Training a Virtual Assistant to Help with your REI by Sharad Mehta

Training a Virtual Assistant to Help with your REI

The Direct Mail Marketing campaigns are going good so far. I am receiving decent amount of calls. Most of the calls are from people who are not interested in selling but I am still happy with the quantity of calls for the most part. As we are getting more calls, I am realizing that I need to have better system in order to capture all the calls and then have a good follow up system.

I had hired a VA from Philippines and it worked out well for first couple of weeks but then the VA just disappeared and it seems to be the case with working with an overseas VA specially when you ask them to work at US time zone. It’s a graveyard shift and the VA starts out very enthusiastically but then they probably get another job where they can work during their day time and then they just stop responding completely.

So I started returning the calls which was actually a good experience as I could see what questions the sellers were asking, what their hesitations were, etc. But that isn’t sustainable for me to be able to devote majority of my day to answering and returning calls so I placed another ad on UpWork looking for a VA.

I must be having a good day because one VA that I had worked with last year messaged me on Skype to see if I was still looking for any admin help. She is based in South America and works US time zone. She speaks really good English. Much better than I do (not that my English is a good yardstick).

She goes to school so she is available to help for 20-25 hours/week which is perfect. I was traveling last week to Chicago and had a backlog of calls to catch up on so I told her as her first priority to make a list of all the calls we have had so far and match them against our CRM and call the ones that we haven’t contacted yet.

I am paying her $6/hr plus bonus for each deal. As she gets more comfortable with the calls part, I will involve her in other parts of the business. She didn’t have much experience calling the leads so I did few practice calls with her and acted as a jerk seller (it came naturally to me, ha) and she stumbled at a few questions but then got a hang of it and is getting into a good rhythm.

She is making really good progress so far and it makes a world of difference that she is in the same time zone as me so I can just message her as I have any questions. Makes for a lot smoother process.