Glossary · Measurement
Time to disposition
How long from submission until you know what the lead was worth — the number that decides whether outcome-based testing is possible for you at all.
One of 25 entries in the Endpoint Forms glossary.
Definition
The elapsed time between a submission arriving and that submission reaching a settled state — won, lost, disqualified, or gone quiet long enough to count as lost.
It is not your sales cycle. Sales cycle usually means the deals that closed. Time to disposition includes the ones that were disqualified in four minutes, which is most of them, and that makes the distribution wildly asymmetric.
Why it matters
Every idea on this site that involves grading a form by outcomes has this number as its precondition. If a lead reaches a verdict in three days, you can rank form variants on what they produced. If it takes nine months, you cannot — you will be comparing this quarter’s completions with last year’s deals and calling it an experiment.
It also determines when a report is safe to read. Any outcome-weighted number computed over a window shorter than the median lag is biased toward whatever closes fastest, which is usually the small, cheap, and least interesting business.
In practice
- Measure the median and the 90th percentile, separately for disqualified and for closed. The mean is meaningless on a distribution this skewed.
- If the lag is long, adopt an interim proxy that arrives early and correlates: SQL acceptance, meeting held, first reply. Grade against the proxy now and audit the proxy against revenue later.
- Set a timeout. A lead with no disposition after your p90 is a disposition — record it as one instead of leaving it open forever.
- Publish the number next to any outcome report so the reader knows how much of the cohort has actually resolved.
“Tracking-wise, I’d also separate the stages. Form started, contact captured, form completed, visit booked, job won. Those are not the same quality of conversion.”
The common mistake
Assuming you need the final outcome.
Teams with long cycles conclude that outcome-based measurement is not for them, and stay on completion rate by default. That is the wrong conclusion from a correct observation.
You need the earliest signal that reliably orders your leads, not the last one. “Sales accepted it” at day four is enormously more informative than “someone submitted” at minute zero, and it arrives in time to act on — see MQL vs SQL for the signal most teams already compute.
Related terms
- VerdictOurs
- Our name for the outcome written back onto a submission: Won, Lost, Disqualified, or Awaiting verdict — plus a value.
- YieldOurs
- Our name for the quality-adjusted metric: Yield rate is the share of submissions that reached a good verdict; Yield value is revenue per hundred submissions.
- Hindsight split testsOurs
- Our name for split tests ranked on Yield rather than completion rate — where the winner cannot be known at submit time, so the test waits.
- MQL vs SQL
- The handoff between marketing and sales, and the cheapest lead-quality instrument most companies already own and never use.
- Outcome webhook
- A callback that tells the form what happened to a submission — the direction webhooks in this category almost never run.