Many business owners find themselves in a tough stage of growth: the amount of work to do is overwhelming, but there’s not enough overhead to cover another full-time employee. You have to manage daily organizational tasks, but it’s too much for the existing staff to accomplish in addition to their more specialized duties. That’s where virtual assistants come in.
When considering adding virtual assistants to the team, the first step is to assess what tasks you’re able to outsource. This is heavily dependent on the type of business you run and what type of products or services you sell, but the goal is ultimately to ensure you have time to complete tasks requiring your expertise, such as business strategy, market research, and acquiring loans or other business funding.
What Tasks Should You Employ Virtual Office Assistants to Handle?
Most virtual office assistants can step in seamlessly and follow written instructions from your team. They typically handle:
- Scheduling calls: If you perform demos, engage in discovery calls, or do quarterly customer check-ins as part of your service offerings, you probably sink a lot of time into reaching out to people and scheduling those interactions. With an updated calendar and an email address for the person you need to meet with, a virtual assistant can inexpensively handle this interaction for you and put the meeting on your calendar.
- Customer service interactions: Chat-based, email, social media, and phone interactions all take time away from your business development process. With a product guide and a little training, your virtual assistant can handle customer service interactions and elevate more critical concerns to your team. They can also add customer interactions to a customer relationship manager (CRM) like Salesforce, so you can track every interaction and discover patterns in concerns and issues.
- Sales prospecting: Are you looking to get more sales? If you already have a sales prospecting list in place or a procedure to make one, a virtual assistant can take this task off your hands. They can schedule demos and calls for you after qualifying your leads.
- Social media scheduling and web posting: Do you have content ready to post to your website and social media pages? It takes time to schedule them, even when you use a reputable scheduling tool or content management system (CMS). A virtual assistant can take that task off your hands and also deliver stats and reporting from this software to your inbox in a dashboard view. This lets you spend more time creating content.
In addition to these tasks, most virtual assistant firms can provide support with a variety of administrative tasks, including project management, document formatting and layout, and more.
How Can Virtual Assistants Increase Your ROI?
The best reason to invest in virtual assistance is the increase they can offer to your return on investment (ROI). This is one of the best indications that your business is elevating. ROI happens with virtual assistants because they handle mundane tasks that keep you from making your next big move.
When you choose an outsourced virtual assistant versus another full-time employee, you don’t have to worry about the overhead of an office. Additionally, if you’re offshoring the job to a lower cost-of-living area, the wages will be lower. Unlike a full-time employee, you don’t have to provide health insurance. Plus, offshore assistants can often do certain tasks, like scheduling email, during your overnight hours.
A virtual administrative assistant is also hourly, meaning you only pay for the amount of work you need — which can change from month to month. This is especially useful for businesses that encounter busy and slow seasons or face changes in the economy. These fractional services can bolster your business when you need the help most.
You’re likely ready for a virtual assistant in your small business if you find yourself overworked and overwhelmed by mundane, repetitive tasks such as prospecting, scheduling meetings, and handling minor customer service concerns. Virtual assistants can complete these types of tasks and email you a summary of their actions so you’re always on top of where your business is, what problems might occur, and what issues your virtual assistant was able to solve.
If you’re at the stage of growth where it’s time to focus more on developing your small business, but you find yourself occupied by administrative tasks, a virtual assistant is the next move you can make to improve ROI and make better use of your time. You (and any other full-time employees you may have) are best when you’re working in specialized areas of growth for your business. Let your social media manager create campaigns instead of scheduling a litany of posts on a program. Use your time to attend the right meetings and analyze the existing growth of your business instead of sending emails and letters of inquiry (LOI) yourself. Virtual assistants are here to support you.