How Virtual Sales Teams Can be Achieved Through Virtual Assistants

Did you know that 92% of customer interactions already happen over the phone? While many of us assume that the sales process is something that has to happen in person, it’s simply not the truth in the 21st century. Sales can happen over voice, over the Internet—they can even happen over emails.

In fact, the higher you go up the corporate ladder, the more buyers like to speak over the phone, according to some statistics. That means that your sales can be more impactful on a virtual basis if you target the right decision-makers in your sales funnel, not less.

Your sales force doesn’t have to be a group of people who are constantly on the road—especially in the age of social distancing. Here are a few of the things that a virtual sales team can do while you’re working on the business itself:

• Writing impactful sales emails. The average individual deletes nearly half of the emails they receive every day. If someone feels that an email is overly “salesy,” you’d better believe that they’re all too happy to send it to the trash bin before they even consider your product. 
• Placing phone calls. Whether you need to follow up with a potential lead who filled out a form on your website, or if you need someone to place cold calls on your behalf, phone calls will remain a key component to getting business done in the era of COVID—and well after that. Sales professionals don’t have to be physically present at your office to do this.
• Creating a sales funnel. Not all sales are face-to-face interactions. If you have an effective sales funnel in place, you can use inbound marketing to continue to generate new leads. This is also a great way to invest money into your remote sales team. You can have them create a sales funnel and then observe how well the funnel functions before deciding to move forward.
• Utilizing social selling tools. Did you know that half of revenue is impacted by the influence of social selling, in some industries? 

To wrap it all up, let’s think about the day of a salesperson and what it might look like. Too often, business owners assume that salespeople have to be in front of the client, face-to-face, to have any meaningful impact.

But statistics show that this isn’t the case at all. Only about one-third of a salesperson’s day might be talking to prospects. 21% of the day is writing emails, 17% is entering in data, 17% is prospecting and researching leads, 12% is attending internal meetings. 

All of these tasks are not only ideal for the age of social distancing, but something that a virtual sales assistant can easily handle from the comfort of their own home. You don’t always have to employ a sales team that’s out and about on the road to get new sales. We live in a digital age. If your business is going to succeed, it should adapt to this new reality.

Sure, it would be great to have full-time workers constantly making new sales for you. But this is the 21st century. Employment is changing. And so are the paradigms that make sales not only possible, but easier.

Consider everything that goes into a full-time hire. Benefits packages. Retirement. Payroll costs. Costly HR additions. And even when you don’t factor those into account, remember that paying someone a salary often means you’re paying extraordinary amounts of money for only about two or three hours a day of actual productive work.

That’s not the way to build a great sales team.

Hiring full-time does have a few advantages, such as face-to-face meetings. But these days, more and more companies are moving to fully-remote operations. Even before the COVID pandemic, some companies were fully remote. They demonstrated that it’s not only possible to create a company culture with a fully-remote environment, but that it’s possible to succeed while doing it.

If you can save money and improve the quality of your virtual sales team without ever relying on a full-time hire, isn’t it worth investigating?

The money saved alone can be worth it. According to Best of Budgets, hiring a virtual assistant can save nearly 80% from operating costs on a yearly basis. If you can generate high-quality leads and sales through a virtual sales team, and you can do so while reducing costs, you have a blueprint for successful growth.

You don’t need to be a Fortune 500 company with a major marketing budget to create a successful sales team. You just have to know where to find the right virtual assistants. 

But nothing happens unless you get started. That’s why we’ve broken down the process into a few key steps for making your first virtual salesperson hire. It doesn’t have to be intimidating, and it can be done in a low-risk way while you get your budget in line.