What Is a Virtual Sales Assistant?

Virtual Sales Assistants are remote professionals who perform a variety of administrative and sales-related tasks, such as managing CRM software, cold calling prospects, or handling customer support and follow-ups. The majority of Virtual Sales Assistants are also proficient at data entry, cold calling, and lead database management.

There are plenty of reasons to hire a Virtual Assistant over an in-office one. If the tasks you’re planning to outsource don’t require someone to spend 8 hours a day, 5 days a week on them, VAs are a much more cost-effective option. Instead of a fixed salary, you’re only paying a VA for the hours worked. Additionally, you are not required to pay other expenses such as PTO, insurance, maternity, or sick leave—all of which full-time employees are entitled to. You’re guaranteed to reduce costs even more if you hire an offshore VA—hourly rates vary from country to country, so it’s advisable you look into hiring international talent.

Contracting VAs will also leave you with more time to dedicate to other tasks that require your attention. The more tasks you delegate to one—telemarketing, prospecting, sales funnel and social media management—the more you can focus on business-critical tasks that boost sales and support revenue.

What Does a Virtual Sales Assistant Do?

The specific services VAs offer vary depending on their skills and experience, as well as the company that employs them. The tasks Virtual Sales Assistants usually perform entail:

• Cold calling—Experienced Virtual Sales Assistants can write and/or optimize a cold calling script, reach out to your company’s cold leads, and present them the products or services you’re offering, in a professional and convincing manner. Not only can they increase the number of cold calls your organization makes daily but also increase the number of conversions.
• Lead relationship management using CRM software—If you want to properly nurture relationships with your leads, you should hire a VA who is well versed in using the most common CRM systems. They will add and update customer entries, follow up on clients at proper intervals, and fully utilize the systems’ efficiency to secure high client satisfaction and speed up the sales cycle.
• Customer research—Finding prospective customers can take up a lot of your time. A VA will help free up your busy schedule by conducting research on buyers’ wants, needs, and goals so as to better understand how to sell your product/service. They will retain new leads and make sure the services your organization offers align with the requirements of the target audience.
• Schedule and calendar management—An organized and well-balanced workday is the chief prerequisite for efficiency and productivity. A VA can do wonders for your business by coordinating yours and prospects’ schedules to find ideal meeting timeslots, handling prioritization for the sales team, and keeping track of daily calls.
• Customer service—It’s proven that client/customer retention is much more economical than customer acquisition. A competent VA will deliver high-quality customer service and increase overall customer satisfaction by helping you resolve issues and handle inquiries and pre- or post-sales transactions.

How Much Does It Cost To Hire a Virtual Sales Assistant?

The cost of Virtual Assistants is determined by several key factors, including their experience, the skills and knowledge they have, the industry they specialize in, and the cost of living in their country. According to ZipRecruiter, the average annual salary of U.S.-based VAs is estimated at $35,000.

There are numerous benefits to choosing a Virtual Assistant over a full-time employee:

• It saves you money—There is zero overhead associated with hiring a VA. You don’t need to provide any benefits, PTO, sick days, insurance, or office space. You pay the agreed-upon VA’s rate, and only for the hours worked.
• VAs have become indispensable for small businesses—The trend of hiring contract workers has boomed so much precisely because Virtual Assistants have proven themselves so essential. They bring all the skills you need to the enterprise but charge per deliverable only. You can hire a VA either short- or long-term or hire an entire team to significantly reduce costs.
• Efficiency boost—Running a business can quickly drain you and your employees and leave you with a pile of unanswered calls and emails. Recruiting a VA will help you redistribute the workload and get more crucial activities done.

Expert Tips on Hiring a Virtual Sales Assistant

If you’re considering hiring a remote worker to outsource lower- and higher-priority duties to, you should take note of the following tips:

• Write a thorough job description—Listing the exact duties you expect a Virtual Sales Assistant to assume in the job ad ensures you’ll mostly receive applications from qualified candidates who possess the skills your company needs.

• Don’t rely on applications alone—Candidates often tend to submit embellished applications, so take care to thoroughly test each applicant to make sure you’re letting only the competent ones pass to the later screening stages.

• Read past employers’ references—The VA you want to recruit will have to be trusted with sensitive information, such as accounts, passwords, and customer databases. Additionally, they will be expected to work independently and produce high-quality results without being micromanaged. That’s why you should thoroughly read references from their former employers to ensure you’re giving the job to a reliable person.

• Evaluate as many applicants as possible—The surefire way to recruit the ideal VA is to screen all the candidates who apply for the position. Keeping track of so many people manually can quickly become chaotic and cost you the precious time that should be spent expanding your brand. Luckily, there’s no reason you should handle large-scale recruitment on your own—Workello can do it for you! Using our services, you can set up a hiring funnel that works for you, one that automates the recruitment process from start to finish—from managing correspondence and filtering out inexperienced applicants to keeping track of individual recruitment stages!

Hire a Reliable Virtual Sales Assistant Faster

You can think of Workello as the perfect virtual hiring assistant. Our fully automated hiring funnel is the product of countless hours, over $100,000 of investment, and dozens of iterations. With Workello, you can automate testing, scheduling, and email correspondence with candidates so you can focus on scaling your business and maximizing revenue.

Here’s how Workello makes hiring Virtual Sales Assistants a breeze:

1. Sign up for a free Workello account and launch your automated, pre-configured hiring funnel in less than 3 minutes
2. Post your job ads across LinkedIn, Monster, Facebook, Indeed, and all your other hiring channels and link to your Workello job ad
3. See all your candidates in a single unified Workello dashboard, regardless of which hiring channel they applied from
4. Reject, test, interview, and send offers to Virtual Sales Assistants with a single click
5. Filter out unqualified candidates with Workello’s built-in testing feature
6. Trigger automated emails and move candidates through your hiring funnel simply by changing their status from a drop-down menu
7. Minimize transactional questions by enabling candidates to see a live status page that tells them exactly which stage of your hiring funnel they are in

Don’t waste hundreds of hours looking for a perfect Sales VA that’s supposed to save you valuable time. Set up a fully automated hiring funnel with Workello, cut your hiring costs by 50%, and start accepting ideal candidates today!

Sign up now and review 5 Sales VA tests for free.