A report from InsideSales.com found that salespeople only spend 36% of their time actually selling. The remaining is spent on non-revenue-generating tasks, including:
- Admin tasks
- Research
- Tool and data management
- Scheduling meetings
Though critical, these tasks are a huge drain on your time and productivity. A virtual sales assistant can help you close more deals by taking these tasks off your plate and enabling you to focus on building stronger relationships with prospects.
This guide will walk you through leveraging a VA, covering use cases, answering common questions, and outlining what you can expect when you sign up for our services.
Tasks You Can Offload to a Virtual Assistant
Your virtual sales assistant can take on a broad range of sales support activities so you can stay focused on revenue-generating work. To make this more concrete, here are some of the most common ways we support members in sales and business development roles:
- CRM support
- Campaign management
- Calendar management
- Prospect research
- Expenses
- Admin support
Need help with a task not listed here? No worries. We can assist with any objective, repeatable process and are happy to have a brief call to discuss how we can meet your specific needs.
Additionally, here are some popular use cases of how our virtual assistants give salespeople more leverage:
Keeping Their Pipeline Full of Prospects
HubSpot research found that over 40% of salespeople consider prospecting the hardest part of their jobs. Finding prospects is a tedious, time-consuming process that pulls you away from engaging in sales conversations. With a virtual sales assistant, you’ll never have to do prospect research again.
All you have to do is give your VA criteria about the types of prospects you’re looking for. Most of our clients give their VAs the following characteristics:
- Industry
- Job title
- Geographic region
- Company size
- Private, public, or non-profit
Using those guidelines, your virtual sales assistant will add a fixed number of prospects to your CRM each week and, if you’d like, send an initial outreach email.
Leveraging Insights from Their CRM
Your CRM is essential for monitoring and understanding your pipeline. However, entering all data takes time, and many sales teams struggle to generate accurate pipeline reports because their data is often incomplete or outdated.
A virtual sales assistant can help you leverage your CRM by:
- Inputting all of your contacts into your CRM and filling in additional information about them.
- Logging every call, email, and meeting so you have a record of all of your interactions with leads.
- Keeping your data clean and up-to-date by changing statuses as needed, removing duplicate data, filling in missing information, etc.
- Running reports and sending them to you so you can access the latest insights into your pipeline.
All you have to do is give your assistant access to your pipeline information, and they’ll manage your CRM.
Maximizing the ROI of Business Trips
Travel planning is a core skill set for virtual assistants. The best way to maximize the ROI of your business trips is to fit in as many meetings as possible. Your VA will prevent you from wasting time going back and forth across cities by reaching out to all of your contacts in the city you’re visiting and scheduling meetings in the same neighborhoods back-to-back.
For instance, if you’re in New York City for a few days, they’ll block out a morning for meetings in Soho, an afternoon for meetings in Midtown, and another morning for meetings in the Upper East Side.
All you have to do is give your VA your travel itinerary, and they’ll fill in the gaps with meeting opportunities close by.
How to Develop a Productive Relationship with Your Virtual Assistant
As with any other colleague, you need to develop a productive working relationship with your VA. Here are some best practices to help you get the most from your assistant.
Communicate with Context
When delegating tasks, it is crucial to clearly communicate your preferences. Your virtual sales assistant will record these in your Prialto Member Manual for future reference. Providing clear instructions from the start helps your VA avoid mistakes and unnecessary questions, saving your time.
Leverage your Engagement Manager
Whether you want to offload a new project or are experiencing challenges with your VA, let your Engagement Manager know. Their role is to manage your service so you don’t have to. This includes training your VA on your processes, fielding their questions, and providing coaching if their work doesn't meet expectations.
Embrace Clarifying Questions
Your VA is trained to ask clarifying questions to ensure they meet your expectations. He/she then documents your answers in your member manual so they know how to complete tasks moving forward. For example, if you ask your assistant to schedule a meeting but don’t specify whether it will be in person or a call, your VA will ask clarifying questions.
Think About Your Business Processes and Preferences
What are your usual scheduling habits? Are there any challenges in your current process that you'd like us to help resolve? If you have a broad idea or process you'd like to delegate but aren't sure how, inform your Engagement Manager. They can help you develop an effective process.
The main principle of these best practices is clear communication with your assistant and Engagement Manager. Doing so will yield a significant return on your investment.
Read More: Have a PA? You Need to Master These Communication Skills
How a VA Can Use Your Tools
Our virtual assistants can access your tools to help you gain maximum leverage from your CRM and other software you use to be successful.
Below are some frequently asked questions about setting up your assistant with your systems.
Q: Do you support [insert tool]?
A: Your assistant can use any online tool you use. We support members in numerous roles and industries, so chances are one of our employees has experience with your systems and can train your VA to use them.
If you use a tool we don’t have experience with, we’ll ask you to quickly share your screen so we can walk you through how to use it. Then we’ll conduct additional research on the tool and train your assistant to use it.
Q: How do I give my assistant access to my tools?
A: You will give the login info for all of the tools your assistant is working with to your Engagement Manager. They will add your logins to the password-sharing tool, LastPass Enterprise, and use it to securely grant your primary and backup assistants access.
Q: Can you help me adopt [insert tool]?
A: Absolutely. Many of our members want to use additional tools, such as CRMs and expense reporting software, but they just don’t have the time to learn how to use them. If that sounds like you, your Engagement Manager can help you get set up and train your assistant to handle the heavy lifting with your new tools.
Have Questions?
Here are answers to some of the most common questions we receive from prospective clients.
Q: What hours do VAs work?
A: Your virtual assistant will work standard business hours Monday through Friday in your time zone. We currently support US and UK time zones. You can choose to receive support in whichever one is most convenient for your work hours.
Q: How much work can I offload to my VA?
A: You can offload approximately two and a half hours of work to your virtual assistant per day. However, this amount is not fixed. If you have a busy week, you can exceed that daily amount as long as you average fifty-five to sixty hours per month.
Q: Can my VA answer phone calls from prospects?
A: Yes, when you on-board, we give your virtual assistant a phone number in your area code. You can give that number out to prospects and others to screen your calls. If your VA is unavailable to take the call, your backup assistant will take it. Your assistant can take messages and provide basic information, but cannot engage in selling.
Q: Will my VA be trained on sales support processes?
A: Yes! We train all of our assistants on the following processes:
- Using Salesforce and general CRM best practices
- Scheduling/calendar management
- Prospect research
- Filing expenses
- Managing outreach campaigns
- Completing miscellaneous admin tasks such as data entry and organizing documents
If you need to train your VA on a custom process, all you have to do is share your screen and walk them through it. Your Engagement Manager will record the meeting and use it to train your VA.
Q: Can my VA also help with the middle and bottom of the funnel tasks?
A: Yes! Your virtual assistant can support you with any process-driven task. Many of the salespeople we work with leverage their VA for scheduling, CRM management, and client onboarding when leads reach the middle and bottom of the funnel stages.
Related: How to Grow Your Business and Increase Sales by Being More Productive
Interested in Learning More? Here’s How to Get Started
- Call us at 1-888-873-6101 or email us at sales@prialto.com to set up a discovery call. During the call, one of our sales executives will gather more information about your needs and help you determine whether Prialto is a good fit.
- Take our Needs Analysis Survey. The survey will help you and our sales team clarify your needs. Our sales team will combine the results with the information gathered in your discovery call to create your implementation plan.
- Schedule your implementation plan review call. In this call, your sales executive will walk you through exactly how we’ll help you achieve your goals if you sign up with us. This call is also a great opportunity to clear up any other questions you have.
- Get ready to on-board. Once you’re satisfied with your implementation plan, we’ll send over an agreement and start preparing for your onboarding.
