Many businesses choose to hire a Virtual Sales Assistant to assist their Sales Team in creating a more effective sales funnel. The main goal is to increase the number of potential customers, improve conversion rates, and generate more revenue for the business. In fact, 71% of high-ranking executives believe that having a productive and efficient sales team is crucial for business growth. As a business owner or Sales Manager, you know that the sales process can involve a lot of work. It’s common for business owners to get caught up doing smaller tasks, like manually sending out reminders, follow-ups, and outreach emails. This takes valuable time away from the Sales Team who should be focusing on more important things, such as networking, sales strategy, and building strong relationships with potential customers.
Ways Sales Virtual Assistants can benefit your business
Virtual Sales Assistants can help Sales Managers become more productive.
Sales Managers often face challenges when it comes to managing their time and resources effectively, which can lead to decreased productivity and increased stress. To overcome these challenges, many businesses are turning to Sales Virtual Assistants to help alleviate the burden of low-impact and repetitive tasks. These tasks may include managing customer relationship management (CRM) software, scheduling calls and appointments, sending reminders and follow-ups, conducting lead and competitor research, contacting old leads, nurturing warm leads, generating leads for cold prospects, managing after-hours support, preparing sales proposals and PDFs, providing customer support through online chat tools, managing inboxes, updating client portals, managing and updating LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and organizing special occasion gifts to nurture leads.
By outsourcing these tasks to a Virtual Sales Assistant, businesses can free up their Sales Teams to focus on more high-impact activities, such as networking, developing sales strategies, and building relationships with leads. With the help of a Sales Virtual Assistant, businesses can increase productivity, generate more leads, and ultimately boost their bottom line.
Sales Virtual Assistants are individuals who can assist businesses in managing their sales funnel.
Your sales funnel is the journey that your customers go through from when they first learn about your business to when they make a purchase. The sales funnel can be divided into six stages: awareness, discovery, evaluation, intent, purchase, and loyalty. The goal of the sales funnel is to move customers from the top to the bottom of the funnel, and this can be done manually or through automated processes.
For Sales Managers to successfully manage every lead in the sales funnel, they need to have enough time and resources. However, this can be a challenge, and a Virtual Sales Assistant can help in different stages of the funnel. In the Awareness stage, they can help with lead generation, prospect and competitor research, and contacting old leads. During the Discovery stage, they can help with customer relationship management, after-hours support, customer support, social media management, and appointment bookings. In the Evaluation stage, they can assist with background research and nurturing leads. In the Intent stage, they can prepare sales proposals and PDFs. During the Purchase stage, they can assist in onboarding and set up onboarding automations. Finally, in the Loyalty stage, they can update the client portal and organize special occasion gifts to build relationships.
Hiring a Sales Virtual Assistant can also help you turn more potential customers into actual customers.
If you have some extra people helping out and a good process for making sales, you may see an improvement in how many people you can turn from potential customers into actual customers. This is because your Sales Virtual Assistant will make sure that none of your leads are forgotten or ignored.
By utilizing your social media accounts, your Sales Virtual Assistant can go beyond that and maintain contact with your potential customers, as well as keep them engaged in your offerings. Our Sales Manager Heidi benefits from this every day, and it involves:
- Getting information about potential customers from our email list (after they’ve shown interest in our company by downloading something from our website or asking us a question)
- Finding these potential customers on social media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram
- Interacting with them on social media by doing things like:
- Liking their posts
- Leaving comments on what they post
- Sharing interesting content with them
- Sending private messages (but only when it makes sense to do so)
With all of these little tasks taken care of by your Sales Virtual Assistant, your Sales Manager can focus on closing deals during sales calls.
Having a Sales Virtual Assistant can also contribute to the happiness of the Sales Team and other staff members.
When Sales Team members are overwhelmed with low-impact and repetitive tasks, it can take away from their job satisfaction and engagement. Sales professionals enjoy connecting with people, serving clients, and achieving results, but when the workload becomes too much, it can take the joy out of the job.
By partnering with a Sales Virtual Assistant to handle these tasks, Sales Managers can free up their team’s time and energy to focus on the most important and fulfilling aspects of their job. This can lead to a happier and more productive Sales Team, who are able to provide better service to clients and achieve their goals with greater ease.
Tasks that can be Outsourced to a Sales Virtual Assistant
Sales Managers who hire Virtual Sales Assistants online may face the common challenge of deciding on which tasks to delegate to their new assistant. Some sales professionals may feel reluctant to let go of certain tasks, believing that they can handle them better themselves. However, after identifying which tasks take up too much time, Sales Managers can benefit greatly from outsourcing to a Virtual Assistant, as opposed to becoming a bottleneck in the business.
Here are the main areas that Sales Managers can outsource to a Sales Virtual Assistant:
Sales Pipeline Management tasks
Managing a smooth sales pipeline is crucial for an effective sales department or strategy. However, busy Sales Managers may not have the time or skills to build out and maintain these pipelines. By having a Virtual Assistant manage the pipeline, sales professionals can receive valuable support in moving prospects up the list and keeping track of where their prospects are in the sales process.
To accomplish this, Sales Managers can get a Virtual Assistant to set up and use a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system like HubSpot to manage and update all the information on their leads. This includes adding new deals to the pipeline, identifying qualified leads by assigning lead scores, sending personalised emails to leads, setting up email templates and documents, scheduling future emails, adding detailed notes, updating leads’ status and sales stage, and creating follow-up tasks and reminders. With better sales pipelines, Sales Managers can easily see where prospects are and take necessary steps to move them from discovery call to onboarding meeting.
Administrative tasks
Sales Managers may not enjoy administrative tasks as much as other high-impact tasks. Fortunately, a Virtual Assistant can handle these tasks with ease, including qualifying incoming leads, handling emails and appointments, creating sales proposals and documents, responding to customer inquiries, organizing meetings and conferences, gathering lead magnets and resources for leads, conducting background research on leads, and organizing special occasion gifts and thank yous.
To begin outsourcing administrative tasks, Sales Managers can book a Discovery Call with an Outsourcing Specialist who can find a reliable and experienced Virtual Assistant to handle these tasks.
Calendar management
Sales Managers can also consider outsourcing calendar management work to their Virtual Assistant, which can be a game-changer for those working with a global audience. A Virtual Assistant can manage leads in different time zones and find the best time to schedule meetings and calls, eliminating any confusion or missed opportunities.
Virtual Assistants can also handle other calendar management-related tasks such as rescheduling meetings, booking new appointments, creating reminders and triggers, and more.
Managing leads in different timezones
When you are working with people who live in different parts of the world, you might run into the problem of coordinating schedules across different time zones. This can be especially challenging for busy people like Sales Managers, who need to juggle multiple appointments and meetings with clients from all over the world.
Luckily, a Virtual Sales Assistant can help take care of figuring out the time zone differences and finding the best time to get on a call. For example, when Sales Manager Heidi needs to conduct meetings and calls with clients living in different time zones, her Virtual Assistant can make sure to book a time that works well for both parties.
This way, Heidi can show up for the meeting confidently, knowing that her Virtual Assistant has taken care of scheduling and coordinating the details. Virtual Assistants can also help with other calendar management-related tasks, such as rescheduling meetings, booking new appointments, and creating reminders and triggers to keep you on track.
Lead generation & LinkedIn leads
A Virtual Assistant can help Sales Managers with lead generation, which is crucial for any sales strategy. Hiring a LinkedIn Lead Generation Virtual Assistant can bring stellar results in reaching out and connecting with prospective clients on the social media platform. Sales Managers can also hire a Social Media Virtual Assistant to create content, engage with others, build connections, and respond to direct messages and requests, freeing up time while still generating leads online. Prospecting outside of LinkedIn and exploring other platforms can also be an effective strategy for lead generation.
New Opportunities for Sales Managers: What to Do with Extra Time When You Hire a Virtual Sales Assistant
To become more efficient at work, it’s not about doing more, but doing less of the right things. By outsourcing some of the tedious sales admin tasks to a Virtual Sales Assistant, Sales Managers can now focus their time, energy, and attention on more productive activities. Here are some things they can do with their newfound freedom:
- Network: Sales Managers can now attend conferences, networking events, or join online communities to meet new people who could potentially become clients or partners. As a sales professional, your network represents one of your most valuable assets, and achieving growth in this area can produce substantial outcomes.
- Learn new sales strategies: Sales is a constantly evolving field, and there are always new strategies, tools, and tactics emerging. With a Virtual Assistant taking care of the tactical work, Sales Managers can devote more time to learning the latest trends and sales techniques. This can be done by reading books, taking online courses, attending webinars, or getting a mentor.
- Develop value-giving materials: With a Lead Generation Virtual Assistant, Sales Managers can work on creating more valuable materials that will help attract and convert more leads. They can offer their unique insights and experiences to develop marketing materials and other tools that improve the company’s client acquisition process over time.
- Train sales staff: For Sales Managers leading teams, outsourcing administrative tasks frees up time to focus on training and coaching their sales representatives. Observing sales calls and providing coaching and feedback can exponentially improve the effectiveness of the team and lead to better results for the company over the long term.
How Virtual Assistance is Changing the Sales Industry
The sales industry, like many others, has adopted virtual assistance as a crucial component of its operations. Thanks to advancements in digital tools, teams can work collaboratively and effectively, even when they are not in the same physical location. This has opened up new opportunities for companies to increase their productivity by outsourcing tasks to virtual assistants.
The modern workplace is evolving, and companies need to keep up with the changes to stay competitive. Hiring a virtual sales assistant can help sales teams focus on tasks that bring in better results. This was the case for Heidi, who was able to delegate administrative tasks, calendar management, lead generation, and sales pipeline management to her virtual assistant. As a result, she was able to focus on high-impact tasks that helped her business grow.
In today’s world, where remote work is becoming more common, companies need to consider virtual assistance as a way to maximise their productivity. With outsourcing to virtual assistants, companies can tap into a vast talent pool, which opens up new possibilities for their sales teams. Don’t get left behind, consider hiring a virtual sales assistant today and start reaping the benefits of the gig economy.
