23 Tasks You Can Outsource - A Guide to Working with Virtual Assistants.

Are you the bottleneck?

Are you intentional in your business or are you the bottleneck in your business?

That’s the big question when it comes to choosing whether or not to outsource a virtual assistant specialized in the real estate industry.

Not sure which camp you currently belong to?

Intentional business owners focus on consistent action through automation.

Bottleneck business owners waste time doing tasks that would be better handed off.

But the good news is that every intentional business owner was once a bottleneck business owner. You have to do everything yourself in the beginning, but in order to scale, you must start to delegate.

One thing we've learned from successful entrepreneurs is this: if they could reduce their workload with no loss of quality, they would.

They know how valuable their time is and want to use it on the things that matter most to them — like building up their company or spending more time with their family.

With so many demands that come with being a business owner, getting assistance from someone who can handle the things you don’t want to do yourself is definitely a smarter way to work.

Let’s break down the 23 tasks you can outsource with a VA. To make it easier, we’ve broken them down further into six categories, namely: Prospecting and Lead Generation, Sales and Lead Management, Manage Dispositions, Customer Success Management, General Admin Tasks, and Online Marketing.

Let’s get started!

Prospecting and Lead Generation Tasks for Virtual Assistants

If you are looking for help with prospecting and lead generation, you may want to consider hiring a virtual assistant. Virtual assistants are available 24/7 to do the tedious tasks which would otherwise take up your valuable time. They can research leads, do cold calling, set appointments over the phone and more.

1. Cold Calling

Your VA is going to be more consistent with the daily habits you need to establish to better grow your business. Whether you hate cold calling or have never even done it before, a VA can take this burden off your plate and help automate lead generation in your business. With a professional cold caller at your disposal, you can have your VA make hundreds of calls per day, which can set out the direction for your business to bring in and quality high-caliber leads.

2. Ringless Voice Mail (RVM)

Ringless Voice Mail (RVM) is a great way to communicate with clients, and your virtual assistant is the best person to perform this tasking part of prospecting on your behalf. This technique allows you to leave an audio message without ever having to call, as the name implies. The voice mail is sent directly from your phone and stored on their answering machine as a voicemail message.

3. Send SMS

Using virtual assistants or remote work employees for tasks like sending SMS or text messages to prospects can make life easier for busy professionals in your industry.

4. Appointment Setting

Outsourcing lead generation tasks is also like getting your own secretary. Virtual assistants can schedule all your appointments for you so you can focus your energy on meeting potential clients all the way through closing a deal.

Sales and Lead Management Tasks for Virtual Assistants

Outsourcing sales and lead management tasks to a virtual assistant can be an excellent solution for professionals looking for ways to simplify the sales process and turn them into positive results. Here are some of the key tasks you can delegate to your VA under this category.

5. Lead Management

Lead management is one of the most important aspects of running a successful business. Leads generated through different channels are useless if not acted on in some way. If not nurtured methodically, these leads become cold prospects who may never convert into clients. Make sure your VA can stay on top of lead management tasks and develop a streamlined sales process.

6. Follow-Ups

Beyond initial sales calls, your VA can also help with follow-ups and lead management. Any salesperson will tell you that sales don’t usually happen on the first call. In actuality, the sale generally takes place around call 6 or 7. With this in mind, why not have a VA keep track and consistently follow up with contacts for you? This way, you can focus on working on your business and not working in your business.

7. Closing Deals

As soon as a deal is reached, it ought to be made official. In this situation, contracts would need to be drawn up, which would take time and require a lot of back and forth between the parties involved. This is a stage where your virtual assistant can provide extra assistance.

8. Data Management

If you’re in a lead generation business, managing data can get overwhelming. Your VA can help take a chunk of the tasks off of your plate, covering tasks ranging from data entry, tagging contacts, data cleansing, and more. Save time and maintain the integrity of your database through a data-savvy VA who can take care of all of this for you.

9. Manage and Maintain Software Stack

The longer your sales teams fumble between browser tabs and software, the less time they spend calling prospects. Your VA can monitor, manage, and update this information.

Customer Success Management

In order to grow your business and leverage the existing relationships you have with clients, you need a good client success program. A key component in building this up is to have a team that applies only the most efficient practices in the virtual assistant industry tailored to your business processes.

10. Coaching Other VAs

If you’ve read about cold calls and lead management, you may already be wondering how you’re going to step into a leadership role to manage your VAs. The good news is that another VA can actually solve this problem for you. At Start Virtual, each VA comes with a Customer Success Manager, or CSM, that helps manage and teach your VA in real time. They can coach and roleplay with new VAs in training to transfer knowledge and demonstrate the required skills for the job.

11. Quality Assurance

Customer experience should remain a top priority for businesses that hire remote employees or virtual assistants. An experienced VA can step into this task to listen in on calls and provide feedback. After establishing the metrics, the team can then improve on the quality and level of professionalism to improve the sales process in its entirety.

General Administration Tasks for Virtual Assistants

Your admin staff serves as the backbone for your operations. If you can’t handle the important business-critical tasks, what makes you think that you can handle the prospecting and sales tasks flawlessly? Without the help of a suitable virtual assistant working remotely, it would be nearly impossible to juggle the tasks you need to complete in your business within the set deadlines.

12. Email Communication

Checking email is a time waster for most business owners. With a virtual assistant, you’ll have someone to handle your emails so that you can focus on the more productive tasks. They can filter emails and inform you of which ones to prioritize. You can also ask them to sort promotional emails on your inbox based on the wanted and unwanted ones.

Most importantly, you can ask them to respond to the emails you receive. This could range from using a templated email response for commonly asked inquiries to answering customer service email queries.

13. Inbound Calls

A virtual assistant can provide help not just with sales or outbound calls but also in taking incoming phone calls. Every business that cares about customers need to respond to general business inquiries over the phone in a timely manner. It also involves completing the administrative tasks that may need to be done in relation to the call such as logging details and updating the CRM.

14. Recruitment

A virtual assistant can also recruit other people to work for you. This is especially important when you have a small business but are now undergoing a period of growth. The virtual assistant will know how to filter applicants with skills that match your specific needs because they have first-hand knowledge of how your business operates.

15. Employee Engagement

Not only can virtual assistants handle general business tasks like answering emails and scheduling, but they can also act as the company's "employee advocate" by serving various culture-building functions related to HR needs, communications across teams, and so forth.

This ensures that employees who previously had disparate access to the management team of their employer now have an entry point which fosters increased civility and understanding between team members.

16. Organize Team Huddles

VAs can oversee finding good times for each of the team members to be available. They might call each of them and ask when their most convenient time would be to hold a meeting and recording their answers to make sure everyone's schedule accommodates everyone else's schedule.

Another way that a virtual assistant could organize team huddles would be by scheduling how often they're done, what they should focus on during certain meetings, and figuring out who participates in which teams.

17. Management of Paid Tools and Subscriptions

Virtual assistants are great at managing paid online tools regularly used in the business. They create an account, take note of passwords, take care of renewing subscriptions, and other administrative tasks related to maintaining these tools. It's taking one for the team so the rest can work without having to worry about these little details.

18. Business Management Tasks

Your VA can handle detail management including virtual bookkeeping, payroll and processing important documents. They can organize some aspects of your company such as expenses and billing. They can take information from accounts payable, invoices, and emails to create the financial records the company needs.

Other similar tasks can involve reconciling bank statements or credit cards, coding transactions into accounts for easy retrieval when it comes time to do tax season, and inventorying documents such as business plans, insurance policies, proposals, and reports.

19. Manage Your Personal Schedule

Your full time VA can also act as your personal assistant who can organize your schedule and timelines. For instance, they can remind you that you have an appointment with the dentist on a Friday afternoon. They can block this out on your calendar to ensure that no client meetings take place during this time. They can also make travel arrangements for you if needed.

VA Tasks in Online Marketing

A virtual assistant doesn’t necessarily have to be an expert in online marketing to know the tricks in attracting online leads. Think of it as if they’re running errands for your digital marketing efforts. As long as they’re adept with the use of technology, they can support your initiatives and leverage channels that can act as lead magnets for your company.

20. Graphic Design

A remote employee acting as a virtual assistant can also be involved in creating graphic designs to promote a real estate company online. They don’t necessarily need to be hardcore designers because there are some drag-and-drop tools out there that don’t require a high level of design expertise. Nowadays pretty much any business needs at least one staff member who knows how to quickly create simple designs for promotional purposes online.

21. Blogs and Social Media Content

A VA can be an invaluable resource for organizing content, writing blog posts, creating compelling copy for social media, editing content, the list goes on. As you may already know, your online presence can make or break your business and it’s important to ensure that you keep pumping out good content that can help build your authority on the internet on a regular basis.

22. Inbound Lead Generation Assets

For the most part, our system encourages outbound lead generation, but an employee on a virtual assistant job can also manage inbound lead generation. If you’ve considered posting on social media, managing Craigslist ads, handing incoming calls, sending out email blasts, or any other way you might think of for sellers to contact you, then consider assigning these tasks to your remote workforce, too.

23. Social Media Engagement

A virtual assistant can take on tasks like replying to messages on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to ensure quick response times. They can also engage in online conversations with potential clients through these channels. They can also keep an eye on the company’s online reputation by monitoring posts’ interactions or comments to discover areas of improvement.

Next Steps to Find Your First Virtual Assistant...

At StartVirtual, we want professionals like you to know that there are many tasks and responsibilities you can outsource with the help of virtual assistants these days.

We hope this quick read helps guide your thinking on how best to use a remote workforce for prospecting and lead generation, sales and lead management, customer success management, general admin, and online marketing tasks.

If this doesn't quite answer all your questions, feel free to reach out. Our team will be more than happy to walk you through how our process works so you can be connected to talented and professional VAs who can be trained according to your business requirements.

Visit StartVirtual for more information.