This is the TitanX newsletter, where GTM is built on conversations, targeting, and, of course, Phone Intent™ - Read more.
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I remember the first time I learned about cold call dispositions. I thought it couldn’t be very hard, just a picklist of 3 or 4 options based on the outcome of the call.
Then I bought a dialer and realized their default disposition set had 10 options. I had no idea what to do with them.
Then I met Justin Middleton and realized how little I understood about the importance of dispositions.
Like most pipe gen teams, I treated call dispositions as a “necessary evil” bit of admin work: gathering data, but with totally unrelated next steps for contacts in each disposition bucket.
They simultaneously have:
A scary-long list of dispositions that include things like “left vm”, “bad path,” “number wrong,” “gatekeeper,” etc.
A binary-state system. Dispositions essentially tell you whether something became a meeting or didn’t (because all the dispositions that aren’t “meeting booked” are meaningless).
Not us. At TitanX, dispositions are not a status or mere description of what happened. They cannot be grouped into “meeting” and “not meeting” because we treat contacts differently based on those dispositions.
Dispositions are direction forward. They define next steps.
If you become a customer, we’ll give you a rigorous lesson on Disposition Science. Joey’s posted about it a few times on LinkedIn, too:
Until then, I’ll give you the most important bit:
“Activated.”
That’s how world-class teams turn every conversation into progress.
"Meeting booked" is not the only win
Most SDR teams think they’re working towards binary outcomes: you either booked the meeting or you didn't.
When that’s the case, I usually see everything that isn't a meeting get dumped into generic nurture, recycled into an undifferentiated call queue, or left in a CRM note that nobody reads.
But think about this scenario your sales development reps encounter regularly:
A VP of Sales says their CEO is too cheap to invest in new tools. Your rep shares some numbers. By the end, the VP is saying "oh, well I didn’t realize that..." But no meeting is booked.
Clearly, that’s ‘not a meeting’.
But it’s also not: "not interested” or "call back later." That person's thinking changed during the conversation.
We call this an Activated Lead.
Leads get the “Activated” disposition when the prospect showed one or more of the Three I's:
This is worth disambiguating.
Intent sounds like:
"Yeah, our connect rates are bad, but we're not doing anything about it yet. We’ve got other fish to fry. No, probably not next month. I don’t know when."
They acknowledge the problem, and that the timing isn’t quite right. That might sound like it should be a ‘Not Now’ disposition, but there’s a difference:
A ‘Not Now’ prospect needs different timing. An ‘Activated’ prospect due to showing intent needs time.
They’re different from a ‘Not Now’ prospect because a prospect who showed intent will probably think about their problem between now and the next time you talk - they just can’t say when that will be. A ‘Not Now’ prospect has a specific time they can think about this, and it’s… not now. They won’t think about this until their specific later date.
(By the way, the ‘Intent’ I’m talking about here is different from Phone Intent: our proprietary scoring algorithm that tells you how likely it is that one of your prospects will answer the phone when you call.)
Intrigue is:
"Huh… I’m a little embarrassed to admit, but I never realized I was wasting resources calling contacts who almost never pick up the phone. Just kind of figured that was the game."
Something in the pitch cracked through the status quo. They're thinking differently, asked a few questions, see a problem for the first time, or see the problem in a genuinely new light.
Intrigue is different from Interest because they’re not asking for more yet. The signal is that they stayed on the line and talked for a bit. That’s meaningful and worth following up on.
Interest sounds like:
"Hm. Could you send me a comparison of how that’s different from what ZoomInfo’s hot leads feature?"
SDRs often get the “send me something” request.
It can be hard to tell when it’s a semi-polite brush-off, or genuine interest. If a prospect is asking for more, it could be they’re uncomfortable saying “leave me the hell alone,” so they figure they’ll move you to their inbox where they’ll ignore you forever.
So, weirdly, ‘Interested’ and ‘Not Interested’ prospects can show a lot of the same behaviors.
But a prospect is interested if they ask questions, if there’s a clear reason they want a specific kind of follow-up. They've self-selected into wanting further information that addresses a particular question.
“Send me some stuff,” where “stuff” is undefined, comes from ‘Not Interested’ prospects. If your reps have trouble telling the difference, tell them to ask what the prospect will do with the content they send over.
Quick, but important note on measurement and objectives
This is really the subject for a whole ‘nother newsletter, but if you’re goaling your SDRs on meetings booked and that outcome alone, they have very little incentive to take dispositions seriously.
To them, their paycheck is “meetings booked” and everything else is by definition “not a meeting”. No matter how granular or specific your dispositions are, you’ve created a mental model for them tied to their very compensation that defines everything in a binary way.
Tell me how you measure me and I will tell you how I will behave.
In your effort to get them to adhere to your disposition definitions, you’ll end up wielding the stick (as opposed to the carrot) A LOT. Which is frustrating for you, tiring for reps, and still doesn’t get you quality data.
You need a carrot too. Besides, conversations are the atomic unit of sales.
Which is why at TitanX, we goal our SDRs on conversations, not just meetings booked.
This means reps have success every time they have a conversation. It’s then part of the job to characterize that conversation. Because they’re getting paid for the conversation no matter what, it’s not a distraction from their compensatory efforts to do so.
It works for us because:
Meetings are a natural consequence of good conversations
It helps reps have lower-pressure conversations (which prospects like)
It frees reps up to treat every conversation as a chance to learn, so we don’t throw every “not meeting” into a pile of leads we learned nothing from.
It’s about the lessons you learn along the way
Back to that point I made earlier: outbound is about more than meetings. Reps talking to prospects is the single most direct way you can gather intel from your market at the point when it matters most. It’s impossible to overstate the value of the insights you can gather.
Every call creates confirmed signals: information you can only get from a live conversation. In most organizations, that information dies in a CRM note.
So if you’ve got a system that forces anything resembling binary outcomes, you lose every time a real conversation gets filed under "everything else/not a meeting."
You lose what the prospect told you:
whether they're hiring
whether budgets are tight
whether priorities are shifting
whether timing is good or bad
whether someone else at the company might be a better entry point
Plus, when 80-90% of real conversations register as failures because they’re not meetings, you’ll drive the wrong behaviors. Reps rush to pitch, pressure for meetings, get happy-ears and mis-categorize borderline outcomes because the only "successful" result is a calendar invite.
Miss the “Activated” disposition, and you’re training your team to optimize for the wrong metric.
What ‘Activated’ can tell you
When you use the “Activated” disposition, you will create more pipeline, and you will learn important things that help you do so more efficiently.
We ran a 90-day analysis across every cold call, broken down by prospect title:
Manager level: 7.6% activated. Our script speaks directly to the pain they feel, and they want to fix it, but they're usually not the buyer.
Director level: 2.7% activated, which is too low for our liking. There were lots of "Not Me" and “Referred” dispositions, too: 32% of all calls. Tells us our messaging reads like a manager script delivered to someone who doesn't own the problem.
VP level: 2.2% activated. Tells us we need to work on our messaging. There weren’t too many referrals, though, which tells us we CAN get traction at this level when we fix our messaging.
Activation rates by title tell you where your messaging is weak, not where your reps are bad.
Most teams can't do this analysis because they don't have the disposition category. You can't optimize what you don't measure. And without an Activated disposition, you're flying blind on the exact data that would tell you how to improve your pitch by persona, your coaching by rep, and your list strategy by segment.
What to build instead
This is how we set up our dispositions and the different follow-up actions each demands:
And here are six of the most important details you cannot overlook when you’re building a system like this.
Route activated leads to your AE team with full context.
These leads should go into your AE’s self-sourcing pool. They should prioritize leads in this pool because they were successfully activated and should be off your SDRs’ plates, but haven’t set a meeting.
The SDR sends a follow-up email, CCs the AE, logs detailed call notes and a follow-up date in Salesforce. The AE sets daily activated-lead calling blocks so nothing gets dropped. This is not optional. Without dedicated AE time, your activated pool becomes a list nobody works.
Settle the credit question upfront.
An activated follow-up that converts to a meeting is outbound-AE sourced. The SDR created the opening; the AE converted it. The SDR gets comp on the activation. The AE gets credit for the meeting. Nobody loses, and the incentive structure reinforces the handoff rather than creating a fight over attribution.
Don't change the disposition on callbacks.
This one is counterintuitive, but critical. Once a lead is activated, it stays activated until a more definitive outcome occurs, like ‘Meeting Booked’, ‘Not Interested’, or ‘Referred’.
If you call back and nothing happens, the disposition doesn't change. This is the same logic as not changing a pipeline stage when a deal stalls. You don't demote an opportunity to "prospecting" because the champion didn't answer one email. Re-dispositioning on every callback corrupts your reporting and breaks your automated list logic. Teams that invent new codes for ambiguous outcomes — "follow up," "callback," "pending" — destroy the data they need to run the system.
Consider paying SDRs for activations.
Activated Leads are incredibly valuable. Make that obvious. That tells reps this outcome matters and is worth doing carefully. If you only pay for meetings, you'll get exactly the wrong behavior I mentioned above: pushiness, happy ears, etc. An Activated outcome means that person (1) had a conversion, and (2) likely can convert to a meeting in the near future.
Treat activated callbacks as their own channel.
When you call activated leads back, you'll see consistently 30%+ dial-to-connect rates versus the industry standard of 3%.
These leads have connected, conversed, and shown at least one of the Three I’s, so you know the data is good, the numbers are correct, and there are no gatekeepers in this list.
Nearly every dial into this list is productive. These aren't cold calls anymore. They're warm follow-ups with context, and they should be treated — and measured — as a distinct channel.
Feed dispositions to marketing.
Use Clay to pull the Gong recording from the original call, identify the broader buying committee at that account, and trigger persona-based retargeting.
"Not Now" prospects get warmed around their renewal dates.
Activated accounts get content that matches exactly what intrigued them on the call.
At TitanX, the SDR-leader persona gets content about Disposition Science, CROs get information about how to break free from the Headcount trap, etc. Each persona receives content relevant to their worldview, triggered by the disposition.
Conversations compound, but only if you capture them
Most sales coaching frameworks were built for a world where reps connected once every 60-100 dials. In that world, coaching was about hope and motivation. When connect rates are 20-30%, you enter a world where you start coaching for execution instead of effort. And the quality of your dispositions determines your strategy and coaching effectiveness.
Your job as a leader isn't to push your team to close everyone today. It's to teach them how to move every account in the right direction, and give them what they need to do that. Activated leads go to meetings. Referrals go to new paths. "Not Now" goes to better timing. "Not Interested" goes to education. Each outcome triggers a specific engine.
Each disposition represents a direction, or next step, instead of a record of activity that your reps point to to justify their jobs (“look how many people I called and left voicemails”.)
Like money well invested, conversations can compound at 4-12x the rate of a single outbound message. But only when you build the system to capture and route every signal.
Most teams don't have that system. They have "meeting booked" and "everything else."
The disposition isn't admin. It's direction.
Thanks for reading, Evan Dunn (LinkedIn)
P.S. If you've built something similar to the activated disposition in your own org, hit reply and tell me what you've learned. I read every response.