What Is a Virtual Sales Assistant & How to Hire One

At some point, the romanticism of the entrepreneur going at it alone smashes into reality. You are working several million hours per week and doing everything yourself. You do not have time to make sure the CRM is squeaky-clean levels of hygienic; your leads are going cold quickly, probably because you put off the follow-up for too long.

You know you need to delegate, but it is too early for you to take the time to interview, train, and monitor. One option is to hire sales assistant support that is fully managed to bridge that gap. But what are reasonable expectations for a virtual sales assistant, and how to know the best ones?

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What Is A Virtual Sales Assistant?

A virtual sales assistant is a remote professional who helps you run your sales process. Mostly, they do the daily routine tasks that are too time-consuming for the founder to do well when they have so many other things to do.

Why a virtual assistant and not AI software?

While “virtual” often equates to our quaint 1990s idea of “not in the physical world”, here “virtual assistant” does not mean AI or another kind of software for you to manage; they are human remote sales assistants.

At the end of the day, AI is not quite there to run automatically in the background without any human involvement or (more importantly) human correction. You already know that you cannot be that human stop-gap. You need a human assistant.

Still, we are living in the age of artificial intelligence, and your virtual sales assistant should be fully trained and comfortable with the AI capabilities of the tools you are using.

Virtual sales assistants vs in-house hire

You are probably in the space right now where you have a lot that needs to get done but do not have the time to really delegate it to anyone. Delegating can be a huge time commitment, not just while hiring but when conducting daily training, checking output, or dealing with sick days and backlog.

Not to mention that a sales support VA is often going to be cheaper than an in-house hire. Depending on which virtual assistant service you go to, it can be 60% to 80% cheaper than hiring locally. Often this is because you are hiring overseas, although plenty of companies include US-based hires. Bear in mind that a US-based hire tends to be more expensive than their overseas counterparts.

Virtual sales assistants vs freelancers

If cost is your main concern, then a freelancer will often be even cheaper than a VA.

However, while a freelancer can be a great idea for one-off projects, a sales virtual assistant is a better fit for ongoing tasks like keeping the CRM clean, ongoing outreach campaigns, and following up on leads that have gone quiet.

A freelancer can create a good workflow or sales sequence, but a sales VA is there to help you run the day-to-day of that sequence.

A Day In The Life Of Your Virtual Sales Assistant

A virtual assistant for sales is not here for one-off projects. They are supposed to be working for you day in and day out, but how do they fill up their time? What does the ideal day look like for them (and for you)?

Morning

Your remote sales assistant will open up the CRM and see what’s live. They check the inbox to see who has replied, take note of who needs follow-up, which deals have moved, and which have gotten to a critical cold state. “Cleaning up the CRM” can mean a few things, but their morning is the exact reason it is so important. You cannot trust a to-do list based on faulty information.

The marvelous thing is that the to-do list has nothing “to do” with you. Once the assistant has cleaned up the CRM, they can start working off this independently.

Afternoon

Once the work gets flowing, your sales VA sets their eye on the important stuff. They know that the replies are warm leads that can’t sit, and they have the time you don’t to make sure they are worked properly. Questions get answered, interested parties get moved forward, “not nows” get logged, and a reminder is set to circle back in a few months. Anyone who has responded gets handled before they are moving on to the next outreach.

None of this reaches you unless you need to make a business-critical judgement call. What are you doing? You are setting the goals and using your creative understanding to create the strategies while your virtual assistant is here to carry out your objectives.

Evening

That strategy you have set up now turns into the next campaign. New cold emails are grabbed from the research, and the next batch is being sent out. Your sales VA knows how to use the AI tools in HubSpot, Salesforce, Zapier, and Outreach to keep their workflow efficient. But they know the personal human voice is what is getting past prospects’ defenses, so your email won’t end up ignored.

The sequence steps fire off from here; all logs are updated. Depending on your VA, they could also be cold calling, dialing prospects, leaving voicemails.

End of day

Always updating, always circling back.

At the end of the day, you have had many things to worry about and many decisions to make. Now you are handed a list of contacts that are ready to close or need your judgment call. Basically, you make the decisions only you can; your VA handles the rest.

You’re not worrying all day about following up on quiet leads, organizing the many sales sequences, or sorting out CRM chaos.

★★★★★

I can rely on my marketing & social media channels to grow while I focus on customers and overall growth.

JT

— Sacha Hason, Owner, European Leather Works

70% year-over-year growth · 160+ hours of content creation per week · 150%+ ROI on assistant investment

Types of Virtual Sales Assistants

There are many touch points in the lifecycle of a sale, and there are virtual assistants specializing in basically all of them. When you are looking at VA services (especially ones that are highly specialized), it is best to know what tasks slot into which roles.

Lead generation assistant

A lead generation assistant is doing what it says on the tin. They are identifying and researching target leads. This can cover a wide range of tasks from list building to lead qualification; some will even sprinkle in a bit of outreach support.

What they are not doing is monitoring the outreach sequences and following up leads that are going cold.

Appointment setter

These VAs are managing your calendar and doing the busy work of scheduling sales calls. Depending on the setup, they are perfectly capable of responding to new leads to route them to the correct place.

This kind of VA is best in a group setting where there are multiple sales reps with multiple calendars to manage. They can work with solopreneurs just as well, especially if you are looking for a more general virtual assistant who is more specialized in sales.

SDR virtual assistant

This is the broadest of the three, and probably what you are thinking of when you think “sales virtual assistant”. They are working the list, outreach, qualifying, and managing follow-ups and bookings.

Which is the right choice for you?

Although the SDR assistant is the broadest, it is important to remember that “broadest” does not mean “does everything the others do and more”. Working a list doesn’t always mean the role includes things like closing deals.

Start right now by writing down a list of all the truly mind-numbing or stressful tasks you never want to think about again. Once you are in a call with the VA service of your choice, they will be able to figure out what role is going to slot into your company, tools, and gaps. To avoid more work falling back on yourself through unintentional bottlenecks, it is best to discuss with your sales rep what the role actually covers.

How to Stay in Control of Your Pipeline

At this point, you are either wondering “this sounds too good to be true” or “this sounds terrifying, am I ceding too much control?” Human error can happen. That is the way of the world, but when you are running your own business, all those human errors come back to you.

So what can you look for in a VA service to help mitigate those risks?

Choose a fully managed VA service

Handing over the keys to the kingdom opens you up to the fallibility of others. Maybe they will push a lead you have decided to hold or say the wrong thing in an outgoing message, all of which can damage a relationship you are trying to build.

The point of hiring a VA is to alleviate work from yourself, not to add the task of micromanaging to your ever-growing task list.

A fully managed service means that you provide the scope to the VA service and your virtual sales assistant runs your processes inside that scope. The CSM assigned to your case is constantly checking for quality control to make sure that everything is sent out to match your guidelines. You are not totally hands-free (that would be terrifying!), but a little bit of effort upfront from you means that your VA and CSM can work to your parameters.

Inside those parameters, they are working away, but anything outside of that they come to you.

Ensure security and access control

Make sure when you are pursuing your options for a VA service that they are independently audited through ISO 27001/SOC 2. Make sure they are compliant with any regulations in your industry, like HIPAA for medical and GDPR if you want to work with any European data.

Do not let anyone try to sell you NDAs alone and call it security.

Some companies take access control even further by creating virtual work environments. This ensures no work is happening on the VA’s local hard drive. It gives you peace of mind that you are not just handing over your pipeline to a random stranger. Your logins, your files, and your context all live in the workspace, not in someone’s personal computer.

How Do You Hire a Virtual Sales Assistant?

Here’s the good news: hiring a sales VA is faster than the sales cycle you are trying to fix, but what happens next?

What does getting started look like?

It starts with a call. Remember that list of mind-numbing tasks you wrote down earlier? That is what the call is for. A good VA service uses it to figure out where your pipeline is leaking, what tools you run, and which role actually fits the gap. This is also where you set the scope, what your assistant owns, and where they escalate to you.

From there, they match you with someone. Not a stack of resumes to sift through, one assistant picked for your stack and your sales motion. Depending on the service, that person can be working your pipeline within 72 hours of that first call.

How much of my time does onboarding take?

Speed matters more in sales than almost anywhere else. Every week a founder spends interviewing and onboarding is another week of leads going cold in a CRM nobody is working. The whole point is to stop the bleed fast, not to add a two-month hiring project on top of the problem you already have.

The part that trips people up is what happens after the match. The assistant starting in 72 hours does not mean you are hands-off in 72 hours. Week one, you are giving direction, a bit each day, so they learn your voice, your guidelines, and what a good lead looks like to you. By week two, most founders have stepped back and let the assistant run the day-to-day. A little effort upfront buys you out of the daily grind for good.

Wing: Everything A Virtual Sales Assistant Should Be

So that’s what a sales virtual assistant is, and what to look for. Here’s where Wing comes in.

Wing is a fully managed service, so you’re not taking on a new person to manage. Your assistant is vetted and trained before they ever reach you, and once you’ve had a quick call to map out your gaps, most clients are set up and working within 72 hours, with you confidently handing off work by week two.

On security, Wing is ISO 27001 compliant and SOC 2 certified, and the work happens inside Wing Workspace, Wing’s secure virtual work environment. If an assistant ever moves on, that context stays put, and a new one picks up where the last left off. Nothing resets.

Don’t just take our word for it; you can see it in practice with this cybersecurity startup. They entrusted a Wing SDR assistant with their full cycle and were able to offload 22+ sales and admin tasks, and benefited from 2000 hours of support.

And whatever the work is, there’s probably a role for it. Wing covers over 150 roles, with 11 sales-specific roles. A full-time SDR hire starts at $1,999/mo.

Ready to get your pipeline moving without hiring a full sales team? Book a free consultation and find out.