Sales are the lifeblood of every business, but it’s also one of the hardest processes to master. Even if you’re the best salesperson for your business because you know it inside out, the sales process demands a lot of time, meticulous research, and monitoring that can easily take up your daily working hours.

That’s why you learn how to delegate to people who can focus on boosting your sales while you divide your time between your responsibilities as a business owner. But if you’re not ready to hire full-time sales employees just yet, you have the option to hire a virtual sales assistant instead.

This professional can take care of a variety of sales tasks using tools like email validation to ensure efficiency within your sales process and guarantee the results that you need for your business.

How can a virtual sales assistant support the sales process?

With the sales process playing such a crucial role in the success of a business, a sales assistant can make a huge difference to your efficiency, productivity and results. But how exactly can one support your sales process?

  • Goal setting. A good virtual sales assistant will have the knowledge and experience to help you set your sales goals or improve existing ones to be able to create a better roadmap for your business.

Since they specialize in sales, these sales assistants can give you ideas on how to create the best sales plan for your business and take care of tasks like doing prospect research, market research, strategizing, and tracking sales progress.

  • Pricing. Smart pricing is a very important part of any sales process because it will have a huge influence on the buying decision of consumers.

But you just don’t decide on the right price for your products based on the budget you spent on making them. You also need to consider a lot of factors—existing prices, market shifts, competition, and consumer behavior—before you could decide on the perfect pricing plan. Instead of doing these things on your own, a sales assistant can help you fulfill these tasks efficiently.

  • Daily sales activities. The sales process is an ongoing task that you need to perform consistently to keep your cash flow going. But these daily activities can also get overwhelming so easily, especially when you have other responsibilities to think about.

But with virtual sales, you get to delegate tasks like generating leads, updating and managing databases, doing follow-up emails, and managing your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to a professional. This will take off some of the burden from you and your sales team without disrupting the flow of your sales process.

  • Risk mitigation. The sales process involves a lot of risks, and you need to know which ones are worth-taking and which ones you should avoid at all costs.

Professional virtual sales assistants know exactly how to analyze these risks and create measures for you to avoid any damages while making sure that you take advantage of every opportunity you have to improve your sales process.

  • Monitoring. The only way to know if your sales efforts are working is to track your metrics and that could be a very tedious job. You can delegate this task to a professional virtual sales assistant who can monitor your sales metrics, gather important data, and organize it so that it’s easier to analyze the efficiency of your sales process and what areas you need to improve on.

What does a virtual sales assistant do?

So, here’s the question: what is a sales assistant? This professional is skilled in driving the sales process by performing different tasks and responsibilities like:

  • Lead generation. Generating leads is one of the first steps into the sales process—and it can also be the most crucial. This process of attracting prospects and nurturing their interest in your business needs expert skills and knowledge that you can only get with a qualified sales assistant.
  • Sales. Virtual sales assistants can handle sales tasks effortlessly because they’re trained for them. After doing market research, they will be able to determine the right target market for your product and how to attract them into your business.

This will help give you some leverage for your business and boost your conversions so you can keep your cash flow coming in.

  • Data entry. Although considered basic, data entry is a very important part of the sales process that’s best delegated to a professional who can manage, filter, and update your databases consistently so you have fresh information that you can use in improving your sales process.
  • CRM management. With most of the sales tasks now being done online, you need virtual sales assistants who have experience in using CRM tools that will allow you to make your processes more efficient.

Instead of hiring a CRM specialist who can only do the job of updating your CRM, a virtual sales assistant can take care of all the tasks involving your CRM like managing your systems, creating the right pitches to prospects, boosting your sales, and training other team members on how to properly use the CRM tool.

  • Market and prospect research. These days, it’s very important to take advantage of every opportunity to reach out to potential customers. This is where market and prospect research come in and your sales assistant can help you use different platforms to contact prospects and nurture them to boost your conversions and build loyalty towards your brand.
  • Lead management. It’s not enough to just generate leads to be able to nourish your sales process. You also need to maximize the leads that you have and nurture them so that you can continue your sales relationship with these consumers.

A virtual sales assistant can manage your old leads and find ways to reconnect with them to re-introduce your product or see if they are still interested in your business and what you have to offer.  

Why should you hire a virtual sales assistant?

If you want to be more efficient with your sales process, a sales assistant will be a valuable part of your team. Here’s why:

  • You get to boost productivity while keeping costs low. If you’ve been generating leads, sending follow-up emails, and answering queries for most of your day, you may be losing money without even knowing it.

But when you hire a virtual sales assistant, you know you’re delegating your sales tasks to someone who knows the job inside out. This will increase your productivity in that department while you can also enjoy better productivity gains by focusing on entrepreneurial tasks that help grow your business.

  • You get to work 24 hours a day. Let’s face it: virtual sale is a 24-hour job, but letting a full-time sales teamwork in shifts would cost you a lot of money in operations.

It is when you can take advantage of the services of virtual sales assistants instead because a lot of them work in a different time zone giving them more flexible work hours to ensure that you have someone to work on your sales process 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

  • You get to manage your time well. Efficiency is a top priority when it comes to running a business, but you can only have so many hours in a day.

A study conducted by the Harvard Business Review revealed that delegating repetitive tasks such as virtual sales can help free up 20% of your productive time every day. Hiring your own sales assistant will allow you to free up your time to stay on top of your business without neglecting critical sales tasks.

  • You get to keep sales team members longer. It’s no secret that attrition among sales team members is quite high, especially since it’s a very competitive sector.

But virtual sales is considered a different ball game because virtual sales assistants are paid on an hourly basis, which keeps them motivated to work harder, meet quotas and perform well in their job so they can receive higher pay and even earn sales incentives in the process.

What tools can a virtual sales assistant use?

Since your virtual sales assistant will be working remotely, it’s very important to invest in some of the most important tools that will help with efficiency in doing different sales tasks. Here are some of our recommendations:

  • Time Doctor. One of the most efficient productivity tools in the market, Time Doctor is useful in tracking working hours, generating timesheets and payroll, and just making sure that your virtual sales assistants are putting in the required number of hours to keep your sales process efficient.

This tool is also great for managing your sales assistants even if they work remotely and from different time zones.

  • Snov.io. Snov.io has always been one of the best sales automation tools for sales assistants because it has everything they need to find prospects, verify leads, manage consumers, send emails and convert leads into sales.

It makes it easier for sales teams to gather data, analyze reports and just make sure that no leads are wasted.

  • Slack. Slack is all about building that strong communication within your sales team, which is crucial to your success, especially if you have virtual sales assistants who are working remotely from different parts of the world.

With Slack, you get to manage projects more efficiently and allow your sales assistants to communicate seamlessly so that everyone is on the same page.

  • MeetEdgar. MeetEdgar is one of the best tools that you’ll find for content and social media management. It has some very impressive features that allow your sales assistant to build a content calendar, schedule posts, stay on top of social media accounts and optimize your publication schedule to get the best results from your campaigns.
  • ContentStudio. ContentStudio is considered a killer social media marketing tool for a reason. Even with a free account, you already get up to 500 posts per month and all the basic features that you would need in managing your social media and content strategies.

With paid plans, you get even more features like being able to schedule repeat posts for each of your social media accounts, the “set and forget” tool where you can schedule your content at specific intervals, and content discovery that makes it easier for you to find related content that you can engage with.

  • Calendly. Calendly is a simple yet very useful scheduling tool that’s beneficial to every virtual sales assistant out there because of all its intuitive features. With Calendly, you get to connect with prospects, nurture and manage them well so you don’t lose them.

It also makes scheduling appointments, demos, and meetings a lot easier so that you don’t forget anything within your calendar. Plus, Calendly has one of the most efficient metrics and reporting features that you can find for this kind of tool in the market today.

  • PicMonkey. Finally, there’s PicMonkey, which is a very useful photo editing tool for creating content that you can use not only in your blogs and social media platforms but also in different promotional materials.

Aside from a load of features that include thousands of customizable templates, design options, effects and filters, textures, and even cloud storage, PicMonkey is also very easy to use. That makes it a smart tool to use for sales assistants who don’t have in-depth experience with photo editing but still want to produce good images for content purposes.

Wrap up

There are many reasons to hire a virtual sales assistant as part of your team. Whether you’re a startup or an existing business that’s trying to improve your sales process, you can greatly benefit from having a sales assistant or two to take care of all the crucial sales tasks that will dictate the success of your business.

From simple activities to big responsibilities, these virtual sales assistants can help propel your business forward while making sure that you keep your costs low.