targets, contact rate, cost per qualified inquiry, and reporting cadence.
Transparency in the brief itself matters as much as transparency in the reporting that follows. If a vendor is vague about how leads will be tracked, what counts as a "qualified" inquiry, or what data the practice will retain ownership of, that vagueness in the sales process tends to carry through into the engagement. A battle-tested vendor, one that has actually managed intake for other ABA practices, should be able to answer these questions specifically rather than in general terms.
It is worth writing into the brief who is authorized to speak on the practice's behalf when a vendor is representing it to prospective families, and what language is off limits. A vendor should never be implying clinical outcomes, promising insurance coverage, or describing services the practice does not actually offer. Spelling this out in advance protects the practice's reputation as much as it protects the vendor from overstepping.
None of this needs to be complicated to write. A one-page brief with current numbers, a clear scope, defined reporting, and a stated review point at ninety days gives a vendor enough to build a real proposal against, and it gives the practice something concrete to hold that vendor to later. Strategy and planning up front is what turns a vague marketing spend into a system a practice can actually evaluate and adjust, rather than a monthly invoice nobody quite understands.
Sign in to leave a comment.