Every hour a salesperson spends on administration is an hour not spent generating pipeline, closing deals, or building client relationships. The maths is simple. What's hard is knowing which exact tasks can be delegated while retaining quality, and implementing a solid delegation process.
Working alongside a virtual admin assistant can help you strip away the business operations from your schedule and devote your attention to income-producing activities. The key is knowing what to do so that you can take advantage of this method fully from the start.
Lead Research and Prospecting Support
The very first type of tasks worth delegating to a VA right now is lead research.
Creating targeted lists of prospects, finding decision-makers at potential accounts, collecting and validating contact data, and organizing information into a spreadsheet is extremely time-consuming yet does not require strategic thought.
A virtual admin assistant will be able to create lists of leads based on your criteria, verify data across LinkedIn, company websites, and databases, and organize this information into a neat spreadsheet ready for your prospecting process.
For companies whose sales teams regularly conduct prospecting and lead generation activities, delegating these tasks will mean saving even more time that your sales team can spend on calls while achieving identical results.
CRM Data Entry and Management
CRM hygiene is critical for pipeline visibility and accurate forecasting, but the data entry required to maintain it is one of the most common reasons CRMs fall behind
Contact information is outdated, activities are poorly documented, and updates on deals are not documented. Delegating such activities to a virtual assistant will allow you to focus on actual sales while having your CRM updated in real-time.
At the same time, delegating such tasks makes your CRM data management process efficient, reliable, and timely, which makes the CRM itself more useful for decision-making and forecasting.
Inbox Management and Follow-Up Coordination
For professionals managing a high volume of inbound email, the inbox becomes a time sink that disrupts focus and delays responses.
A virtual assistant can triage your inbox based on certain criteria, forward messages that require your direct input, respond to incoming messages based on the templates you create, and schedule follow-up reminders where necessary.
In addition, in case you work with inbound leads, delegating your inbox management process will allow your sales team to increase the response rate without getting distracted from other tasks by incoming emails.
The same way, managing follow-up processes is one of the tasks your VA will do with ease. Handling quotation confirmations, confirming attendance to meetings, sending post-call summaries, and checking if proposals were opened are all processes a VA will manage perfectly with the proper system set in place.
Calendar Management and Appointments
Yet another aspect that consumes more time than you think and is generally overlooked in sales is appointment scheduling.
The process of going back-and-forth with the leads, setting up meetings with many people, inviting people, managing all those calendar appointments, and making arrangements for anything else can be an extremely big waste of your precious time.
By delegating this responsibility to your VA according to your schedule and timeframes, you are assured of having a good schedule in which appointments arrive at appropriate times, the leads have quick response times, and you don’t even need to manage the schedule yourselves.
If you have software like Calendly and HubSpot Meetings at your company, then there is no problem with scheduling customized meetings with multiple participants in different time zones.
Content Formatting and Social Media Scheduling
Another important task related to content creation, promotion, and distribution is the actual process of doing it all.
Formatting articles for publishing, resizing photos, writing meta descriptions, scheduling and tracking posts on social media, moderating comments, managing the entire calendar of content publications, and other tasks related to content creation and social media activity can be delegated with ease to a VA.
Delegating such tasks will mean saving a lot of time of whoever is responsible for creating the content while ensuring that it gets published and promoted accordingly. In other words, your VA will provide the backbone for your entire content strategy.
Preparing Reports and Compiling Data
Creating regular reports on performance is inevitable for most modern companies yet compiling raw data, putting it in a presentable format, and preparing the first draft of a report can be fully delegated to a VA.
Generating lead performance reports on weekly basis, compiling pipeline status and progress on monthly frequency, pulling metrics from ad platforms, and analyzing website traffic and email metrics will be easily done by a VA from predefined templates, while you will be free to analyze and use the data received in reports.
As your team grows, it is increasingly difficult to compile reports based on data from multiple sources manually; thus, delegating this task becomes an incredibly efficient solution.
Handling Lead Capture and Form Operations
Creating traffic is only one step of your lead generation process. The next important one is capturing all the generated leads and properly routing them into your CRM.
Using intelligent multi-step forms with the purpose of qualifying your leads in advance, your VA will be able to track their effectiveness, ensure that all new leads from the form are appropriately tagged, and instantly route the best leads straight to the sales rep.
Delegating this task will prevent any issues related to your lead capture and ensure that no prospect falls through because of poor administrative performance.
Building a Delegation System That Sticks
What causes problems in delegation the most is a lack of proper communication and feedback loop between the delegator and the delegatee. Lack of feedback and proper instructions will make it impossible to build a sustainable and effective delegation system.
Before delegation of the assignment, ensure that you have written down the whole process with clear instructions on how to accomplish the assignment, and any other details that you would like to include. Your notes should be precise such that anyone can follow them and accomplish the assignment.
Create a review schedule for the first 4-6 weeks of delegation. Analyze and provide feedback on completed tasks, giving instructions for improvement in case something goes wrong and the result was not as expected. Usually, a delegation system reaches its final form in 6-8 weeks, during which a VA learns the process and executes it almost automatically.
Tasks mentioned above are only some examples of things you can delegate. Once you get used to working together with your VA and learn how to delegate, the process will become much easier.
Conclusion
However, there is one resource that every firm has limited supply of, which is time, and it is this factor that can determine the efficiency of any sales and marketing operation. It is, therefore, crucial to delegate all those activities connected with administration to an outside expert, which is a very wise decision, as it will help you use your time efficiently.
Moreover, if this delegation is combined with lead automation through multi-step forms, all possible drawbacks in your lead generation strategy will be eliminated.
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