Virtual Sales Assistant: Why You Need One in Your Sales Team Today

Rimma Sytnik 17 Nov 2024

One of the biggest challenges salespeople face nowadays is balancing personal relationships with prospects and the increasing pressure for speed and efficiency brought by modern technology and data-centricity. As a result, AI is now leading the charge on how sales teams operate.

Perhaps most noteworthy has been the rise of virtual sales assistants—technology that, although has existed for several years in the market, is astonishingly far more powerful today because of AI.

Countless premium tools have transformed from basic automation platforms into powerhouse AI assistants, having the potential to drive productivity and performance in unprecedented ways.

From lead generation to personalized outreach at scale and real-time coaching, virtual sales assistants enable both efficiency and effective competition for businesses. For smaller teams, they equalize the playing field, offering capabilities that were previously reserved for large enterprises with deep resources.

In this article, we’ll dive into the world of virtual sales assistants, exploring what they are, how they work, the unique value they bring to a sales team, and what types are available in today’s market, helping you choose the right solution for your team.

What is a virtual sales assistant?

Before we begin, let’s talk about the elephant in the room. ‘Virtual sales assistant’ may mean two things—it traditionally referred to human sales assistants who worked remotely to provide support to sales teams, oftentimes contractors rather than employees.

However, these days, and especially in the modern age of AI, the meaning has changed. Nowadays, this term defines specialized software designed to support and automate sales.

Well, what exactly is a virtual sales assistant?

The virtual sales assistant is an AI-driven automation software designed to augment a sales team by executing key activities of the job, helping them achieve better operational efficiency.

They offer an extra pair of hands for sales teams to overcome workload congestion, automate time-consuming and monotonous tasks, and free up sales reps’ time to prioritize building and maintaining relationships with potential and existing customers.

It’s like getting a digital member to your sales team, one who is always on and super-efficient with no fatigue or vacation days when your deadlines are missed.

Key use cases of virtual sales assistants

Modern virtual sales assistants are not all the same in terms of functionality, given that they each focus on one or multiple sales processes.

So, for instance, your sales team could have one sales assistant that finds targeted leads and enriches their customer profiles and another one that automates personalized outreach at scale.

If you take it a step further, you can opt for the more advanced virtual sales assistants like AI SDRs that flawlessly handle numerous tasks and continuously improve over time, but more on that a bit later.

For now, let’s take a look at the most common use cases for virtual sales assistants:

Inbound lead generation → These tools capture leads from inbound sources, such as your website or email inquiries, and qualify them based on their behavior and how well they fit your customer profiles. Using visitor behavior and engagement patterns, they can identify prospects with high intent and seamlessly add them to your sales pipeline.
Outbound prospecting → Probably the most common use case, this is where a sales virtual assistant specializes in connecting with potential clients through personalized outreach. They often find relevant prospect data, act as sales email assistants to craft personalized outreach messages, and even create multichannel sequences with email, LinkedIn, and SMS touches while ensuring all prospects are followed up with and properly engaged at all times.

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Lead scoring and qualification → Some virtual assistants analyze leads through predictive analytics and rank them based on their likelihood to convert. Your human sales team can then better invest their valuable time in the most promising prospects.

Predictive analytics → Predictions about sales results are executed by virtual assistants with the analysis of historical data, real-time inputs, spotting trends, and then guiding teams on what are the best next steps to take with each prospect.

Sales coaching → Last but not least, there are several advanced virtual sales coaching tools that empower sales reps to perform better by providing them with actionable tips, timely reminders, or even scripts during live calls.

These capabilities illustrate how virtual sales assistants go beyond mere automation to intelligent additions to your sales team, enabling them to be more productive and effective in their day-to-day operations.

Why businesses need a virtual assistant for sales

If you’re wondering if virtual sales assistants are merely a new trend in the industry that isn’t worth all that talk, let’s discuss the main reasons why they are an absolute necessity for all modern sales teams, regardless of size or industry.

Increased efficiency

For the most obvious part, virtual assistants drive sales efficiency by handling and automating the more routine, non-revenue generating tasks, which sales reps spend an estimated 64% of their time on.

But even when it comes to the more high-value activities like building relationships and closing deals, virtual sales assistants now have the capacity to significantly save time, for instance, crafting personalized and effective cold emails in a matter of seconds, which would otherwise take sales reps 10-20 minutes.

Cost savings

No technology can fully replace human SDRs, but in many instances, especially when a business is looking to scale its operations, virtual sales assistants may be more than sufficient to handle growing demands.

And considering just how expensive hiring, training, and retaining sales staff is, virtual assistants are a much more cost-effective alternative, especially when taking into account the growing trend of SDR turnover.

So if you’re looking to move from targeting 5,000 to 10,000 leads per month, a virtual sales assistant AI offers the ability to identify and engage more prospects with operational excellence, for a fraction of the cost.

Increased personalization

We all know that we live in the era of personalization, which is why sales and marketing teams spend so much time creating separate, tailored buyer experiences. The only downside is that it takes a lot of time, and we didn’t have tech to replicate this level of humanized engagement…until now that is!

Outbound AI sales assistants have the power of hyper-personalized outreach by leveraging insights it would take ages to find, generating unique messages that resonate with each prospect, and up-ing conversion rates.

Data-driven decision-making

Linked to the previous point, meaningful personalization is built on concrete prospect and company data, but so are virtually all sales decisions, from what kind of template performs best to long-term strategy.

An AI virtual sales assistant is fantastic at processing tons of data and leveraging their predictive analytics to enhance existing insights and help sales teams improve decision-making.

Empowering small businesses

Virtual sales assistants do a great job at leveling the playing field for smaller businesses, helping them tap into enterprise-grade capabilities and go toe-to-toe with larger competitors by targeting more prospects and leveraging more data without the need for extensive human power or premium software.

Different types of virtual sales assistants

Now that we’ve covered the theory, let’s take a closer look at how a virtual sales assistant performs in real life, and why they’re some of the top sales tools out there.

As previously mentioned, they come in different shapes and sizes, designed to handle different aspects of sales, but here are the most prevalent variations on the market:

AI SDRs

AI Sales Development Representatives are just what the name suggests—AI-powered SDRs that are designed to think and operate exactly like human SDRs.

They are specifically designed to perform prospecting, outreach, and qualification-related tasks. In most cases, AI SDRs are used to send hyper-personalized emails at scale and engage leads with multichannel outreach sequences.

We’ve recently written a detailed article on these superhuman tools for those interested to learn more.

How they work:

With the help of natural language processing, AI SDRs are fantastic at interpreting human language to not only understand what your customers are saying but also determine how purchase-ready they sound from their communications and behavior.

In addition, AI SDRs use machine learning to make their outreach strategies continually better with time, getting smarter each day by analyzing what works and what doesn’t. This in turn allows them to generate highly relevant leads and do effective, converting outreach.

Example:

A prime example of a powerful AI SDR is Jason AI from Reply.io. Without any help, Jason AI finds businesses targeted prospects, creates tailored multichannel outreach sequences for each lead, crafts effective and personalized messages, ensures timely follow-ups, and if all that’s not enough—it also handles responses!

Jason AI automates the entire sales workflow, from prospecting to closing deals, as this AI SDR will identify, engage, and nurture prospects all the way to booking meetings on your behalf, on autopilot.

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AI Chatbots

Next in line are AI-powered chatbots, which are sales assistants optimized to handle inbound leads by engaging website visitors in real-time, capturing their details, qualifying them, and even scheduling meetings in the process of answering questions or providing essential information.

How they work:

AI chatbots also use natural language processing to fully understand what the visitor is asking and react to it in the best way possible, providing relevant information, matching their tone, and depending on the conversation, potentially escalating the discussion to a human rep for better service. Also, after careful consideration,

AI chatbots will ‘push’ inbound leads into the appropriate (and fully automated) nurturing sequences depending on their purchase readiness and other behavior attributes, without you having to lift a finger.

Example:

AI Chat by Reply.io is a sophisticated AI chatbot designed to capture website visitors, qualify them based on your predefined criteria, and engage them with information relevant to their needs.

Sales teams can simply integrate their company’s knowledge base with AI Chat and it will always find the right thing to say for any query it’s faced with.

To make things much more interesting, Reply’s AI Chat uses customized video avatars to engage with website visitors, boosting the chances of turning them into leads.

Finally, AI Chat will also qualify new leads and allocate them to one of the existing automated inbound sequences, and if shown interest right from the get-go, even schedule a meeting with a human SDR right away.

Lead generation assistants

Finding potential customers is no easy task, let alone with the consistently growing competition in the B2B/SaaS realm. Searching for leads manually can be exhausting and time-consuming, and this is where lead generation sales assistants step into play.

Whether its building mass prospect lists, finding key decision-makers on LinkedIn for account-based sales, or enriching existing customer profiles with external data, these virtual assistants take care of all the heavy lifting.

How they work:

Lead generation assistants scan public online resources like social media, industry databases, and company directories to collect valuable information. Once they’ve compiled the basics, like email addresses, job titles, and company details, they refine it further.

These tools score or categorize leads based on how relevant they are to your business, emphasizing the data/behaviors/signals that help sales reps make informed decisions.

This way, your sales reps get a neatly prepared list of high-potential prospects—saving hours of tedious work, as well as actionable insights to remove the guesswork.

Example:

While B2B contact databases aren’t virtual assistants, they are seamlessly integrated with AI automation tools like Reply.io to create a constant, evergreen flow of potential leads and prospect information in real time.

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There are numerous data-scraping tools that can be used as virtual sales assistants across the entire web. Findy, for instance, is always there for sales reps who work with LinkedIn to identify and engage with prospects, helping them scrape prospect and company data to improve lead generation.

Sales intelligence assistants

Sales intelligence assistants are all about helping sales teams make smarter decisions by providing concrete, data-backed insights regarding their prospects. They analyze complex data such as buying intent, work their magic with predictive analytics, and analyze historical data to provide sales reps with the intelligence they need to remove the guesswork in their work.

How they work:

These virtual assistants draw data from various sources, such as internal CRM platforms, prospect online behavior, and third-party data providers to identify and process crucial information that affects sales decision-making.

Most common examples of such data include hiring trends, recent funding, job changes, and other details that can help sales reps tailor their outreach, decide which pain points to focus on, and more.

Example:

Clay is an excellent example of a tool that helps sales teams take their lead generation to the next level.

virtual assistant for sales from Clay

Clay collects contact information, enriches existing customer profiles with additional insights, and identifies the best messaging and timing for engaging your inbound and outbound leads.

On this note, we’re thrilled to announce Reply’s recent integration with Clay, delivering our clients an even better customer experience by fusing AI-powered outreach with AI-powered sales intelligence. Be one of the first to leverage these joint superpowers!

Virtual sales coaches

Even the brightest sales reps need guidance from time to time, which is why an increasing number of sales teams are leveraging virtual sales coaches. Using AI-powered tools as mentors to provide personalized, and more importantly, data-backed feedback for every high-level sales task like calls with clients could be one of the most exciting opportunities here.

Virtual sales coaches are especially beneficial for bigger or remote sales teams where

consistent, one-on-one coaching isn’t always accessible. They provide consistent support to make sure that every representative has the tools and knowledge necessary for success.

How they work:

These tools leverage AI to analyze sales interactions—be it a call, a demo, or even an email thread—looking at things like tone, phrasing, response times, and level of engagement. Many virtual coaches also offer role-playing capabilities, where sales reps can practice objection handling or pitch delivery in a no-risk environment.

Example:

In this category, one of the leading players is Chorus by ZoomInfo, which focuses on detailed call analytics to create actionable coaching insights for each individual sales rep.

virtual sales assistant ai called Chorus

Chorus helps sales professionals improve their skills through actionable advice that’s based on hundreds of thousands of analyzed messages/calls and real-life sales literature. This tool is great for breaking down sales conversations into digestible feedback that helps improve overall win rates, something that sales managers often don’t have much time for, especially in the context of a large team.

For instance, Chorus might mention when a rep spoke too much and should have listened more, as well as some other tips for the next call.

Welcome virtual assistants to your sales team

As you can see, virtual assistants have really become an umbrella term for different kinds of sales software that entirely handles certain sales tasks, just like a human professional would.

The right virtual assistant for sales teams will depend on what tasks they are looking to automate, scale, and lend a helping hand to sales reps.

With the rise of incredibly advanced virtual assistants like AI SDRs, we are entering a new era of B2B sales, one where humans and AI work hand-in-hand to drive efficiency, each focusing on the tasks they do best.

And with technology continuing to improve, it can really go through the roof. From AI SDRs perfecting outbound prospecting to virtual coaches helping teams improve performance, there’s no denying the future of sales will only be more digital.

Ready to take the plunge? Check out tools like Jason AI and explore how they can completely transform your sales operations. The competitive advantage they bring can be the difference that makes your business merely survive or actually thrive in today’s market.