Wouldn’t it be great if you could automate your business by offloading some of those day to day sales tasks? With the technology available today we love that you can use a virtual assistant to take care of a lot of your business needs. They could be in the same town as you or they could be half way around the world, it’s up to you! Here are some of the sales-related tasks that you could get a virtual assistant to take care of;
- Sales Calls
- Handling incoming queries
- Proposals, contracts and administration
- Notes from sales meetings.
There are many services available which offer virtual assistants. These range from virtual assistants who are based in third-world countries and often offer to do work very cheaply, or virtual assistants based in countries such as the USA, Australia or the UK who will charge more. The difference can be in the quality of work produced, for example if there is a language barrier. However, many produce very high quality work and you can do a search and offer a small amount of work as a trial if you wish.
While you may not want a virtual assistant to actually make sales calls for you, they can certainly help out by setting up appointments in your calendar to make those calls. They can also handle queries either by phone or email, or at least be a point of contact for customers so that they know their message has been received and someone will get back to them. Many entrepreneurs are so busy working ‘in’ their business that they only get 12-15% of their time available for sales-related tasks. Having a virtual assistant can mean that this is taken care of much more efficiently and more time is able to be spent focusing on the areas that drive business.
One thing that makes sense to us as a business is using assistants to take care of our proposals and contracts. These can often take a fair amount of time to put together so we will get others to do that while we check it over before it gets sent out. This means we are able to spend more time on the activities that we want to be doing.
As for sales meetings, if you are able to record notes during these meetings you could send the recording to your virtual assistant to allow them to put together minutes or put together contracts etc based on the discussions you had.
How do you make sure that your virtual assistant gets the data they need to do the job? If you are using an email system such as Mailchimp it is as easy as giving them logins to your account so that they can see communications and follow-up. Some of the bigger systems such as Office Autopilot or Salesforce even allow you to have tasks automatically assigned to people when certain things happen. For example, if someone signs up to an event of yours a task could automatically be sent to someone on your team to follow-up and give them a call a few days before the event. This is a great way to make sure that sales are not left on the table and is an opportunity for those up, down or side sells too.