Does Your Business Need an Inside Sales Agent or a Virtual Executive Assistant?

There are a lot of virtual assistant services you can leverage for the growth of your business. We’ve even written an article on the three virtual assistants to hire first.

Sales and operations support are both vital during the early stages of a growing business. If you’re deciding whether to hire an inside sales agent or a virtual executive assistant (EA), here’s a quick rundown on their differences.

ISA vs. Virtual Executive Assistant

Inside sales agents (ISA) are virtual assistants who specialize in providing support to your sales team or sales reps. 

They do this by conducting prospecting calls and securing appointments so your in-house reps can have more informative sessions that could potentially lead to a purchase.

Virtual executive assistants are virtual assistants who typically provide multiple forms of support to entrepreneurs and managers. They can also take over phone lines, but their role can expand in a more diverse manner.

Executive virtual assistants (EVA) from Virtudesk are equipped with administrative, marketing, sales, and other skills to provide clients with extensive support in growing their business.

While ISAs can become sales team managers, EVAs can go from providing admin and workflow support to directing operations, leading marketing, or other departments.

Let’s look into some of the daily responsibilities these two roles take on.

An Inside Sales Agent’s Typical Work Week

While ISAs typically focus on outbound calls and securing appointments for sales representatives, there are a few tasks that can also be included in their to-do list.

ISAs can help your business by preparing insight reports from the information they gather in conversations. This can include suggestions, inquiries, and other insightful material that can be used to address customer pain points and improve your service or product.

They can also assist in lead processing and generation by helping research lead sources, and qualifying and scoring leads. You can also delegate some tasks like email marketing so your inside sales agent can help nurture your leads.

Here’s what your virtual ISA’s weekly schedule can look like. 

A Virtual Executive Assitant’s Typical Work Week

Virtual executive assistants have a wider range of services offered to their clients. Their schedules and responsibilities heavily depend on the client’s needs.

Virtual executive assistants can also take over phone lines for a few hours in a day. The rest of their working days can be used up to handle ongoing projects and manage other daily tasks.

Your virtual EA can conduct prospecting calls for a few hours every day while they also prepare marketing materials. In between tasks, they can also continue to help you and your team with administrative support.

Sometimes they can also be responsible for IT troubleshooting, product and market research, social media management, or other business functions.

Here’s what your executive virtual assistant’s week could look like.

Responsibilities of an Inside Sales Agent

Here’s a list of responsibilities you can delegate to a virtual ISA from Virtudesk.

• Outbound Cold Calling
• Appointment Setting
• Lead Generation and Nurturing
• Client Relationship Management
• Database Management
• Customer Service
• Virtual Sales Support
• Lead Tracking and Qualification
• Script Library Management

Responsibilities of a Virtual Executive Assistant

Here’s a list of responsibilities you can delegate to an Executive Virtual Assistant from Virtudesk.

• Outbound Cold Calling
• Client Relationship Management
• Lead Processing, Generation, and Nurturing
• Email Management
• Calendar Management
• Data Entry
• Administrative Management
• Database and Process Management
• Marketing Implementation
• Content Management and Production
• Email Marketing Execution

ISA vs. EVA: Which Virtual Assistant Should You Go With?

Should you be looking for a virtual inside sales agent or an executive virtual assistant? Really, that depends on what your business needs you and your virtual assistant to do.

When your business needs you to be closing deals most of the time, you can have an ISA help you book demo calls with your prospects. Especially when you’ve started purchasing leads, you need someone who can take a power dialer and go through your call list.

Hiring an ISA can help you maximize every sales opportunity for the growth of your business.

If your business is in a place where team members need only some support, and projects on the back burner have piled up, it’s a great time to hire a virtual executive assistant.

Executive virtual assistants can help you have more projects going on in your business while providing administrative support for your other employees.

Even for solopreneurs, executive virtual assistants can provide a lot of help by helping out in marketing, providing technical support, calendar management, social media marketing, or even eCommerce assistance.

Maximizing an executive virtual assistant’s wide range of services can level up the way you work, and scale your business faster.

Growing Your Virtual Team

Whether you hire an ISA or an EVA, outsourcing to virtual assistants lets your business achieve more in a cost-efficient manner.

Knowing your business’s needs is always at the core of your hiring needs, so refer to that before deciding which virtual assistant to hire next. Then, create a task list, or follow this virtual assistant onboarding checklist.

If you wish to leverage the skills of Virtudesk virtual assistants for the growth of your business, fill out this form and one of our Consultants will get in touch with you.

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