When ABA clinic referrals slow down, the instinct is to do more marketing. Run ads. Redesign the website. Hire a sales rep. But nine times out of ten, the answer is sitting in your existing provider relationships.
An audit of your provider relationships will tell you which referral sources are strong, which are fading, and which are gone. You can do it in 90 minutes, and it almost always reveals two or three relationships that could be producing referrals again with a little focused attention.
Here’s the step-by-step process to audit provider relationships for your ABA clinic.
Step 1: Build Your Complete Provider List
Pull together every provider or office that has referred a family to your clinic in the past 18 months. Check your intake records, your CRM, your outreach team’s notes, and your intake coordinator’s memory. For each one, record:
- Provider name and practice
- Primary contact person at the office
- Referrals in the last 6 months
- Referrals in the prior 6-12 months
- Date of last referral
- Date of last contact from your team (any type)
Also add offices you’ve been actively prospecting, even if they haven’t referred yet. Mark these as “prospective” so you can evaluate whether your outreach is producing results or just consuming time.
Step 2: Sort Every Provider Into Three Categories
Go through the list and assign each provider to one of three groups. Do this with your outreach team, not alone. They’ll have context about relationships that your data might miss.
Warm: Active, Engaged, Referring
Referred in the last 90 days OR responded to outreach in the last 30 days. Your team has a relationship with at least one person in the office. These are your most valuable relationships.
Dormant: Used to Be Active, Now Quiet
Referred families previously but not in the last 90+ days. Communication has slowed or stopped. This is where your biggest opportunities are hiding, because these offices already know you. For practices struggling with retention alongside dormant referrals, strong caregiver collaboration often reignites both.
Inactive: No Meaningful Engagement
No referrals in 6+ months. Little or no communication. These might be offices you visited once and never followed up.
For a detailed framework on how to categorize and manage each tier, see our referral source categorization guide.
Step 3: Diagnose What Changed With Your Dormant Providers
Dormant relationships are the highest-ROI target in this entire audit. A provider who used to refer and stopped is much easier to re-engage than a cold contact.
For each dormant provider, investigate four questions. You won’t always get clean answers, but asking will point your team in the right direction:
- Did our contact person leave? Staff turnover at pediatric offices is constant. The person who knew your name may be gone, replaced by someone who doesn’t know your clinic exists.
- Did we drop the ball? Check your records. Did your team miss a planned follow-up? Did a referred family have a bad intake experience? Sometimes referrals stop because of one specific event that nobody addressed.
- Did a competitor start showing up? Another ABA clinic may have filled the gap while your team was absent. This isn’t fatal, but it means you’ll need to bring more value when you reconnect.
- Did the practice change? Some offices shift their patient focus over time. A pediatrician who used to see many children on the spectrum may have brought on a new partner with a different patient base.
Step 4: Prioritize Where to Spend Your Team’s Time
Not every dormant relationship is worth reviving. Use these criteria to sort your list:
High priority (re-engage this month): Referred 3+ families in the past year. Went dormant within the last 6 months. Your team had a genuine relationship with the office. If you’re evaluating whether to re-engage or build new relationships in a new expansion territory, use these same priority tiers.
Medium priority (re-engage this quarter): Referred 1-2 families. Some communication history exists. The office sees children likely to need ABA.
Low priority (monitor or archive): One referral years ago with no relationship since. Office focus shifted away from your patient demographic. Multiple outreach attempts with zero response.
Step 5: Create a Re-Engagement Plan for Each Priority Contact
For each high-priority dormant relationship, write down three things: who on your team will reach out, what value they’ll lead with, and when they’ll do it.
The “what value” part is critical. Don’t reach out with “just checking in” (that doesn’t work). Lead with something useful: a resource for their office, an update on a shared family, new information about insurance changes, or an offer for a brief training.
For medium-priority contacts, schedule outreach over the quarter. Spread it across weeks so your team isn’t trying to reconnect with fifteen offices in one week.
For low-priority contacts, try one more value-based touchpoint. If there’s no response in 90 days, move them to an annual check-in list and stop spending weekly energy on them.
Step 6: Turn This Into an Ongoing System
A one-time audit catches problems. A monthly review prevents them. After the initial audit, set a 30-minute monthly check-in to review:
- Any provider that moved from warm to dormant (catch it fast)
- Re-engagement progress for dormant providers
- Planned outreach that didn’t happen (this reveals capacity issues)
- Any new referral sources to add to the system
Pair this with a proper relationship tracking system and your team will never be surprised by a referral drop again.
Run the Audit This Week
Block 90 minutes. Pull your team together. Go through the list. The referrals you recover from just one or two re-engaged relationships will pay for the time many times over.
If you’ve been wondering why you have great relationships but aren’t getting referrals, this audit will show you exactly where the gaps are.
Want help building a complete referral marketing system for your ABA clinic? Explore our services.