The Right Way to Bring On a VA: 3 Steps Before You Hand Off Sales Tasks

Most business owners don't hire a VA with a plan. They hire one because they're overwhelmed, hand off whatever feels urgent that day, and a few months later they're frustrated and convinced the VA just isn't cutting it. Here's the truth: it's rarely the VA. It's that nobody set them up to succeed in the first place. I'm walking through three steps to bring on a VA the right way, plus three sales tasks you can hand off immediately if you're overwhelmed and not sure where to start. Follow up, proposals, and contracts and invoicing don't need to live on your plate forever. They just need a process before they leave your hands.

Ready to build a sales process that doesn't depend on you doing everything? Head to suzieconsoli.com.

Transcript

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Most people don't hire a VA with a plan. They hire one because they're overwhelmed. They don't have a specific task in mind. They just know they're drowning in a VA, EA, whatever you want to call them, OBM feels like the fix. So a VA starts and the business owner is figuring out what to hand off in real time on the fly with no process behind any of it. A few weeks later, the follow-up email is sound off. The proposals are missing pieces. The content isn't quite what they thought it would be. There's just a lot of disconnect. So the business owner takes it back and they're convinced that the VA just wasn't good enough. And they're right back to doing everything themselves, except they're out some money and they're frustrated. Here's what actually happened. There was never a plan to begin with, which means there was never actually any training. You can't train someone on a task you haven't even defined yet. They're handed whatever felt urgent during the day, not a process, and then blamed for the person or the VA not being able to read their mind. So today I want to walk you through the three steps to set your VA up for success. And then we'll dive into the three specific things they can take over from a sales perspective. Because if they're able to take over part of your sales process, they're going to drive more of an ROI. We say this all the time on this podcast. If you have more time, you will make more money. They're going to free up your time. They're going to help you close more deals. And that's going to make them worth the investment. So that's going to be really important. So two parts, three steps each. Part one, how to set your VA up for success. So step one is going to be identifying what repeatable tasks they can actually take over. Not everything on your plate. They can't become you. Look specifically for the tasks that you repeat over and over again and prioritize the ones that help you close more deals and move revenue forward. If you're sitting here thinking, I have no idea what those are, that's exactly what we're going to cover in just a minute. Step two, I want you to map out SOPs for each one of these tasks. This is a step that most people skip, and it's one of the things that determines whether or not this actually works. You don't have to write these from scratch either. Talk through how you do the task and have AI turn it into a clean document for you. But be specific. If you want them organizing your email, don't just say organize my email. Tell them exactly how you want it organized, what folders, what gets flagged, who are your clients that you worry about, who's actually your aunt, and who do you need to, you know, as best you can give them the details that will actually help them do this job. You also in this SOP need to define what success looks like. Success can't be, I feel better. That's what most people are measuring their VA against. Do you feel better? But the truth is being a business owner is really stressful. And so VA or not, greatest VA in the world, they're not going to be able to read your mind and instantly make you feel better about everything. So what you need to do is define here's what it would look like for this to be successful. This brings us to step three. Set really clear expectations and deadlines. And the reason that I say this brings us to step three is a lot of times you can say, hey, if all of my emails are organized every day by four o'clock, that will be a success for me. And you're just letting them know, here's how I see this task, here's how I'm prioritizing this, here's when I expect it to be done. Does this feel realistic? This is where a lot of business owners go soft and it's a mistake. I want you to do this every single day. I want you to have this on my desk by 5 p.m. on Tuesdays. I want this proposal sent out 24 hours after the call. Clear deadlines are not micromanaging. They're what's going to make somebody actually able to succeed in the role. This also allows your VA, EA, whatever we want to call them, to get to know you and know what's important to you. Over time, they're going to be able to make better decisions because they're going to know, okay, we get proposals out quickly. I know to prioritize that over an Instagram post today. If I only have so much time to get something done, your assistant cannot immediately come in, no matter how much experience they have and know what's important to you, because what's important to you is not important to everyone in the same way. We all measure things differently. All clients are different. They're not coming in with any historical knowledge. You need to assume that they are operating under a different lens than you and give them the rules so that they can succeed. Okay, as you're going through this process and you're outlining what you want your VA to do. Obviously, most people want to hand off something in their inbox. A lot of people want to hand off some kind of content or engagement things there. But there are three key pieces to your sales process that I think you should hand off to an admin or a VA. As you're making this list, as you're putting together your SOPs, make sure that you have these three things on there. First is follow-up. This is the one people let die the fastest when they're busy, and it's often where deals go to disappear. A trained VA can manage your follow-up sequence, know when to send a check-in, know your tone well enough to sound like you, and flag anything that needs a personal touch. They also can be in charge of identifying things like, hey, we told this person we were going to follow up in six months. Make the list for that. Make sure that we're checking in with them. They can own that and that will give you more brain space to chase the deals that are the hottest. Okay, the second thing your VA can help you with in your sales process is your proposals. Once you have a system, a template with your language, your pricing structure, your offer laid out in the way you actually want to sell it, a VA can build that first draft of every proposal. They can tee you up to just knock out all of your looms in one afternoon or one hour. You review it, you personalize anything that needs your voice, especially now that we have transcripts from calls that we can apply to AI, I would definitely leverage that so that your VA can even update it using AI and get everything ready for you. The way that I've always had great success with VAs or assistants is to say, hey, here's how you can make the most of my time. I need you to get this proposal all the way ready as best you can, flag any questions that you have so that when I sit down to film these five Loom videos or send off any of these proposals, they're all ready to go and sitting in front of me. Typically, then following this, I would just take the Loom links and have my assistant put together the emails because this actually takes time, right? Sitting down and saying, hey, prospect, it was great talking to you as promised. Here's your proposal, here's the Loom video, yada, yada, yada. I'm really excited to have our follow-up call. That is something that your assistant, if trained correctly and knowing here's the process we're going through, here's what we're trying to move them towards, they can actually help you get this done faster and get this off your plate so that all you're doing is filming the Loom videos. The last part is contracts and invoicing. This is pure process. Once the deal is closed and someone needs to send the contract, track the signature, generate the invoice, follow up on the payment, make sure that all of that gets signed, done, moving forward. You need somebody who can stay on that and move them through the final stages in order to actually get them to close because a verbal yes is not payment. We want to make sure that they're actually moving forward. But at this point, when you get the yes, it's so easy to be like, oh, cool, I'm done. Um, I'm gonna go move on to these other deals that I've got in the pipeline or I've got to put out the SPIRE over here. Have your assistant go through the contracting and invoicing process. You could even call them the onboarding specialist or whatever that is, if you want to fully hand that off, if they need to have a call with them or if they have any questions and you want to make sure that they have a point of contact there. I know that putting all of this together sounds like a dream scenario. If somebody was handling all of your inbox management and your calendar, and then they're handling these three pieces of your sales process, they're following up with people, they're putting proposals together, they're handling contracts and invoicing. You're like, oh my gosh, Susie, this sounds amazing. I would do this in a heartbeat. Part of this is you having really clear systems, you having these templates in place, you having outlined exactly what your expectations are from a deadline perspective, from a professionalism perspective, and making sure that that is all set in place before you bring the VA into it. The connecting thread for each of these is that the VA cannot manage a follow-up they don't understand. They can't write proposals for an offer that they've never seen you explain or handle contracts for a process nobody walked them through. You have to set them up first and then hand off the rest. So if you're sitting here thinking your VA isn't working out, go back through your steps and ask yourself honestly which ones you actually did and where you dropped the ball. If you're sitting here and you're like, oh my gosh, I already onboarded them and we don't have this process in place, it's not too late. You can always outline all of these SOPs and say, hey, I kind of want to start fresh. I want to take your time and reallocate it towards some of these things. I want to put some of these SOPs in place. And here are the deadlines and expectations that I want to set to make sure that we are working towards the same goal together. If you want help building out the systems to make outsourcing your sales process actually work, or maybe the VA that you'd like a second opinion on, or you're struggling with systems and how to write these SOPs. That's exactly what we can work on together. One of the steps of my coaching process is to actually evaluate your team, your process, and figure out how to get you more of your time back. You don't have to figure this out alone. I can absolutely walk through this with you. Head over to susieconsoli.com, schedule a quick call, and we can dive in together. Thanks for listening. Until next time, sell well.