Joy and Jo take you through our tips for getting the best out of your virtual assistant. You're paying for them so why not make the most of the opportunity.
Get ready to delegate!
Welcome to Savvy Sessions #3.
Today, the topic is how to use a virtual assistant well.
The first and most important factor is communication. In this type of role communication is key. We need to learn how often you need to talk to someone. Whether it's a daily phone call, a once a week check-in, just whatever works for you and if you like using things like WhatsApp, which a lot of our clients do, because they can easily just send a message and we don't have to go through voicemail and so forth. So, communication is key, giving us feedback, whether it's good, bad, or indifferent.
If you feel like you're over-communicating, then that's probably about right, you can always pull it back.
We teach our team members to also over-communicate until the client says, "Okay, I don't need that much communication". Then you know that you've reached that good point and you just pare it back because they've built the trust and they don't need that much communication. But if our virtual assistants are not getting communication back from you, they don't know what's important to you at the moment, what's on your radar, what are you thinking, what's coming up for you, that sort of stuff. Over-communication is definitely key.
And always have some kind of joint to-do list. That way there's visibility of what you've assigned to your virtual assistant to do and they have visibility over what you need to do. That makes it a lot easier for them to be able to say, "Hey, how about I do that for you?", "I can see it's on your list", "I can do that, take it off." So, always having some kind of joint to-do list really helps.
They can see your tasks, you can see theirs, and everyone knows which tasks are being done by who and what's on the to-do lists.
It might be that as a client you think no one could possibly do all of these things on your to-do list, but when your virtual assistant sees those things, they could be suggesting things that you might not have thought about in terms of how they can actually do that task.
The next one is to learn to delegate properly. Often we'll have clients who struggle with delegation. They have always had control. They don't like giving up that control for fear of things not being done right or things going wrong. But if you're never going to actually hand over some control for some things then you're never going to get out of the overwhelm and you're always going to be stuck as it's just you and not be able to grow your business how you'd like it to grow. Also, making sure that you're really clear in how you're actually providing that request for the task. Give them all of the context. Give them the background, like why they would be doing this task, what's it for, what's the end result that you're looking for. Lots and lots of detail about the task can help the virtual assistant then actually do it properly and correctly and how you want and have the best outcome and make good decisions about those tasks.
If you give limited details, then it's almost going to set them up to fail. So, you want to give them as much information as you can to get a good output.
And it doesn't have to take a long time. We mentioned WhatsApp. WhatsApp is a really good way to actually provide task requests because on WhatsApp you might have used the text feature but there's actually a record-your-voice feature. So, you hold down the microphone record button and then you can verbalise your request. It means that the virtual assistant can then actually listen to it a few times if they need to go back and refer to something. And it means that you can talk a lot more quicker than you can write or type, you can just get all of that context out. We highly recommend using WhatsApp. You can walk and talk, you can be leaving a meeting, going to another one. Just pick up WhatsApp, send a message to your virtual assistant with instructions, and carry on.
Because it's all about making it as easy as possible to get things off your plate and to delegate those tasks. If there's a barrier, or if it's too hard, then it doesn't happen and then you're not getting those tasks undertaken for you and freeing up your time.
Probably one of the other tips would be to have a password vault that you share, like LastPass, which is what we use here. That has all your passwords put in it. They're not visible by your virtual assistant, but then they don't have to chase you over passwords, and it auto-fills credit cards and so forth. If they need to book flights for you, we can have your credit card details tucked away securely. It shares your passwords anonymously meaning that they can't actually see what the password is but they're able to use it on the site that they need to log into.
Those would be our top tips for how to get the most out of your virtual assistant.
Thanks for watching. That was Savvy Sessions #3.
See you next time!
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