5 Strategies That Scare The Crap Out of MOST VAs, Yet Allowed For Me To Book Over $150K In 4 Months As a VA
Before becoming an internationally renowned Marketing Coach at MarketLikeANerd.com, I ran two successful virtual assistant companies that I grew in relatively unconventional ways (well, at least they are unconventional for the VA industry)!
More on how you can do this too in just one second, but first… a little back story:
I started out as an entrepreneur at the sweet age of 21 and was lucky enough to be immediately picked up by a website development company who wanted me to do their social media management. While there, I learned about project management, SEO, website design, graphic design…. and fell so in love with the technical side of business that I started my own virtual assistant company.
Within 4 months I had BANKED my first $10,000 month at the age of 22.
Suddenly, I became well known as the go-to VA for coaches and was approached by a high profile business coach who I later started a second, jointly-owned virtual assistant business with.
Within 4 months together, we booked over $150,000.
Suddenly, virtual assistants started flocking to me to understand HOW I did it. Because while the average virtual assistant only makes $16K in a YEAR… I was making TWICE that in single MONTHS!
While coaching with these virtual assistants to walk them through the steps I took, what I noticed across the board was that most virtual assistants don’t do the strategies that they see coaches doing, because they think “That’s what coaches do; that’s not what virtual assistants do.”
Look, I’m here to break it to you: Coaches do this stuff because it works!
So here are 5 Growth Hacks I Learned From Watching Coaches And Leveraged To Scale My Virtual Assistant Business To Over 6 Figures In Record Time!
VA Growth Hack #1: List Building Isn’t Just For Coaches!
Most virtual assistants don’t grow or maintain a mailing list, but if you want to scale your business and make more money than you ever thought possible, then having a list you can leverage to put offers in front of is very important, no matter the niche or industry.
As a virtual assistant, I was hosting telesummits and giveaways of my own, and I also participated in other people’s telesummits and giveaways as well. For example, my ex-business partner and I ran “The Best Damn Online Biz Summit” alongside 24 high profile millionaires and marketing influencers... and we grew our mailing list by 3000 names in just 2 weeks!
We also ran a giveaway through Facebook ads where we gave away 10 free hours of Virtual Assistant services…so YES we paid for traffic and YES we gave away 10 hours of services to the winner for free, but we also added HUNDREDS of targeted leads to our list in the process.
After building this list, we would simply offer phone calls to funnel them into sales conversations about our services. We also directly offered $47-$297 offers to our mailing list each week with no sales call needed to buy. This created a huge list of entry-level buyers who we could later upsell to higher virtual assistant packages.
VA Growth Hack #2 - A Smarty Pants VA Uses Sponsorships!
We actually kicked off the launch of our business with a paid sponsorship at a live event run by Video Coach Ruth Sherman. Typically when sponsoring a live event, you get a booth, you get ad space in the marketing collateral for the event, and you might even get some speaking time on stage.
This is another strategy that tons of coach use, but you very rarely see virtual assistants participating in sponsorship opportunities, especially if it’s paid (which means… when you do, it STANDS OUT)!
Well, we weren’t afraid to do it. We paid to be sponsors. We paid to get our booth decked out with branded posters, business cards, hand-outs, and more. We offered a raffle for one lucky winner to get 10 hours of VA services for free… for anyone who left their business card in our booth’s bowl.
And we ended up with around 50 extremely targeted leads! #WorthIt
VA Growth Hack #3 - Heck, Host Your Own Event While You’re At It!
Rather than sponsoring other people’s events, we eventually decided to just host our own (something I’ve actually never seen another VA company do before)!
The event was co-hosted between my ex-business partner’s coaching company and our jointly-owned VA business. Essentially what we did was leverage her coaching practice to filter clients into both businesses at the same time.
She pitched a year-long coaching package at the live event and bundled in Virtual Assistant services, so that everyone who purchased her coaching ALSO by default purchased our VA services.
Win-Win!
Live events are a big investment, but the packages you can pitch are typically in the range of $10-$40K/year so it ends up paying off big time. If you have a coach in mind who you can partner with, it may be worth exploring!
VA Growth Hack #4 - Facebook Ads, Sales Funnels, and Clients Oh My!
In every business I’ve run - both of my VA businesses and my coaching business - I’ve always leveraged Facebook ads to create a consistent flow of leads and sales, so that I didn’t have to worry about when they’d come in.
Most VAs shy away from this, because they are too afraid of the risk and the investment… Or they try it out, spend $20 bucks and when it doesn’t lead to a sale, they give up (too soon).
The truth is both sales funnels and facebook advertising DO take set up, patience, time, and testing… but when they work… you can turn a $300 lead into a $5000 website sale, you can get literally hundreds of calls on your sales calendar without lifting a finger, and you will never have to worry about money again.
There were many funnels we ran but the two main ones were:
- Facebook Ads straight to Discovery Call landing pages. The cost per lead here is higher than usual ($5-$30) but the people who schedule are usually highly targeted and if you set your prices right, one sale makes you profit.
- Facebook ads to a Video Sales Training with a pitch at the end for a PAID discovery call. Yes, people PAID - $97 to be exact - to get the phone to talk to us about our services. The deal was… if you come and decide NOT to work with us, we’ll refund you. If you come and decide TO work with us, we’ll credit it to your account. About 95% of the people who purchased the $97 call went on to buy packages of at least $5000 with us.
VA Growth Hack #5 - No “Maybe So”s on the Phone… Only Take A “Yes” Or “No!”
Most Virtual Assistants are either too afraid to ask for the sale and get a credit card on the phone call, or they have a long process involving proposals and contracts that you need to get through first.
This creates a ton of follow up work for every sale. Now, you CAN make big money with email follow up (heck, I once closed a $40,000 sale strictly via email with no phone call)!
BUT, this SLOWS DOWN the sales process. Ideally, you want to REMOVE follow up all together and just get a “yes” or a “no” on the phone.
The way I used to do this was by pitching what I called a “Save Your Damn Seat Deposit”. The idea was that they would pay $197 on the phone to reserve their spot for our VA services, they’d give us an estimate of their desired start date for those services, and then they’d simply pay the remainder before that start date.
This sold like gangbusters, so I highly recommend trying it out! It will completely change the way you do sales in your business!
Those are the 5 Growth Hacks I Recommend For Virtual Assistants Who Are Bold Enough To Use Them:
- Build Your List
- Seek Out Sponsorships
- Host Your Own Events
- Create Sales Funnels
- Get A Decision On The Phone
These are just some of the strategies my virtual assistant clients have used to double, triple, quadruple (and more) their income and clientele, hit their $10K months, and become KNOWN in the industry.
If you have any questions at all, want to share your favorite a-ha from this article, or need some extra motivation to get into action, then please join me in my free Facebook Group The Balanced Entrepreneur, where I share daily tips and resources to support you in creating a sustainable and scalable business.
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- 5 Growth Hacks To Grow Your VA Business to 6 Figures! - December 25, 2018
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