Virtual assistants offer a lot of advantages. What is one way you use VAs to help streamline your processes, as well as aid productivity?
Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most successful young entrepreneurs. YEC members represent nearly every industry, generate billions of dollars in revenue each year and have created tens of thousands of jobs. Learn more at yec.co.
1. Blogger Outreach
A huge part of our marketing strategy is collaborating with bloggers in our industry. The outreach process can be very redundant and sometimes nerve wrecking with rejections. Having a VA assist in this process has taken this non-favorable task outside of the office and streamlined our collaboration efforts. Using Google Sheets to update prospects makes it easy for everyone to stay up to date!
– Mikey Moran, Private Label Extensions
2. Handling Phone Calls
Virtual assistants are great for handling phone calls. We use them to screen any incoming calls before they are forwarded to the appropriate person. This streamlines our client communication process. This has saved us so much time, and allows us to focus productively on our work, not on miscellaneous calls.
– Samuel Thimothy, OneIMS – Integrated Marketing Solutions
3. Lead Generation and Outreach
Our B2B team uses VAs to research the right contact online, find their email address, reach out with a follow-up sequence and schedule a call. We’ve found through our experience that VAs are most effective when there are set rules, so the more tightly defined the process, the more success we’ve had.
4. Meeting Confirmation and Follow Up
A way to look really professional when dealing with a new or prospective customer is to have a VA call to confirm any scheduled meetings or appointments. This makes you seem busy, important and in demand. If the meeting is canceled, you just saved a lot of time. After a meeting, having your VA follow up on anything that was discussed but not answered is a way to make sure you didn’t miss anything.
– Scott Kacmarski, Reps Direct
5. Data Entry
If you have an excel sheet that you’ve been putting off updating, a virtual assistant can help you with that. Just send them an email with clear instructions on what you would like them to find, update and how you would like the excel sheet organized.
6. Scheduling Social Media Posts
We have so many social media channels that sometimes it’s hard to keep up or find the time to post on all of them. This is where a virtual assistant can help. We have used them in the past to help schedule some of our posts for Twitter using Buffer as well as Facebook and Linkedin daily posting.
7. Visual Content Creation
There are many tools that have made creating image overlays and infographics much easier these days. You can quickly train a virtual assistant to use Canva for example to create stunning image overlays that get a lot of shares on Facebook.
– Chris Christoff, MonsterInsights
8. Answering Emails
It helps to have a VA who can speak for you in emails and other correspondence, since there is often so much to answer and respond to. And not all automated technology helps the way a VA could in selecting the right tone and word choice for this type of communication.
9. Prospecting Research
We’ve used a VA to determine the right businesses to approach. For anyone in B2B sales, know that there are tons of businesses who were ready to buy from you yesterday. Determine the common characteristics of your ideal client and have a VA compile a list for your team to reach out to. This allows your sales team to focus on closing bigger deals without getting bogged down with research.
– Bryan Citrin, Chiropractic Advertising
10. Organizing and Filtering Your Inbox
You can build a few processes in place with a good VA, so that you can have your email and messages more streamlined. They can take care of filtering, prioritizing, cleaning and of course making sure you don’t miss any critical follow-ups. It’s a good task to be able to free your mind of so you can focus on more important tasks.
– Nicole Munoz, Start Ranking Now
11. Discovering Tasks to Delegate
A VA can help you streamline your processes by being your test for how easy or difficult processes are to explain or delegate. Many of us did everything when our businesses started, and that can be a hard habit to break. Seeing your VA excel at tasks like responding to technical questions (from an internal FAQ, for example) can help you figure out what can be safely passed to someone.