Referral Lab or Leadaura: tracking referrers or finding new ones

What Referral Lab does well

Referral Lab describes itself as "Purpose-built software for referral-driven dental specialists" for "Periodontists, oral surgeons, prosthodontists, endodontists, orthodontists, pediatric dentists and multi-specialty groups" (Referral Lab). It points at a real gap: "Practice management software tracks appointments. It does not track the relationships, conversions and revenue behind every referral source."

Its features page says it can "Score and tier every referring provider based on actual production, not gut feeling", with "Automatic scoring based on referral volume, consistency, and conversion". It also says "Dormancy Detection surfaces declining provider relationships within 30 days" (Referral Lab features). Setup is light: "No integration required. No IT department needed."

If you have a base of referring dentists and want to know which ones are growing and which are fading, that is exactly the job it is built for.

When tracking your referrers is enough

• You have a steady base of referring offices and your schedule is full.
• You've lost referrals from offices you know and want to catch the next slowdown early.
• You have several locations and want the same referral reporting across all of them.
• Your liaison needs to know which existing offices to visit this month.

In those cases, a tracker like Referral Lab, or the referral reports in your practice software, answers the question you have. You may not need Leadaura at all.

When you need new referring dentists

• A handful of offices send most of your cases, and losing one would hurt.
• You opened a new location and no one nearby knows you yet.
• Referring dentists retired, sold their practice or joined a dental group with its own specialists.
• General dentists near you started placing implants or doing extractions themselves.
• You want to reach offices that have never sent you a patient.

Referral Lab's Marketing Direction page says it helps "uncover opportunities hidden in plain sight" and points marketing "to the sources that matter most" (Referral Lab). Whether it finds general dentists who don't refer to you yet is not stated on the pages we read. Every feature we read works on providers who already refer.

That second list is the job Leadaura does. Enter your ZIP and a radius, and a run finds every general dentist in range, reads each office's own website for the procedures your specialty does, and ranks offices by how likely they are to refer, with the reason. Our guide on getting more referrals from general dentists covers what to do with the list.

Side by side

Referral Lab also lists "$749.99/mo" for 2 to 4 locations and "$999.99/mo" for 5 to 9 (Referral Lab pricing). Check its site for current details.

Using both

The two barely overlap. Use Leadaura to find and approach new offices. Once an office starts sending patients, track it in Referral Lab or in your practice software. Leadaura does not track referrals, and your next run skips the offices you already have, so each run adds new names. Our guide to the four kinds of dental referral software shows where each tool fits.

Before you reach out to anyone, read the referral outreach rules. Never offer anything of value in exchange for referrals, whichever tool built your list.

Try it on your area

Each office in a run comes with the owner and office manager, and a checked work email and direct line when we find them, plus an opener for the first call, a map, a visit route and a CSV. The data comes from public business listings, each office's own website, the national provider registry and public professional profiles (data sources).

Runs are available for periodontists, oral surgeons, endodontists, prosthodontists, orthodontists and oral medicine. You pay per run, from $99, with no subscription (pricing), and offices we can't deliver are refunded automatically. Preview your area free to see how many offices are in range.

Questions