How Virtual Sales Teams Can be Achieved Through Virtual Assistants

How important are sales? Some people call the sales department the “lifeblood” of a business. Without revenue from sales, your business won’t have the resources to invest in everything else that makes it a success. Without new sales drawing clients and new business, you’re stuck in “prospecting” mode, with time for little else except getting the bottom line to add up in your favor.

But you don’t always have time to handle sales, either.

Given the importance of sales, but the lack of resources necessary to invest in it, what’s a business leader to do? We recommend considering a virtual sales team.

In this article:

More on Virtual Sales Teams with Virtual AssistantsWhy a Virtual Sales Team Can Work with Virtual AssistantsWhy Not Hire Full-Time?How to Get Started with Delegated TodayFrequently Asked Questions (FAQ) About a Virtual Sales Team

More on Virtual Sales Teams with Virtual Assistants

Young Female Virtual Assistant for Sales Team

Using virtual assistants within a sales team means you can free up more time to focus on business while remote workers handle the duties of funneling prospects in as potential sales. 

Here are a few reasons you may need to delegate your sales:

  • Cold calling. Statistics point to it often taking as many as 8 calls before reaching a prospect. The owner of a business simply doesn’t have the time to devote to that much work, even if investing that might time in a prospect might ultimately be beneficial for the company. You can only be in so many places at one time.
  • Following up. Another statistic says that 30-50% of sales tend to go to the business that responds to a need first. That means that even if you don’t have the best offering or the best price, your ability to follow up with a lead or identify a need is often the deciding factor. And it’s hard to do the research and work necessary for that kind of strategy if you have to spend your time doing other things.
  • Timing. Let’s say you don’t want to get up at 5 a.m. to send emails to prospects who may be looking at their email inbox in your target time zone. Virtual team members might be able to handle that for you. Many prospects, for example, do like to read emails in the early morning hours—and if you don’t want to get up that early yourself, you only have two other options: email automation or delegation. Sometimes, both at once.

Business owners of all types have to deal with one basic fact: they can’t be in two places at once. You have to find ways to leverage your time so that your business can handle both lead generation and the critical work of delivering on your promises to clients. 

Delegating your sales process to a virtual assistant can be the way to do it. Here’s why.


Why a Virtual Sales Team Can Work with Virtual Assistants

Did you know that 92% of customer interactions already happen over the phone? While many of us assume that the sales process is something that has to happen in person, it’s simply not the truth in the 21st century. Sales can happen over voice, over the Internet—they can even happen over emails.

In fact, the higher you go up the corporate ladder, the more buyers like to speak over the phone, according to some statistics. That means that your sales can be more impactful on a virtual basis if you target the right decision-makers in your sales funnel, not less.

Your sales force doesn’t have to be a group of people who are constantly on the road—especially in the age of social distancing. Here are a few of the things that a virtual sales team can do while you’re working on the business itself:

  • Writing impactful sales emails. The average individual deletes nearly half of the emails they receive every day. If someone feels that an email is overly “salesy,” you’d better believe that they’re all too happy to send it to the trash bin before they even consider your product. 
  • Placing phone calls. Whether you need to follow up with a potential lead who filled out a form on your website, or if you need someone to place cold calls on your behalf, phone calls will remain a key component to getting business done in the era of COVID—and well after that. Sales professionals don’t have to be physically present at your office to do this.
  • Creating a sales funnel. Not all sales are face-to-face interactions. If you have an effective sales funnel in place, you can use inbound marketing to continue to generate new leads. This is also a great way to invest money into your remote sales team. You can have them create a sales funnel and then observe how well the funnel functions before deciding to move forward.
  • Utilizing social selling tools. Did you know that half of revenue is impacted by the influence of social selling, in some industries? 

To wrap it all up, let’s think about the day of a salesperson and what it might look like. Too often, business owners assume that salespeople have to be in front of the client, face-to-face, to have any meaningful impact.

But statistics show that this isn’t the case at all. Only about one-third of a salesperson’s day might be talking to prospects. 21% of the day is writing emails, 17% is entering in data, 17% is prospecting and researching leads, 12% is attending internal meetings. 

All of these tasks are not only ideal for the age of social distancing, but something that a virtual sales assistant can easily handle from the comfort of their own home. You don’t always have to employ a sales team that’s out and about on the road to get new sales. We live in a digital age. If your business is going to succeed, it should adapt to this new reality.


Why Not Hire Full-Time?

Sure, it would be great to have full-time workers constantly making new sales for you. But this is the 21st century. Employment is changing. And so are the paradigms that make sales not only possible, but easier.

Consider everything that goes into a full-time hire. Benefits packages. Retirement. Payroll costs. Costly HR additions. And even when you don’t factor those into account, remember that paying someone a salary often means you’re paying extraordinary amounts of money for only about two or three hours a day of actual productive work.

That’s not the way to build a great sales team.

Young Black Virtual Sales Person

Hiring full-time does have a few advantages, such as face-to-face meetings. But these days, more and more companies are moving to fully-remote operations. Even before the COVID pandemic, some companies were fully remote. They demonstrated that it’s not only possible to create a company culture with a fully-remote environment, but that it’s possible to succeed while doing it.

If you can save money and improve the quality of your virtual sales team without ever relying on a full-time hire, isn’t it worth investigating?

The money saved alone can be worth it. According to Best of Budgets, hiring a virtual assistant can save nearly 80% from operating costs on a yearly basis. If you can generate high-quality leads and sales through a virtual sales team, and you can do so while reducing costs, you have a blueprint for successful growth.

You don’t need to be a Fortune 500 company with a major marketing budget to create a successful sales team. You just have to know where to find the right virtual assistants. 

But nothing happens unless you get started. That’s why we’ve broken down the process into a few key steps for making your first virtual salesperson hire. It doesn’t have to be intimidating, and it can be done in a low-risk way while you get your budget in line.


How to Get Started with Delegated Today

Ready to get started? We’ve broken down the process into a few key steps:

  • Sign up to Delegated. That’s it! Just get your toes in the water with an account. From there, you’ll see how easy it is to move on to the next steps. But if you do nothing else today, consider signing up to Delegated and kicking off the process.
  • Succeed. That’s a short way of saying that the next step in our process is to have a Customer Success Manager reach out to you. They’ll help you factor in everything you need to choose the best possible assistant for your virtual sales team.
  • Select. Now that you have your priorities for your first hire ready, make the selection. Who’s the best person for the job, and what skills do they have that you can immediately put to use?
  • Onboard. The onboarding process can be as simple as sending your new assistant a document that deals with the specific details of working at your company. 

That’s it. It’s not as laborious as scheduling multiple rounds of interviews and writing offer letters to candidates. Just sign up and get started.


Start growing your business and reducing overhead with Delegated

1. Meet your assistant


We’ll ask you some questions to match you with one our virtual assistants as well as a backup assistant.

2. Create a workflow


Our platform gives you the power to create a workflow that fits your lifestyle. You choose how to track time, communicate, and share files with your assistant.

3. Start delegating


You have access to your virtual assistant 8am-5pm your local time. Start delegating tasks and grow as you need.
Get Started »

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) About a Virtual Sales Team

Still not quite “sold” on the idea of a virtual sales team? Let’s take some time to address the most frequently asked questions about outsourcing your sales to a virtual assistant:

What if I already have a sales operation in place?

Good! If it’s working for you, you can simply plug in additional resources and expand your ability to make sales. A virtual sales team can jump right into a preexisting sales process and add more time and energy to the team. For some companies, learning how to grow without investing in new full-time employees means that a virtual team is the ideal way to go.

Does a virtual sales team work for B2B sales?

There’s no reason it can’t. In fact, many of the processes with which a virtual sales team may be familiar are well-suited for B2B sales: prospecting, identifying leads, working with an inbound sales funnel, scheduling product demonstrations, and even pitching over the phone. A skilled virtual sales assistant can handle it all.

Why don’t I just hire salespeople who work on commissions?

You can, and it often works. But if it were that easy, why haven’t you done it by now? Keep in mind that a virtual sales team is an easy way to hire someone by the hour. That way, they’re also working on the systems you have in place. They’re not just trying to maximize sales without any regard for how it works within the context of your existing business systems. A skilled virtual sales assistant can handle your sales environment and even improve it by the processes they bring to the table.

What if I don’t need a full-time virtual assistant?

Great! You don’t have to hire full-time; that’s the beauty of working with a virtual sales team. We often recommend that people who are unfamiliar with working with a virtual assistant “dip their toes into the water.” This is a great way to start if you’re not familiar with the process of building a sales team in the first place. You only pay for the hours of work you receive, which means you’re not making heavy commitments as you would when hiring a full-time employee.


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