Salespeople demonstrate their value by building strong relationships with prospects, which helps them close high-quality deals regularly. However, while emotional intelligence and strategy assist in converting late-stage leads, they do little to support the top-of-funnel activities needed to keep the pipeline flowing.
Many of the best sales executives resent those tedious tasks for distracting them from their top opportunities.
Outsourcing sales support addresses this challenge by offloading all those tasks to a dedicated virtual sales assistant, allowing your team to focus solely on strategic and relationship-building activities that close deals.
Sales Teams Turn to Virtual Assistants to Boost Support
30 percent.
That's how much time most salespeople spend selling, according to the Center for Sales Strategy.
"Sales reps are only spending one-third of their time selling," InsideSales.com founder Ken Krogue said. "Administrative tasks dominate sales reps' time. That just can't happen."
That was the situation Rob Graham, VP of Enterprise Solutions at fintech company Ascendant, found. The amount of administrative work hindered Ascendant's sales team—prospecting, email outreach, scheduling meetings, and reporting were consuming reps' time.
"There are only so many hours in a day, and our sales team needs as much time as possible to seek opportunities," Rob said. "Administrative tasks are an important part of the sales process, but can be tedious and time-consuming."
And delegated.
Ascendant turned to us to provide a team of virtual assistants to support the sales team in offloading administrative tasks, allowing reps to spend more time selling. Prialto sales assistants help Ascendant's sales team with prospecting, list building, CRM data entry and management, lead follow-up, and appointment setting. "The Prialto assistants allow our sales executives to focus on growth," Rob said.
After piloting the service, Ascendant expanded virtual assistants to support 13 executives. "We started with a few assistants. After seeing the value, the relationship expanded to assign one to every salesperson, and they love the service," Rob said. "Best of all, they don't require any handholding by me or anyone else. We tell them what we need, and they get it done."
The benefits are there, but just how much support do reps need?
How Much Sales Support is Just Right?
How much support is enough?
How much is too much?
McKinsey analyzed data from 40 sales organizations to identify the support levels and types that provide the highest ROI for businesses. Researchers examined the number, cost, and functions of all non-quota carrying members of sales teams, including customer support, sales operations and administration, and sales management.
McKinsey found that the highest-performing sales teams (top 25 percent) had:
- A 1:2 ratio of support staff and salespeople.
- 200 percent higher ROI.
- Twice as much administrative and operational support (27 percent of staff).
"The makeup of sales support is just as important as its quantity," McKinsey said. "We found that what matters most are the levels of operations and administrative support." The study highlighted one company whose salespeople spent 70 percent of their time on admin and back-office tasks.
After adjusting support to McKinsey's recommended levels, win rates increased by 10 percent, the sales cycle decreased by 40 percent, and sales operations costs decreased.
You heard that right. Spending more on support reduces sales operational costs. How? Support frees up salespeople to focus more on selling. This is where the scales tip. McKinsey points out that the sales reps for top-performing companies averaged $5.7 million in gross margin, compared to $1.7 million for others, and the support costs are much lower than in a rep-heavy organization.
Ways You Can Utilize Virtual Assistants for Sales Support
With companies experiencing significant success in hiring sales support, the primary question to answer is what tasks yield the most impact for reps?
While there are multiple tasks you can outsource to virtual sales support, here are six ways virtual sales support can help your team drive revenue, and some tips to help you decide if outsourcing is an effective solution for your business.
Maintain a Full Pipeline of Prospects
Healthy sales pipeline management is the foundation of sales success. Without it, your team will always be struggling to keep up.
However, prospecting is extremely tedious and time-consuming. It's easy to fall behind when the pipeline is busy and then go through low activity periods after all your late-stage opportunities have closed or dropped out. Establishing this habit creates a highly volatile pipeline, making it difficult to generate consistent revenue.
Outsourcing prospecting allows your sales team to focus on closing deals without stressing over where their next leads will come from.
All you have to do is give your virtual sales assistant criteria for your target accounts, including:
- Industries
- Roles
- Company size
- Locations
And any other key characteristics of your target audience.
Your virtual sales assistant will use this information to ensure your pipeline always has new prospects.
Learn More: 5 Ways to Improve Your Sales Pipeline Management and Boost Revenue
Personalize Emails with Less Effort
Personalized emails are proven to elicit more responses than generic ones, yet few salespeople personalize beyond easily automatable phrases, such as names, locations, and site interactions.
A sales support assistant can help your team personalize more easily by providing prospect information, such as:
- Recent LinkedIn posts
- Company news
- Mutual education
- Mutual interests
These kinds of personal details make it easier to customize emails in a way that's more authentic and engaging than the standard fields. This will help your messages stand out from the many generic sales emails prospects receive daily and spark engaging conversations.
Engage in Social Selling Consistently
A study by International Data Corporation found that 75% of B2B decision-makers use social media when making purchasing decisions. This includes reviewing company profiles, seeking advice from their network, and engaging directly with brands.
If you're not already doing so, you can take advantage of this engagement by incorporating social selling into your sales strategy. It can help you build your brand's reputation and fill your pipeline with warm prospects who already have a relationship with your sales team.
Despite its effectiveness, social selling can be challenging, as it requires consistent engagement for optimal results.
If your team doesn't have time to scan their network daily and identify the best interaction opportunities, outsource this process to a virtual sales assistant. If you provide them with the criteria for the types of people and topics you're interested in, they'll create a daily list of relevant social posts for your team to comment on and contacts they should reach out to.
Outsourcing the research portion of social selling allows your team to focus on creating helpful interactions that keep them top-of-mind with high-priority connections.
Learn More: How to Leverage a Virtual Assistant for Social Selling
Prevent Leads from Slipping Through the Cracks
Not all leads are ready to close shortly after their first interaction with sales. Some individuals need weeks, if not months, to conduct the research and budgeting required to determine if a solution is right for them.
When many reps hear that a lead wants to delay the sale, they often assign it a low priority, as they'd rather focus on opportunities they can close within the current quota period. Though this approach seems logical, it disregards slower prospects who are highly qualified and capable of converting into substantial deals.
Outsourcing your sales pipeline management can prevent these leads from slipping through the cracks by ensuring that every lead has comprehensive notes and follow-up reminders on their records. These follow-ups keep your solution top of mind for prospects and provide resources that can aid their research process.
Depending on your preferences, they can manage all interactions with slower leads until they're ready to hop on another call. Outsourcing this process allows your team to focus on the hottest prospects while the remaining leads in your pipeline receive the nurturing they need to convert later.
Maintaining Your CRM
Your CRM should be your sales team's source of truth. From predicting which leads are most likely to close to revealing your pipeline's weaknesses, CRM reports (like the HubSpot sales report template) can provide your team with a clear path forward.
However, you can only leverage the reports if your CRM data is standardized and kept fully up to date. Any missing or outdated information will result in inaccurate predictions, distracting your team from the real issues.
When your sales team is jumping between back-to-back calls and preparing for custom demos/presentations, it's not practical to expect them to add every detail to your CRM. Data entry is also not a good use of their time, even if they do remember.
Outsourcing sales support offloads CRM maintenance to dedicated virtual assistants, so your team doesn't have to slow down, and you can leverage predictive reports.
Learn More: How to Choose the Most Valuable CRM for Your Business
Focus on Improving Your Playbook
Ultimately, outsourcing sales support frees up your sales team's time to work on the project that will have the most lasting impact on your company's success: improving your playbook.
You might reach out to 500 prospects daily, but few will respond or progress after the first call if your templates and pitches are weak. Keeping a strong playbook makes sure your team follows the latest best practices for closing deals.
With the time your team saves from not having to do all of their tedious sales tasks, they can spend more time on activities that unveil and support those best practices, including:
- Experimenting with subject lines
- Testing new messaging
- Creating new sales pitches
- Developing better responses to common objections
- Working with marketing to create more relevant collateral
And a variety of other strategic sales activities that drive conversion rates.
The more sales support tasks you outsource, the more time your internal team has to become masters at selling your offering. This allows you to increase revenue while only marginally increasing costs.
How Other Sales Teams are Utilizing CRM Sales Assistants
Woodruff-Sawyer is an insurance brokerage serving more than 4,000 companies from 15 offices across the United States. Its producers wanted to spend more time with clients and prospects, and less on administrative tasks – without adding full-time support or in-house staff.
In addition to managing calendars, travel, and expenses, Prialto assistants provide in-depth sales support. Assistants drive research, list building, email campaigns, Salesforce data management, and reporting. They ensure that data is up to date, clean up inaccuracies, create new contacts and opportunities, and provide event and relationship management.
"We rely on our Prialto assistants' expertise in Salesforce," said Jeff Fenigstein, head of marketing and sales operations. "We're confident that they know what they're doing, and it takes the burden off the sales team." Fenigstein credits Prialto with helping them maximize their investment in Salesforce.
Fellow insurer Graham Company found itself in a similar situation to Woodruff Sawyer. Graham wanted their producers to spend more time building relationships and developing new business without adding full-time office staff.
Graham VP and Managing Director Carl Bloomfield engaged Prialto to staff executive assistants for the company's top producers, with prospecting and account research, document prep, and CRM support.
"The Prialto team streamlined our processes and increased efficiencies, allowing us to integrate our Prialto assistants into our day-to-day lives," Bloomfield said. "The data in our CRM is much more accurate, which has also improved the efficiency of my team. By offloading our admin tasks, our producers can now spend more time in the field with prospects and clients."
Is Outsourcing Sales Support Right For You?
Despite all of the benefits of outsourcing sales support, it's not the right solution for every business. Typically, the organizations that get the most value from this kind of support have these characteristics:
- Use a CRM or would like to adopt one. One of the most significant benefits of this kind of support is enhanced data integrity.
- Have a multi-stage sales process that involves calls, surveys, paperwork, onboarding, and other tasks that all require coordination.
- Have a sales leader and/or team that excels at closing deals but is weighed down by admin work.
Where to Find Sales Support
There are several options available for finding the right sales support.
Hire In-House Employees
The first would be to hire directly. This gives you the most control, but also is the most expensive and time-consuming option.
You're tasked with recruiting, hiring, and training your employees, all of which come at a cost.
If you have a very complex sales process, require support that can make high-level decisions, and have access to a large pool of local talent, this could be your best option.
Hire a Managed Virtual Assistant Service
With administrative support critical to sales team performance, managed virtual assistant services offer a fast path to professional, right-sized administrative and operational support for sales teams.
In a managed virtual assistant outsourcing company, the service provider hires, trains, supervises, and continually optimizes the performance of the sales support assistants. The assistants are typically offshore, with account teams in the U.S.
This model is ideal for sales teams because:
- You do not have to recruit, hire, and train assistants one at a time.
- There is no added HR or managerial overhead because the assistants are employees of the service provider.
- You can scale quickly (up and down) as your needs change.
- Assistants arrive pre-trained and onboarded onto your team's tools and processes.
A typical arrangement features one virtual assistant supporting three salespeople, which is close to the 27 percent admin-to-staff ratio recommended by McKinsey.
Support Without Management
Companies turn to managed virtual assistant services like Prialto because they lack the internal resources to recruit, hire, train, and manage executive assistants.
The publicly traded healthcare software company Castlight Health was in growth mode. Its regional sales VPs (RVPs) managed teams of representatives and were responsible for administrative tasks such as scheduling, expense reports, booking travel, and updating their CRM.
The head of sales operations saw the RVPs' pain but knew that Castlight lacked the time, expertise, and resources to build an administrative team for them. Castlight tapped Prialto to provide trained virtual assistants to support 13 regional VPs in four areas:
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Calendar management: scheduling was a tedious task and a considerable time sink. Castlight worked with Prialto to implement a scheduling process that maximized each executive's time.
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Travel planning: planning travel was tedious and time-consuming for outside sales reps. The Prialto assistants learned the travel preferences of each RVP, such as preferred airports, airlines, travel times, and hotels.
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Expense reports: RVPs struggled to send accurate expenses by their deadlines. Prialto assistants ensure that reports are accurate and filed on time to provide timely reimbursement and peace of mind.
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CRM data hygiene: Castlight's CRM is crucial to the team's success. Prialto assistants ensure all information and data are accurate and up to date for the team and management.
By offloading these tedious tasks to sales support, you can help your sales team focus on nurturing leads and closing deals. Tools like Mailgo can further enhance this efficiency by automating routine communications.
Critical Sales Support for Your Team
"Sales support is critical," McKinsey said. "Only by putting in place and optimizing the right types and levels of support can companies hope to get the greatest growth from their sales organization."
At the same time, the traditional executive assistant has all but disappeared—there are 65 percent fewer people with the title than in 2004. This leaves many organizations struggling to hire for the role, especially at scale.
The right amount of sales support enables sales representatives to spend more time selling, resulting in the kind of ROI McKinsey described. The result is a flexible and scalable administrative layer for your sales team, requiring minimal resources on your part.
When salespeople are adequately supported, growth happens. With a managed virtual assistant service, you can give your sales team the time they need to drive revenue growth.
We have provided virtual assistants to sales teams for over a decade. From our offices in Portland, Oregon, we recruit, hire, train, and manage assistants for U.S. businesses. The assistants are our full-time employees working in secure offshore offices.
Need sales support? For a free consultation on how Prialto assistants can help your sales team, please schedule a call today.