Why You Should Consider Hiring a Virtual Sales Assistant

When you think about hiring a virtual assistant, what tasks do you imagine delegating? Data entry, email follow up, managing your social media accounts like LinkedIn? These are all great things you can do with a virtual assistant, but what if you want someone who can help organize and manage your sales pipeline?

For many business owners, bringing in new sales is not their passion. They’d prefer to spend time thinking about the customer—not acquiring new customers. For people like that, a virtual sales assistant can be a major relief. A virtual sales assistant can plug into your sales process like a full-time employee, assisting with prospecting, administrative tasks, and lead generation.

In this article:

What You Can Outsource to a Virtual Sales AssistantHow Do Virtual Sales Reps Fit Into Your Organization?Why Do You Need a Virtual Sales AssistantHow to Hire a Virtual Assistant TodayFAQs for Businesses Hiring a Virtual Sales Assistant

What You Can Outsource to a Virtual Sales Assistant

What can you outsource to someone in this line of work? You’d be surprised at just how much you can hand over. Think of a virtual sales assistant as something of a marketing assistant; they’re not only good at taking on tasks that you would rather not do, but they can add to your capacity in just about anything that has to do with marketing and sales.

But let’s look at some specifics:

  • CRM skills: Do you have customer relationship management software that itself needs to be managed? That’s something that you can outsource to a skilled virtual sales assistant. Put them in charge of making sure that every customer’s entry is updated with the latest information. You can also put your virtual assistant (VA) in charge of following up with clients you haven’t heard from in a while.
  • Telemarketing: It’s not something you always enjoy doing, but it’s often a necessary part of doing business. You can hire a remote worker like a virtual sales assistant to make outgoing calls to businesses on your behalf.
  • Outsourcing marketing strategy: Has your marketing strategy been aimless? Business owners can not only outsource basic marketing tasks, but outsource strategic thought when it comes to running the sales team and streamlining the sales process. 
  • Sales assistant services: If your marketing team is in need of an assistant who can grasp the basics of your most common marketing tasks, but also serve in an executive assistant role, a virtual sales assistant can leverage their skills and experience to join your team seamlessly.
Young Female Virtual Sales Assistant

How Do Virtual Sales Reps Fit Into Your Organization?

Whether you want a virtual assistant to come in as a virtual sales rep or as more of a virtual assistant, one question remains: what will it look like? What will the day-to-day experience with a virtual sales assistant do for your organization? Your free time? Your ability to produce better results?

  • Streamlining of basic sales tasks. Administrative tasks like handling social media or even handling data entry don’t have to be the exclusive domain of your sales team. A VA who provides adequate assistant services will handle these administrative tasks with an eye on making them fit within your sales team’s needs. In other words: a good virtual sales assistant will handle administrative tasks the way a sales team needs them done.
  • Outsourcing customer relationship management. Sick of handling follow ups? Reaching out to leads? Handling customer support yourself? You have customer relationship management software for a reason. But if you’d rather focus on different elements of your business, a virtual sales assistant can pick up the slack.
  • Nurturing leads while you work. No matter what you’re working on, a virtual assistant can offer the sales support necessary to ensure that your qualified leads filter through your sales funnel. From cold calling to following up with those qualified leads, you can outsource the nitty-gritty of making sales to a virtual assistant while you focus on big-picture needs for your business.

Why Do You Need a Virtual Sales Assistant

Given all of these points, you might be struck with one question: why bother? Can’t you have all of the above if you were to hire a full-time sales employee? And isn’t it better to have a full-time commitment of someone who’s physically present in your office?

You’d be surprised. It’s true that a virtual assistant won’t be physically present, but you may find that the advantages of hiring one can far outweigh the need to have your assistant with you at the office.

  • Cost. In sales, it’s all about the bottom line. So how does hiring someone who can help you in the sales process impact that bottom line? It starts with evaluating a virtual assistant in terms of cost. One of the great advantages here is that you won’t commit to a virtual assistant what you would otherwise have to pay for a full-time employee. You aren’t paying benefits. You aren’t paying to relocate them. You’re simply hiring someone at an hourly rate. That makes it much easier to figure out the bottom line as you evaluate the value of an assistant who can help you with closing deals.
  • Flexibility. When you commit to a full-time hire, do you know how much you’re committing to? If you’re not yet sure you want to expand the number of people on your Slack channel, then skipping straight to a full-time employee hire can be a big step. A virtual assistant gives you the flexibility to outsource your prospecting tasks without making a larger commitment first. Keep in mind that the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the average cost of a hire is about $36.61 per hour—and that includes unskilled workers who may know nothing about sales.

Two of the main complaints of anyone looking to add to their team—the cost and investment it takes to bring on a new employee—are essentially washed away. When you factor in hidden costs like employee benefits, a virtual assistant hire is a straightforward, simple way to add to your sales team.

Businesswoman Working at Desk


How to Hire a Virtual Assistant Today

Convinced already? Then let’s get right to the process of adding an executive assistant who can help with your sales department. Here are the key steps to making sure you’ve got a great hire:

  • Sign up. Sign up with us today to get the process started—it will only take a few moments.
  • Work with a customer success manager. We don’t want you to hire any old virtual assistant just because it’s a good idea to add some help to your sales team. It’s important that you precisely match your specific needs with the skills and experience of a virtual sales assistant who can help. By getting in touch with one of our customer success managers, that’s exactly what you’ll do.
  • Hire the VA. Now it’s time to select the right VA for your needs!
  • Bring the VA onboard. As great as it is to hire someone with sales experience—or experience using your specific customer relationship management software, for example—it’s even better when you can provide the VA with an onboarding document that will help initiate them into your way of doing things. 

Do it the right way and you’ll bring on an expert new VA who is familiar with your processes and able to get started with confidence on day one.

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2. Create a workflow


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FAQs for Businesses Hiring a Virtual Sales Assistant

We understand that there may be more questions you have about hiring a virtual assistant for the first time. Here are some of the more common questions we receive:

What exactly will a virtual sales assistant bring to the table?

A lot! But since we don’t like to talk about these in general terms, let’s get specific. Depending on their individual skills and experience, a virtual sales assistant can help with: customer relationship management, customer support, prospecting, managing your sales funnel, managing leads through social media, and much more. The question is, what do you need your virtual sales assistant to do to bring value to your sales team? Once you know the answer to that, you’re ready to move forward and select a virtual assistant with that precise experience.

How do I get a VA up and running?

Have a look at our steps above to become familiar with the process. But you can start today if you know you want to hire a virtual assistant. All you have to do is prepare an onboarding document that details the kinds of tasks that you expect virtual sales assistants to complete on a regular basis. In fact, you might even have your first VA help you build the onboarding document as you work through these various processes with them. After that, you can enter an evaluation period where they take on.

What can’t a virtual sales assistant do?

If you’re counting on a virtual sales assistant to go around ringing doorbells for you—well, then you’re probably going to be disappointed. But a virtual sales assistant can still handle plenty of work within your sales pipeline, including just about anything that you can do via phone or Internet. What’s more, a virtual assistant can do this by putting aside dedicated time to put towards your project, whereas a full-time employee would require breaks, lunch, and much more. For a VA, they can simply log off.

What tasks should I assign my VA?

That depends entirely upon what you need! Your VA can be someone who you rely on for your normal sales procedures, such as customer relationship management, cold calling, and more. But you can also have them take on the tasks you would otherwise not handle yourself, such as data entry and updating your contacts. In short, your virtual assistant can do just about anything that you’d prefer not to do yourself, allowing you more time to dedicate to the work you find most rewarding.

What do I do if an assistant gets something wrong?

It’s important that you give your assistant feedback so they know what to do—and what not to do—as they learn how things work at your business.

Who should hire a VA?

When you read through this, you might get the impression that a VA is only a luxury for businesses that are already growing and simply need to supplement their staff. But you’d be surprised. A virtual assistant can be great for C-level executives, freelancers, small businesses, and solo entrepreneurs. There’s really no limit to who should hire a VA—it all depends on what you need to get done on a daily basis.

What traits work best for a virtual sales assistant?

Look for skills, experience, and adaptability. Professionalism is a must, and it’s why we work so hard to make sure that we can team you up with someone who’s going to deliver all of the above. But beyond that, make sure to look for someone who can fit within the culture of what you’ve already established at your company. And if you’re still building that culture, look for a positive, professional, upbeat presence.


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