The Importance of Call Dispositions & How to Leverage Them in Reporting

These days, revenue leaders have huge swaths of data right at their fingertips. Yet a lot of data is under-utilized, sitting in a silo, or simply not what they need to make informed decisions.

One of the most valuable pieces of data a sales leader can have is call dispositions. They provide a quick view of a call’s outcome and what the next step should be for the rep. They give everyone visibility inside the composition of the call to diagnose areas of improvement.

Call dispositions are a set of normalized values that your team members use to categorize the call once it’s completed.

The workflow looks like this:

1. Receive an inbound call or make an outbound call
2. Have conversation
3. Once call is over, hang up
4. Select the correct disposition and hit save
5. Optionally, if you have conversation intelligence software, request coaching on the call

To further illustrate what call dispositions might look like, here are three examples from organizations with different sales motions:

Outbound Prospecting (Cold Calling)

• No Answer; No Voicemail
• LVM (Left Voicemail)
• Gatekeeper
• Connect; No Conversation
• Convo: Not a No; Not a Yes
• Convo: Meeting Scheduled
• Convo: No
• Convo: Referral
• Convo: Company Poor Fit
• Convo: Rescheduling
• Meeting Confirmation

Inbound Lead Follow-Up

• No Answer; No Voicemail
• Left Voicemail
• Connected – DM: Qualified, App Follow Up
• Connected – DM: Call Back Requested
• Connected – DM: Qualified, App Taken by Phone
• Connected – DM: Qualified, Not Interested
• Connected – DM: Disqualified
• Connected – Gatekeeper or Future Follow Up
• Inactive/Wrong Number
• External Verification
• DNC (Do Not Contact)

Full Sales Cycle

• No Answer; No VM
• LVM
• Gatekeeper (Admin, S/B, Other Person)
• Connect – Convo: Discovery Scheduled
• Connect – Convo: No
• Connect – Convo: Other Outcome
• Discovery Call
• Demo Call
• POC Call
• Proposal Review Call
• Follow Up Call

These call dispositions can be a critical piece of the puzzle to understand a rep’s performance. When you marry the disposition with call recording insights, you can answer things like:

• What percentage of our calls are resulting in meaningful interactions with real buyers compared with gatekeepers or non-buyers?
• How many of those conversations are ending in positive, neutral, or negative outcomes?
• Which lead sources are performing better than others?
• Which teams under different managers are most skilled at handling different lead sources?
• Who is using dispositions correctly? For example, an 8-minute call with a disposition of left voicemail (LVM) probably indicates that the rep is getting lazy and simply picking the one at the top of the list.
• What is the difference between our calls that end in a positive disposition vs. a neutral or negative disposition?
• Are our reps even using our messaging correctly? Is it working? How can we adjust our marketing campaigns from lessons learned?
• Why are prospects and customers saying no to next steps? What can we do better to avoid or overcome objections?
• What are our best reps doing differently in their positive calls that can be trained and coached into our B-players?

Call dispositions absolutely MUST be customized to your organization. There is no generic list that fits every type of sale and every product/offering. The key to great call dispositions is to create the fewest options possible while making sure the choices are intuitive and capture 98% of the scenarios your team will encounter. It’s okay to leave out dispositions for extreme edge cases that almost never happen.

Why Call Disposition Should Be in Your Reports

One of the biggest challenges sales executives face is understanding what’s really happening on the sales floor. Metrics like the number of dials, leads converted, and opportunities created only tells a sliver of the story.

Dispositions provide an additional layer of depth into sales performance. For example, let’s compare the activities of a few reps:

Rep X made 163 dials yesterday.

Rep Y made 83 dials.

Rep Z made 526 dials.

It appears that Rep Y is slacking off, right? Let’s dive deeper:

The dispositions show Rep Y actually has the second-highest number of meetings scheduled, despite having the lowest number of dials. Rep Y is really good on the phone converting a much higher number of prospects into positive next steps. Even though Rep Z has one more meeting scheduled, it took that rep 650% more dials to achieve that result. Rep Y is working smarter, not harder.

This is called rep efficiency.

If the company runs an expensive and high-value marketing campaign, which rep would you want to receive the leads? Rep Y of course.

Using call disposition in your reports will help reduce the number of questions regarding high activity with low productivity and highlight rep efficiency. It also helps managers and leaders hone in on things like lead assignment, workflow optimization, and which reps are having the most effective conversations.

With so many benefits, it’s hard to believe more companies aren’t using call dispositions. How are you using the data from the dispositions to help you understand areas of performance improvement?

Watch: How to Spot Skill Gaps in Existing Sales Reports