What is a Call Disposition, and How Can Measuring it Increase Sales ROI?

A call disposition describes the outcome of a call. They include statuses like, “demo scheduled,” “left voicemail”, and even “no longer in service.” In fact, customer service teams have actually logged call dispositions for years, and sales teams have followed to record call outcomes.

Call dispositions give sales managers valuable intelligence they can use to optimize their team’s phone performance and sales process. Best of all, properly implemented call dispositions are actually huge time savers, as they act as a one-click shorthand for call outcomes, and save reps lots of time in manual note-taking.

How Do Call Dispositions Work?

Imagine you’re an inside sales rep dialing down a list in the midst of an outbound call campaign. After each call you have to answer several questions. Did you reach the intended target? Is a follow up task required? If so, what action must be taken? Was the line busy? Was it the wrong number? Rather than manually taking notes then organizing and including them on a lead or contact record after every call, you can use a one-click call disposition in Revenue.io to instantly record the result and get on the phone again.

As a best practice, call dispositions should be set as a picklist in your CRM so they can be associated to a specific lead or contact record. Dispositions can then be used for reporting purposes and displayed in dashboards. This way, trends in call outcomes can be tracked in real-time while informing sales and marketing strategy.

Why Is Call Disposition Data Important?

Call disposition metrics provide sales manages with greater insight into their team’s sales performance and process. For example, a disproportionately high number of a particular call outcome can alert sales managers of an opportunity or problem. In Revenue.io, call dispositions can be completely customized depending on which outcomes and metrics are important to your business. These various dispositions can include:

Appointment Set – If a high number of calls in a campaign lead to appointments, then the campaign is likely generating high-quality leads. However, if calls with this disposition is disproportionally low, the campaign is underperforming.

Demo booked– For SaaS companies, metrics surrounding demos are absolutely essential for proper insight into SDR performance. If sales development reps don’t book enough demos, management needs to intervene and coach reps on the proper way to generate demos. Furthermore, if demos aren’t being booked, but your reps still perform well, it could indicate that your lead quality needs work.

Disconnection/No Longer in Service/Busy – If a large number of leads end in busy signals or disconnection messages, then it might be time to analyze the lead source and move in another direction. If Marketing has provided Sales with a high number of disconnected numbers, then it could mean that there’s a problem with the lead source. If reps are hitting voicemails or busy signals, you may need to adjust the time of day your reps are calling prospects.

Left Voicemail – If too many calls are going to voicemail, it could be time to do an audit to remove specific leads from follow-up lists that always go to voicemail so reps don’t waste their time calling them.

Left Live Voicemail – Are your reps having trouble getting past gatekeepers? If too many calls are ending with receptionists instead of key decision makers, it could be time to coach your team on ways to get past the gatekeeper.

Need to Nurture – Sometimes leads just aren’t ready to have a serious sales conversation. This disposition can be used to pull a list of leads that need further nurturing from marketers. Some Revenue.io clients even use this as a factor in lead scoring.

Rejected– Are a high volume of calls getting rejected or going unanswered? It could be time to try local presence, which has been proven to increase connection rates.

The Power of One-Click Call Dispositions

Sales managers love call dispositions because of the significant time savings they provide for their teams. Call dispositions remove the need for reps to waste time entering long and frivolous notes after each and every call, especially those who are usually not very enthusiastic about having to enter data into Salesforce.

Tools like Revenue.io’s Intelligent Dialer streamline this process by automating certain after-call actions and simplifying others. The dialer creates an easier method of logging data.

There’s another benefit to call dispositions as well. Like call notes templates, call dispositions standardize input, which means it gives you better visibility into the outcome of calls to monitor activity, track trends, identify patterns, and much more, across your entire org. Reps also benefit from leveraging call dispositions as a layer of added context when they do follow up prospects.

For more ways to improve sales processes check out our guide to the ROI of sales acceleration.