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A virtual assistant performs a variety of tasks. These range from scheduling appointments to screening and responding to emails. But scheduling and emails are just the tip of the iceberg. If it can be done online, a virtual assistant can probably do it.
Here’s your ultimate guide to virtual assistants, what they are, and what they do.
Managing your calendar, both professional and personal, is one of an entrepreneur’s greatest challenges. From providing reminders to scheduling appointments, virtual assistants can make it effortless for you. They can:
1. Coordinate and schedule calls and appointments. This alone typically saves gym owners about 10 hours a week and keeps them from doing the tasks that they dislike. The key is to give your assistant rules about when and who. VAs also schedule calls for some team members.
2. Confirm appointments. A best practice is to give the virtual assistant a list of appointments to confirm, such as the next day’s appointments. This eliminates wasting time when the other party forgets or waits until the last minute to cancel.
3. Provide reminders about calls and appointments. There are times when you might forget to make a call, especially when out of the office or in back-to-back meetings. The virtual assistant can call or text you a few minutes before to ensure you don’t forget.
4. Reschedule calls and appointments. While you may try to avoid it, sometimes, you need to reschedule. Your VA can handle this for you.
5. Provide notice of schedule changes to others. The virtual assistant will also provide notice to the other party and get the rescheduled time confirmed.
6. Protect time. It can be hard for business owners to say no to someone who wants to meet for a coffee to “catch up.” The VA can be the bad cop.
7. Send and maintain a “pending list”. Each week, virtual assistants can send you a list of people that have not responded to requests for setting up a meeting or a call so you know when you need to get involved.
8. Inform significant others when you will be out of town. As part of a travel process, the VA gives significant others a calendar invite with the out-of-town dates along with flight and hotel details. This keeps them informed.
If you’re buried under a ton of emails — or if you need someone to update your contact list — take note. A good virtual assistant can save hours of time by doing the following activities:
9. Screen emails. Based on the rules you set, VAs will delete, respond, forward, or flag emails for your attention.
10. Add people to contacts. When you have a call, meeting, or some other form of engagement with someone new, the virtual assistant can add that person’s details to your contacts.
11. Update people’s info to contacts. Sometimes, a contact’s phone number or other information is not known right away. A VA can add information to contacts as it becomes available — say from an email signature.
If you need some light receptionist work done, or phone interactions, a virtual assistant can do certain tasks.
13. Perform light receptionist duties. When expecting important calls that you may not be available to answer, calls are forwarded to the virtual assistant.
14. Transcribe voicemails. As most voicemails can now be received by email, these are forwarded to the VA for transcription. And any necessary follow-up activities.
Whether researching leads on LinkedIn or finding email addresses, there is a lot of leg work in business development. A virtual assistant can do these activities, letting you focus on the personal interactions involved in making sales.
15. Research leads on LinkedIn. B2B businesses (and some B2C businesses) must keep a list of ideal clients. A virtual assistant, following guidance from you, can research LinkedIn and creates a list of prospective clients.
16. Find email addresses. Using databases along with Google, a VA can find the email addresses of prospective clients you need to contact.
17. Design presentations. A VA can enhance proposals by finding and inserting a prospect’s logo and changing the text color to match. They can also animate slides as appropriate.
As you scale your business, there will be plenty of management functions that need to get done. You may need to assemble reports for clients. This may simply mean putting together a lot of data you may already have. There are other management functions — like recruiting more people to your team. You can easily delegate some of this to your virtual assistant.
18. Assemble reports. A VA can create KPI reports at pre-determined intervals to track progress.
19. Help to recruit employees. The competition for good people is tougher than the competition for employees. VAs screen LinkedIn for prospective employees based on criteria that you provide.
Does doing the books or sending invoices fill you with dread? Why not have your VA do this stuff instead.
20. Maintain the books. With a little training, virtual assistants can review and match transactions and handle monthly reconciliations.
21. Create and send invoices. With the help of templates, a VA can create invoices and send them to clients.
22. Chase down payments. All companies should have an accounts receivable process. virtual assistants can follow that process and collect A/R. The process can include escalation to the business owner or someone else when appropriate.
Your job as a small business owner is planning for your company’s future. As a result, you want to focus on creating new products and services — and other projects that will take your business to the next level. So maybe you should leave jobs like filling out online forms and handling file management to someone else.
23. Fill out online forms. A virtual assistant equipped with company information can fill out forms including subscribing to SaaS products.
24. Take notes from webinars. Sometimes you would like the information from a webinar but don’t want to invest the time to watch — even for on-demand! A VA “attends” and provides the notes.
25. Convert files. Have a PDF but need a jpeg? A VA can convert it for you.
26. Conduct research. A virtual assistant can conduct first-level research for decisions that need to be made, such as which SaaS product to choose.
27. Set up projects in your project management system. A VA can set up the project and then invite the appropriate participants.
28. Handle file management. Whether you use Dropbox or a local server for file management, a virtual assistant ensures that files are put in the right place with the right filename. He or she also ensures that the right people have access.
29. Schedule social media. A VA takes your social media posts and schedules them per your process.
30. Proofread and edit letters, blogs, and presentations. One of the great risks you run when you get overloaded is that mistakes may creep into your work. So your virtual assistant can help you with that.
Of course, there are a few things your virtual assistant won’t do. You needn’t worry about a virtual assistant’s attitude if you ask them to do something. A VA does not:
Identify the tasks in your business that would be best to outsource. Hint: Focus on tasks that do not require your expertise. Ask yourself if the task is the best use of your time or would be better done by someone else?
Then schedule a call to go over your needs and find out how a VA can help you get back your freedom!
Copyright © 2017 - 2024 Fit Hive, LLC. All Rights Reserved.