Dusti Arab — March 29, 2018 If you’re in the middle of a growth cycle with your company, tasks on your to-do list at the end of the day can quickly pile up, even if you currently have a team in place. It’s easy in this situation to have the thought that keeps so many of us trapped in the day to day of our businesses, “It’ll be faster if I just handle it myself. I don’t have time to train someone right now.”
You may be right – it may be too much to hire on a full time staff member right now. However, virtual support teams are already prepared to assist you with what many times are basic, repeatable tasks.
You can be even more productive by adding virtual support staff to your team. Here’s how:
1. Email Support
Your customer is your top priority – and providing great customer service often means fielding questions and responding to multiple emails each day. A virtual assistant (VA) can not only help you prioritize the requests coming in but can handle responding to some requests on your behalf. It might sound unbelievable, but there are stories out there of a VA helping their client to achieve inbox zero from 20,000+ unsorted emails.
A virtual assistant can also take on creating and customizing email templates for prospecting, keeping that line of communication open for more leads in the funnel. That brings us to our next topic, lead generation.
2. Lead Generation
Once you’ve set goals for the type and amount of leads you’d like to generate – you can begin delegating these tasks to a virtual assistant. The key here is to be specific with your VA about the population you want them to research. The more specific the better, but make sure you’re not giving your VA an impossible task. Even the best VA out there probably can’t get Mark Zuckerberg on the phone.
A great virtual assistant who is experienced in lead generation will be able to identify your target profile easily and find email addresses for them. They’ll also be able to enter these contacts into your CRM and potentially research more robust data on them to make your job easier when you reach out.
Want to know more? Check out this article on how to use virtual support for lead generation.
3. Data Storage and Organization
Have a shared drive that’s driving you nuts? A virtual assistant can take on that task to keep the flow of data running smoothly and give you peace of mind that everything is right where it’s supposed to be.
Let your VA take over data entry or contact management in your CRM to keep your data integrity high. Having all the right information about your clients or potential clients means making more contacts – with better results.
4. Delegate Meeting Planning and Scheduling Tasks
Meeting planning and scheduling is crucially important to your business, and extremely time-consuming. Even if it’s just a phone call, it can be difficult to coordinate schedules, block time on calendars, and make sure everyone is up-to-date with the agenda. That’s where virtual support comes in.
A virtual assistant can make all the calls, send all the emails, and draft your agenda while you work on tasks that better fit your skill set. They can even reserve meeting space, plan catering, make hotel reservations, and more for larger in-person meetings.
5. Travel Management
Travel Management is more than just booking a flight. Travel and expense management is widely known as the second largest controllable expense for companies. To maximize your travel dollars and your time, you need to be able to plan and book trips quickly and efficiently. A virtual assistant will take multiple factors into account, act as your advance team, manage risk, and more.
Read more about the 5 rules for delegating travel management to a virtual assistant. Then, pass off all your expense reporting to save even more time!
6. Manage Social Media/Blogging
Social selling can be big business for many sales teams. Superoffice.com’s article on social selling statistics reports that 90% of top sellers now use social media as part of their sales strategy, and that 64% of sales reps using social media hit their team quotas.
Social media and blogging are often a major component in building a brand that people trust, but they can require hours’ worth of content creation, planning, and scheduling. Who has time to fool with social media when you’ve got current and prospective clients to meet with? Your virtual assistant does.
VAs can spend the time to properly research your audience, create a strategy, and then launch it. So many businesses, particularly small businesses, fail at social media because they don’t have a plan. Once your business is up and running on social media, it takes time and attention to cultivate your audience too. Your VA can spend time interacting with your audience (potential clients!) and managing any problems that might arise. They can also create content for your pages and blogs to keep them running smoothly while you focus on other tasks. The choice seems clear: spend 3 hours writing a blog post, or half an hour editing one.
7. Spend Less Time Hiring and Training
When using a managed service provider, such as Prialto, you know that you’re hiring someone that is qualified and has already had training on the programs and platforms you use. The experts at Prialto will help match a qualified virtual assistant to the needs of your team – significantly cutting down the time you’d spend vetting, interviewing, hiring, and training.
This is particularly crucial for small businesses that may only need someone for a few tasks or only for part of the day. This also means you’re not paying for the cost of having an (or another) employee in house, saving you money on overhead.
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