How to read a dental marketing guarantee before you sign it

Every dental marketing company offers a guarantee now. Most of them are carefully worded to sound like your money back while promising something considerably softer.

This is not necessarily dishonest. A guarantee is a risk allocation, and reasonable people write them differently. But you should know which one you are being offered.

Six questions will tell you.

1. What exactly is being promised?

“We guarantee results” is not a promise. “We guarantee 25 booked appointments” is.

A real guarantee names a number and a unit. Appointments. Patients. Calls answered. Something that can be counted and that you could argue about afterwards.

If the promise is a percentage improvement, ask what it is a percentage of, and who measures the baseline.

2. What is the remedy if they miss?

This is where most guarantees quietly change shape.

The strong version is a refund of money you paid. The weaker version is continued service at no charge. The weakest is “we will keep working until we hit it,” which sounds similar but costs the vendor only time they were partly going to spend anyway.

None of these is wrong. But “money back” and “more work” are different products, and a lot of marketing copy blurs them deliberately.

3. Who qualifies?

Almost every guarantee has an eligibility condition, and it is usually buried.

A recall guarantee that requires a minimum list size is reasonable: you cannot promise to bring back 25 patients from a list of 80. But you need to know the threshold before you sign, not when you try to claim.

Ours is a good example of a condition you should expect to see. Our guarantee applies to practices with at least 500 patients overdue twelve months or more, with working phone numbers or addresses for them. That is not a loophole, it is arithmetic, but it is exactly the kind of thing you should look for in anyone else’s.

4. When does the clock start?

“Within 90 days” is meaningless until you know 90 days from what.

From signing? From your onboarding call? From the day the first campaign actually goes out? That last date can be weeks after the first, particularly if texting is involved and a carrier registration is still pending. We have written about why that delay happens.

Get the trigger defined in the agreement in words you could read aloud to a stranger.

5. What are the definitions?

A guarantee of 25 patients depends entirely on what counts as a patient.

Does a booked appointment count, or only one that was kept? What about a patient who books and reschedules? What about someone who was already going to come back anyway?

Reasonable answers exist for all of these. What matters is that they are written down. If the vendor defines the terms after the fact, the guarantee is whatever they say it is.

6. Where does the fine print live?

If a guarantee appears on a website with no link to its full terms, that is the finding.

A real guarantee has a page. The page has definitions, eligibility, the remedy and what happens if the two documents disagree. The headline version on the homepage links to it every single time it appears.

A note on the evidence offered alongside

Guarantees usually arrive wrapped in proof. Testimonials, case studies, a number of practices served.

Since October 2024, the FTC’s rule on consumer reviews and testimonials has prohibited fake reviews and testimonials, buying positive reviews, and suppressing negative ones, with civil penalties available per violation. That is a useful thing to know as a buyer, because it means unverifiable proof is now a legal risk for the vendor as well as a credibility problem.

So it is entirely fair to ask: can I speak to one of these practices? A vendor with real references will put you on the phone. A vendor without them will explain why they cannot.

We do not publish testimonials, because we do not have any yet. That is the honest version of the same answer, and you should hold anyone making bigger claims to the higher standard.

The short version

Print the guarantee. Find the number, the remedy, the eligibility, the start date and the definitions. If any of the five is missing, ask. If you get a vague answer, you have learned what you needed to know.

Ours is here in full, fine print included. And if you are still at the shortlist stage, twelve questions worth asking any agency.