Why Hire an Online Business Assistant to Boost Business Performance?

The best-selling author and entrepreneur Ryan Lee says, "When you start looking at long-term benefits instead of short-term investments, hiring a new VA would be your next course of action." This is especially true when you want to improve your business's performance.

Similar to physically present assistants, virtual assistants help streamline various business processes, like scheduling, automating workflows, handling your company's social media profiles, updating CRM, onboarding employees, collecting customer feedback, and so on. Fret not; it doesn't go to eternity, but close!

Without seeking the support of a virtual assistant, optimizing your business's performance and scaling your brand can be an uphill battle, especially if you're a new entrepreneur who cannot afford an extensive management team.

Even then, hiring a virtual assistant can prove useful. You can employ these remote workers to share the clerical and administrative load, thus freeing up your team's time for business building and other core tasks.

But this is not it! Here is a detailed list of how virtual assistants help track your business performance.

Why do companies outsource work responsibilities. Source

5 Reasons Why You Should Hire Virtual Assistants to Improve Business Performance

Improve your Business Performance by Letting Virtual Assistants Takeover These Tasks | Source

Are you on the fence about hiring a virtual assistant? If yes, then this list may finally be the push you need.

1. Online business assistants improve sales performance

Virtual assistants help boost sales performance. What a bizarre statement. Only it is true. Sure, they don’t directly start chasing sales leads and nurturing them into conversions. How strange would that be! However, what they do is take all non-revenue generating activities off your sales reps, thus increasing their time to sell.

Do you know that your sales reps only dedicate 35% of their time to selling? The rest, a whopping 65%, is wasted in activities that don't bring your company any clients. What are these? Check out the breakup below.

Breakup of the time spent by sales reps

This is not to say that the non-revenue generating tasks are unimportant, but they do get in the way of a sales rep's core activity. A virtual assistant can quickly step in and manage CRMs, inboxes, data entry, etc.

They can also keep track of your sales reps' calendars and traveling schedules, along with assisting them with last-minute and ad-hoc bookings. All these seemingly small activities will eventually allow your sales reps to optimize their sales process, thus improving their performance.

2. Virtual assistants are instrumental in managing finances

Managing finances is not only time-consuming, but you simply can't afford mistakes while tallying accounts, evaluating losses and gains, tracking billing, and invoicing. Anyway, no matter how small a business you run, streamlining your accounting and bookkeeping process is critical to maintaining transparency and filing taxes.

In a nutshell, it is not everybody's cup of tea. But, it is a walk in the park for virtual assistants who specialize in finance. You can hire a virtual assistant for small businesses that are either qualified accountants or have a rich experience in the field of finance.

Virtual assistants with expertise in finance are easy to find if you know where to look. For example, through Wishup, you can hire finance and accounting managers with extensive experience.

These remote assistants can help you manage your finances and keep you informed on various compliance norms, upcoming financial policies, and new accounting laws.

Be it updating accounts, preparing invoices, paying bills, collecting payments, or bookkeeping, virtual assistants are adept at all of them.

3. Online business assistants act as research ninjas

Whether a business is old or new, research is a basic need for all. Be it extensively researching new markets, marketing trends, tools of the trade, etc., certain online business assistants are masters of it.

Now, of course, you won't hire a virtual assistant to conduct qualitative research with methodologies like a focus group, long-form conversation interviews, ethnographies, etc. They also won't crunch numbers for you and prepare quantitative datasets. But they are incredibly helpful for conducting the secondary research.

This often includes conducting background checks for prospective clients, SEO activities, keyword searches, and, more importantly, market research. For example, virtual assistants can research a market's purchasing potential, conduct competitor analysis, suggest product pricing, find product-specific press and media release platforms, and scout for third-party vendors.

Effective research can help you design better products that are priced correctly with the support of the right vendors. All of these elements eventually improve your overall business performance.

4. Small business virtual assistants aid in recruitment and onboarding

Payrolling an extensive HR department is a critical but expensive task. Small businesses with limited funding often need help with it. This leads to delayed hiring, ineffective orientation programs, and careless vetting of applicants, which ultimately negatively impacts your business’s performance.

If only there were a way to leverage experienced HR assistants and managers at a fraction of the cost. There is! You can hire online business assistants specializing in recruiting and onboarding new employees.

Anyway, recruitment and training are cyclical for companies big and small. Companies are not hiring all year round, so they can consider hiring virtual assistants during the recruitment season every 6 months or 1 year. These entities can vet applicants and pre-interview them for different roles. They can also streamline employee onboarding by following up with the recruits between the offer and the start date.

Furthermore, they can take care of all the official paperwork involved in recruitment, help set up the workplace, schedule meetings with other employees, and set up interaction sessions.

Add to it if you want to develop policies and processes beyond hiring and onboarding; even then, B2C or B2B virtual assistants are a wise choice. In addition to assisting with scouting, screening, and scheduling interviews, they can evaluate your lead pipeline to address the potential talent shortage. They can also conduct training sessions for new joiners.

Safe to say, you can have a reasonably working HR department if you hire more than one virtual assistant to fulfill HR responsibilities.

5. Virtual assistants can help with tracking metrics and generating reports

Tracking metrics directly linked to a business’s performance is a crucial responsibility, but it also adds to your administrative load. Metrics that track a business’s performance include:

• Sales Revenue
• Gross Profit Margin
• Net Profit Margin
• Cost of Customer Acquisition
• Net Promoter Score
• Sales Conversion Rate
• Monthly Web Traffic

Why should your sales and marketing reps spend several hours per week tracking these metrics and creating reports around them when they can actually be selling or marketing? Such an administrative task can be delegated to a virtual assistant who can collect data on these metrics from relevant departments. After this, they can compile said data into presentations and create reports benchmarking the safe ranges for these metrics for stable business performance. Additionally, a virtual assistant can play a crucial role in monitoring customer satisfaction by regularly analyzing the Net Promoter Score, providing valuable insights into the loyalty of your customer base.

They can do this in addition to documenting procedures and doing timely data entry for every metric. With these tasks streamlined, the administrative load on your core sales and marketing personnel will reduce, and they will have more mental space to identify and nurture leads.

Additionally, with this data, your business can more easily apply the various operational principles for business success, which can lead to sustainable growth.

Not sure where to start? Try Wishup

If you are looking for a remote staffing solution to help scale your business while maintaining a healthy work-life balance, try Wishup. We don't just link businesses to different freelance virtual assistants or outsourcing agencies. Our forte lies in creating a workforce for different business needs. We do it by:

• Hiring virtual assistants
• Training them in-house
• Deploying them as part of our client’s team
  

From managing inboxes to automating workflows, our virtual assistants possess both generic and specific skills needed to track and improve your business’s performance. They can assist you with the following:

• Scheduling and organizing meetings
• Managing CRMs
• Payment, billing, and invoicing
• Creating reports and presentations
• Collecting feedback from customers
• Managing company finances
• Figuring out content for social media

And much more.

Wrapping up

Virtual assistants perform seemingly endless tasks that allow your employees to be more productive, which has a direct effect on your business's performance. Moreover, you can hire with a variety of skill sets depending on the operational excellence you require.

What’s more, with portals like Wishup.co, training them is also not your headache, and neither do you need to provide them benefits or insurance. These professionals work as remote contractual employees with niche skill sets. Hiring them reduces overhead costs and allows you to focus on core tasks.

Anyway, as the world gravitates towards remote and hybrid working practices, hiring virtual assistants makes more sense. In addition, geography no longer remains a restriction in hiring some of the best talent, which also leads to improved workplace diversity. So, scale your business along with tracking your business performance by checking out our virtual assistant profiles.

To have a chat about hiring a virtual assistant, schedule a free consultation today, or send a mail to [email protected].