1Where Does the Time Go?

Where does the time go? According to Pace, a salesperson time allocation in a typical week looks like this:

• Admin and paperwork: 7.3 hours
• Email management and correspondence: 8.2 hours
• Internal communication: 6.6 hours
• CRM Management: 2.2 hours

How Salespeople Want to Spend Their Time

Here’s what Pace’s subjects told the surveyors are the most valuable uses of their time.

• Closing sales
• Taking orders
• Networking
• Customer service
• Planning

2Virtual Assistants to the Rescue

More and more sales leaders are leaning on virtual sales assistants (VAs) as a cost-effective way to tackle the admin tasks that take up so much of their time.

Admin and Paperwork

Virtual assistants can handle much of a salesperson’s day-to-day administrative work. Admin tasks VAs commonly handle to give you those 7.3 hours a week back include:

• Scheduling meetings and appointments
• Document prep for meetings
• Data entry and management
• Customer and lead research and targeting
• Social media outreach
• Prospecting
• Expense reports
• Travel planning

Prospecting

Let’s take prospecting as an example. More than 40 percent of salespeople say prospecting is the most challenging part of their work. It can be tedious and time-consuming.

Prospecting is something easily delegated to VA once the qualification criteria are clearly defined. VAs can use your LinkedIn Sales Navigator, ZoomInfo, Apollo, or another contact database to build lists and/or complete lists with missing information.

All you have to do is give them criteria about the types of prospects you’re looking for. You can give the VAs the following criteria for your search:

• Industry
• Job title
• Geographic region
• Company size
• Company type (Private, public, or non-profit)

As you narrow your targeting, you can expand your criteria to get more specific contacts.

Scheduling

Then there are meetings. It takes 20-25 minutes and 10-12 emails to schedule a business meeting. Multiply that across a week’s worth of meetings, and it’s at least a few hours. That’s something a VA can take off your plate, including:

• Sending confirmations to avoid no shows.
• Book meeting locations.
• Provide profiles of the people you’re meeting with before you meet.
• Take notes on action items from recorded calls.

For business travel, it takes an average of 12 hours to plan and book a trip. A VA can handle that task using your travel preferences and loyalty accounts. In addition to trip planning, a VA can help you maximize the ROI of your business trips by scheduled as many meetings as possible. A VA can also help you save time by reaching out to your contacts in the city you’re visiting and planning meetings in locations that are close together.

All you have to do is give your VA your travel itinerary, and they’ll fill in the gaps with meeting nearby opportunities.

Document Prep

Document prep can also be time-consuming. A VA can update templated documents like

• Proposals
• Sales sheets
• Presentations

Anything that simply needs updated content cut and pasted into a template can be offloaded to a virtual assistant.

Email Management

According to Salesforce, it takes six to eight touches to make a sale, but 70 percent of salespeople stop at one. Why? Because it takes too much time and salespeople are pulled in too many directions. If you are already spending seven hours a week on email correspondence, multiplying your sales outreach eight-fold is quite a challenge.

Email outreach cadences will differ for each business, but you can delegate many of these routine emails to a virtual assistant. You can also give scripted follow-up emails and inbox management to a virtual assistant to make sure you:

• Follow up on qualified leads at the right frequency for your business.
• Don’t miss any high-priority incoming messages buried in your inbox.

Internal Communication

A VA can make routine internal calls like meeting confirmations and regular updates to share information, but not more sensitive calls like syncs with managers and direct reports. Those are the higher priority tasks you need more time to do.

CRM Management

Maintaining accurate customer data is critical to business success. That data is usually in a CRM, and companies that use a well-implemented CRM perform better, plain and simple.

• Customers spend 20-40 percent more with companies that use a CRM.
• Companies that use CRMs increase retention and customer satisfaction by 47 percent.
• Conversion rates rise by up to 300 percent for CRM users.
• The average ROI for a CRM is $8.71 for every dollar spent on the platform.

But only 30 percent of businesses have strong CRMs.

One of the biggest reasons CRMs don’t live up to their potential is inconsistent data entry. Different users enter information differently, or the contact information is not updated regularly. When you don’t know if a contact’s information or status is accurate, you don’t use it.

Once you define rules for contact information and the database is up to date, a PA can pull lists, complete missing data, confirm pipeline status, and enter new contacts as they come in. A VA can also generate lists, email campaigns, and process response data.

A virtual sales assistant can help you leverage your CRM by:

• Inputting all your contacts into your CRM and filling in additional information about them.
• Logging every call, email, and meeting, so you have a record of all your interactions with leads.
• Keeping your data clean and up to date by changing statuses as needed, removing duplicate data, filling in missing information, etc.
• Running reports and sending them to you, so you have access to the latest insights about your pipeline.

Once the data is entered, you can also track opportunities using your contact qualification criteria for:

• Leads
• Opportunities
• Deal size
• Deal timing
• Confidence percentage