BUSINESS
Sell More With Less: Using A Virtual Assistant A virtual assistant can free you up to spend more time selling, while eliminating human resources responsibilities. By Rob Vaughn
I
nsurers are buckled up to accelerate growth in 2022, Deloitte reported in its 2022 Insurance Industry Outlook. “But attracting (and retaining) talent in an evolving hybrid work environment will be key,” the report said. The latest Jacobson and Ward Insurance Market Labor Market Study found 62% of insurance businesses plan to add staff, but “recruiting difficulty is increasing.” For the first time in the study’s history, from IT to sales to operations, all roles are rated moderately to extremely difficult to fill. The average salesperson spends only 35% of their time selling. The primary drags on sales productivity are administrative. According to insurance marketers at Zip Quote, the tasks that get in the way of advisor productivity are:
» Email and inbox management — a black hole that renews itself every day.
» Poor customer relationship management
data hygiene. Inconsistent and incomplete contact information and status.
» Lack of a lead management system. 44
InsuranceNewsNet Magazine » May 2022
Physical leads on business cards and Post-it notes vanish.
» Time spent prospecting. Researching and finding qualified leads, building lists and reaching out are time-consuming.
» Inconsistent lead follow-up. A lack of a formal process for following up with leads.
» Cumbersome manual workf lows. Tracking new applications and renewals.
The Vanishing Administrative Assistant
The Wall Street Journal wrote about “the vanishing administrative assistant” in 2020. The decline has been gradual but massive. The number of workers with the title administrative assistant has decreased by 65% since 2004. The U.S. has shed more than 2 million administrative assistant jobs since 2000. Meanwhile, job board Lensa reported that administrative assistant is the third most challenging job to fill in 2022. It turns out that all the productivity apps designed to make executives self-sufficient and had the opposite effect. Research by Service Now found that salespeople spend only 35% of their time selling. The rest of their time is spent on day-to-day tasks such as email correspondence, scheduling meetings, entering the CRM data, prospecting and chasing leads.
Enter Managed Admin Services For Executive Teams
The shortage of administrative assistants is particularly challenging for businesses with larger executive teams that need to scale up support quickly. According to LinkedIn, the tight labor market and surging demand mean it takes a median time of 33 days to hire an administrative assistant. Stretch that time out for multiple executives, and you have a daunting challenge. Companies realize that paying executives to do admin work is lousy business, and they instead can outsource the work to experts — managed remote virtual assistant services. In a managed virtual assistant service, the service provider hires, trains and supervises assistants — the assistants work for the service provider. Executive teams get a professional administrative layer of support without the time and cost of recruiting, hiring, training and managing more people. Executive teams can:
» Hire faster. Service providers maintain a bench of qualified, trained assistants.
» Scale more quickly. It is far easier to hire multiple assistants to form a cohort.
» Lower overhead. The assistants are ser-
vice provider employees, with no human resources or performance management lift for businesses.
