Ultimate Guide to Hiring & Training Your Virtual Marketing Assistant

Azhar Siddiqui (co-founder and CEO at RepStack)
All right, everyone, thanks for registering for our webinar on how to hire onboard and train marketing assistants for your digital marketing agency. I want to welcome you all over here. And I promise it's going to be very fruitful, especially if you're a digital marketing agency owner. We've, you know, at RepStack, we've been doing this [Hiring VA’s for Digital Marketing Agencies], for some time now we have a team of over 100 people working with digital marketing agencies, different virtual assistants in mainly three key roles right now. And one of those key roles is a marketing assistant. And we're going to talk about number one, if it's, even if you want to get a virtual assistant or a marketing assistant right now are you should, then we're going to go into the details of what this if you do decide, and then if you do qualify, we have a qualifying checklist for you ready to go. If you do decide that, or you qualify, on that checklist, the next step is going to be to show you what exactly it means when you're hiring this person. And who this person is and why you're hiring this, like the why behind is so critical. Then we're going to give you some sample job posts on what we're using right now to grab all the talent for, you know, several digital marketing agencies all across the USA, and Canada right now. We're seeing tremendous growth, we're extremely humbled. And then we're also going to let you know what your options are to find a person like this so that this person can continue your marketing engine day after day. And you know, you can step back a little bit and not worry about marketing that much anymore inside your organization. We're going to show you where you can hire these people. Obviously, one of the options is RepStack, we'll walk you through our process, we'll show you what other platforms are available to get yourself some help right now. And then we'll also walk you through some examples of some of these VAs doing some amazing work right now for their clients and what their day looks like. So you get a peek inside their day, maybe look at a couple of clients, we're getting some amazing results using a marketing assistant. So we'll walk you through some of those videos. And yeah, and that's basically we'll try to equip you with as much information as possible. We're trying to convince you that, you know, this is the role that you want help with right now especially if you don't have this person right now, you should get this person ASAP. And, and we'll prove to you with what type of results are coming in, by showing you what you know, clients are getting and what currently marketing assistant bees are doing. So today, it's me, my name is Azhar Siddiqui, and I'm the co-founder and CEO at RepStack. And co-hosting with me right now kind of supporting me is our chief growth officer, Jeff Fisher. Jeff Fisher is an industry veteran as well, inside digital marketing. He's run his own digital marketing agencies in the past, a serial entrepreneur currently running a recruiting business. And he's Chief Operating Officer for that recruitment business. And he's also been an elite-level coach to digital marketing agencies. So when you know he's talking, he knows what he's talking about, especially when it comes down to hiring some of these amazing folks for yourself, and your digital marketing agency. I'm going to quickly share my screen here and get going. And just a brief about myself. My name is obviously Azhar Siddiqui. And then I've also been running my digital marketing agency for the last 13 years now I believe. And yeah, so you know, I'm also coming to you guys with some, you know, some hard labour, proper sweat into digital marketing. I know you know what it feels like to be a one-man show and then work with a whole bunch of contractors. And, you know I have a ton of experience, 13 Years and my agency in Canada is still operating. And, you know, going through all of those motions, we're kind of able to figure out that we only want to work with digital marketing agencies. And we want to focus on filling in these three key roles [Digital marketing assistant, Sales Rep, Account Manager].


So that people like you can, you know, go to the next level, start adding a million dollars in revenues, and more. And I can promise you that, you know, hiring. Obviously, there are other roles, like Sales Assistants and Account Managers, and we'll talk about that some other time. But today, a marketing assistant is the key focus on how you want to hire one onboard and train. Before I move into the presentation, Jeff, is there anything you'd like to add?


Jeff Fisher (Chief Growth Officer at RepStack)
It's interesting that you know if you actually have a marketing assistant, you're always wondering about how you get your marketing done. And once you put somebody in charge of that 40 hours a week, all of a sudden your name your brand starts getting out on. And so this is, to me, one of the most key rules that you hire, when you're starting to grow your business to get you that extra set of hands to get all the different things done, related to the market. Remember, marketing's not going to drive dollars today, necessarily, but it's definitely going to help you grow your business in the future. When your prospect can find you on YouTube, they can see all the great marketing materials that you have out of a variety of social posts and stuff. So that's why I always like to say, as far as administrative support for virtual assistant type work, that marketing assistant is the first one you should hire.

Azhar Siddiqui (Co-founder and CEO at RepStack)
Yeah, yeah, no, I think that's really interesting because marketing assistant is that one person who can get that, you know, if you're not doing marketing properly, and an ongoing basis, who's feeding the sales engine, right, so you're jumping ship, you're going to marketing, then sales, and back and forth, back and forth, we want to set you up right now with a marketing assistant. So that once this role is filled, your marketing engine is going pretty much 24 seven, because once some of these campaigns are up and running, they're working while you're sleeping. So you know, if your marketing assistant can do that, then that's the best position you want to be in terms of next-level growth coming to you. So the first thing that we want to talk about is, do you even want a marketing assistant, or should you even consider hiring a marketing assistant. And some of the reasons like if these reasons make sense to you, obviously frees up time by letting you step back from the day to day activities of your agencies, reduced costs, believe it or not, if you're doing your marketing, if you're a digital marketing agency owner, and you know, you're probably doing a lot of activities inside your agency, some of them might be your own marketing stuff that you're doing. But if you're doing it yourself, your time is extremely, you know, well qualified. And it's expensive because you're probably taking home most of the money out of your agency as well. So you know, believe it or not, it's going to actually cost you less money to hire this person full time and get them to do these marketing activities for you, instead of you trying to fill in these shoes from time to time. And, you know, if you're making 100 $150 an hour, versus somebody who's getting paid 12 to $14 an hour, it's very different in such a situation where some reduce costs and quickly scale your business operation. So again, what I was just mentioning is that you know, somebody's taking 40 hours a week, 160 hours a month, they're taking this massive action on a daily, weekly, monthly basis for you. The results are going to start speaking for themselves really really soon. So you get to scale your business really fast once you have this person in place, strengthening weak areas as entrepreneurs. You know me I don't know what my strengths are, probably getting the right people in place. Hopefully, I think that's what I would consider my strength wasn't always like this. But yes, so um, you know, we usually have teams for doing fulfilment for our clients like SEO people and paid ad people, web development people, and things like that. But when it comes down to Doing the, you know, actual work to bring in more business-like marketing, closing the deal sales, and then also doing the account management, we really rely on ourselves to do all these key activities. So and you know, we're usually not, you might be really great at sales, but in sales account management marketing, you can tell me that you're, you know, a boss and all three of those things. And so, you know, find out which one of your weaknesses is where you really need help. And then step back end, you know, let somebody else do the day-to-day, and you'll be the strategy driver. And then, you know, depending on where you are with your agency, some of these people can work different hours, they can cover weekends for you guys and different things, different work after hours, and things like that. So you know, you have that area where you're not available, you can get some of your virtual assistants to fill in for you. We also have this amazing checklist that you guys should all, here's the link at the bottom over here. And this checklist basically asks you a few quick questions. And if you answer three of them, you were a yes, then you should probably look at hiring a virtual assistant and market marketing virtual assistant for yourself.

Moving on. So now that we've found out why you need this and do you even qualify to get a marketing assistant for your agency? And we presume that the answers are Yes, we're going to move on to the actual marketing assistant role and why it's so important. So the marketing assistant role is a key role for your agency designed to continue the marketing engine on an ongoing basis. Without breaking this, this person will report back to the agency owner, which is probably you, or the marketing manager if you already have that and be able to do the following tasks for you. So these are just some of the tasks. But usually, there'll be a version of a marketing assistant working for you doing some of these, or maybe really specializing in one of them, depending on how big your agency is. So run cold outreach campaigns. It's like email marketing campaigns and things like that. Take care of your social media profiles, and post regular updates. With time, launch and manage paid ad campaigns for you manage the CRM system to assist the sales and marketing team. So this is also really important, like your marketing assistant, if they can be a pro at your CRM system, like HubSpot high level or any other CRM that you're using, they should be able to automate different tasks within your agency to help out the sales team in most cases, but sometimes also with the account management team. They can build out funnels and automation, and things like that. So really, really key task again, and a marketing assistant should be able to help you out with that. Anything else, Jeff, in terms of what a marketing assistant can do? Besides some of these things that we just covered?

Jeff Fisher (Chief Growth Officer at RepStack)
Well, you know, make a long list of all the things that you're weak at as a business owner, and then share that list with your marketing assistant. And you'll be surprised at how many things they're a strong app that you're weak at. And that's the list of the things they can do for you, and then prioritize them. Remember, if you, for example, have only been posting once a month on your social media. All of a sudden, if you can have somebody post three times a week, that's a dramatic improvement over what you were doing. So don't always look for perfection here. Look at making progress. And this marketing assistant definitely can do a lot of things that you either just don't like doing or you're just not good at. I like to say, you know, if you work really hard at getting better at your weaknesses, you end up with strong weaknesses. To find out what they're good at and allow them to do it and you will watch your business grow.

Azhar Siddiqui (Co-founder and CEO at RepStack)
Yeah. Oh, that's awesome. Jeff, thanks for that input. So, as you guys can see, it has such a key role. And we usually, you know, as agency owners, we're marketing agency owners, we're doing all this work for our clients. And I think I may have heard this from you know, one of our coaches, that, you know, you gotta eat your own dog food, and sometimes we're not, we're not doing these key activities for ourselves, and we Maybe doing some amazing work for our clients. But for ourselves, we were neglected. And this person in place will help you do that with perfect style. So, so marketing assistant, we know that we needed, how soon we needed I think, need this will fail. I think if you guys go back to the checklist and some of these things, you'll be able to find that out. And like Jeff said earlier on, this should be your first hire for these key roles, I think a marketing assistant is going to be able to get that marketing and sales engine going for you. So we got a couple of sample jobs over here, we've hired over 100 people or people already working in these specific roles. So you know, when you get this job description from us, you can rest assured that these job descriptions are really in-depth, and they should cover most of the things that you want to cover. I think this is one of our posts from indeed a screenshot of this. And then we have it listed down below as well. So you know, so you know, use this, we're going to give you different platforms where you can also go and hire some of these people. So you can just copy this stuff, and you can paste it onto the platform that you want to use. And then also along with this, if you want to make it really your own, then what you want to do is that like Jeff just said, making a list of things that you have to do, and things that you're good at. And then you don't want to do so and then add those things in there. And that should just turn this job requirement into something that your agency-specific needs. So here's that roll that we just told you about the sample job post couple of them over here, but we're kind of going through this again, you know, you want to hire also, yeah, you want to, I've heard this in the past as well, Jeff, that you want to hire for attitude. And you know, because everything else, usually you can train on. But you know, if you have a bad attitude, right from the get-go, that's just a downer for me. And I don't want that person. I want a person who's going to be two steps ahead of me when he or she comes to me. They already have a solution to the problem they're bringing to me. All I have to say is yes, no, or maybe do this with this. So those are the types of people that I want to work with. And this is what we try and RepStack as well that anytime you onboard a new virtual assistant with one of our clients. These people have amazing, amazing, enthusiastic behaviors so that they're not holding you back from the day-to-day of your organization.

Jeff Fisher (Chief Growth Officer at RepStack)
The other thing you want to look for is what I call the lifelong learner, you want somebody that's interested in what's going on in the world, what's changing. You know, too many people get their college degrees. And then the United States, especially over 40% of the people, never work to the degree that they actually get. So where do they get training in the information for the job that they're actually in and that all comes down to the reading video, you know, however, you consume, it doesn't really matter what you want, somebody that is always consuming new information that will make a great marketing assistant for you. And in the future, they may become your marketing manager who the heck knows.

Azhar Siddiqui (Co-founder and CEO at RepStack)
Yeah, yeah, exactly. No, that's some good insight there. Um, and some of the things like in terms of their qualifications and things like that, where you want to look for, I just wanted to highlight that there is more stuff over here as part of your job post. Usually, you know, somebody with a bachelor's degree in marketing, some of our VA even have MBAs or are working towards MBAs. in-depth knowledge of marketing techniques, databases, MS Office Excel, and things like that. Knowledge of CRM is extremely important. Even if they don't have a high level, you know, expertise. They should have, like if they're a learner and they're enthusiastic. In today's day and age, you should be able to give them a tool, and they should be able to become experts overtime for you. So if it means a CRM tool, if it means you need to start running Google ads or Facebook ads or LinkedIn ads, whatever it might be, they should be able to go take some training and get good at it over time. Understanding advanced marketing principles ability to multitask, really important in our fields, we're all doing it. And we should expect it from our virtual assistants, especially the marketing, virtual assistant as well. excellent communication and interpersonal skills. This is also really important because sometimes your marketing assistant will also be helping you out or the sales team out by maybe even jumping on the phone calls for you. So that we actually when we place a marketing assistant, we actually screen them for this. Hey, are you going to be comfortable getting on the phone 20 to 30 times a day? And when you put a person in charge of that, then you know, you want to have some accent requirements, so that they can effectively communicate with your clients, their English, spoken and written should be perfect, there should never be any grammar issues there. And obviously, these guys are going to be writing a lot of content for you. So you want to make sure that they're good writers. So some of these things are extremely important when you're posting this job post, so make sure that at least they have these basic requirements filled out. So target, and benchmark. So I think this really gets me excited. Because at the end of the day, when we're filling the marketing assistant role, and if we can see something tangible coming out of it, at the end of the month, that's what we're going for. And if you can, you know if you can work towards some of these targets, and benchmarks, which most of our virtual assistants right now are achieving for their clients, if they're doing specific lead generation and things like that for them, then, you know, it's going to be a beautiful day, an amazing week, and an even better month for you guys month after month after month for as long as you have this person in that role for you. So what we say, an ideal marketing assistant should be doing for you, in terms of leads generated, we say around five to 10 per day, 25 to 50 per week, and 100-200 per month, and appointment. So these are just, you know, soft leads people replying back to maybe an ad that you posted, or replying back to an email outreach campaign that you have going on or a LinkedIn outreach campaign that you have going on, there might be a few different things that you're doing. But, these are just soft leads that are you know, people are raising hands, they're asking questions and things like that. And out of these, you want to see three to five appointments booked for you and about 15 appointments booked from 15 inbound appointments booked for the month. Usually, your sales rep will do this for you. But also the marketing assistant should play a good role here, in assisting the sales rep to book the discovery calls for you anything on these target sites that you'd like to add, Jeff?

Jeff Fisher (Chief Growth Officer at RepStack)
Just remember that they grow over time. So you're not going to necessarily see this kind of results in your first week or even your first month. Because you need to train your marketing assistant about your company. get them excited about what you do, you know, even though your digital marketing agency, everyone does it slightly differently. And so make sure that they know that and keep working until they have success, which I see happen too often. And I don't care where you hire the marketing assistant from where that's from Pakistan or the United States or wherever they give up. And when you give up is when you lose when you keep marching along. You know, that's when you'll start to see these numbers grow month over month and you'll start achieving that 15 appointments per month.

Azhar Siddiqui (Co-founder and CEO at RepStack)
Awesome, thanks. So here we have a comparison sheet. So I told you initially that we're going to be showing you different options that are available to you right now to hire this type of person. And the most prominent options that are available out there are Fiverr, Upwork, "online jobs.ph", and then obviously RepStack is one of the options available to you as well. So, so rep so how we have this is that in red, are anything that's in red is sort of like you kind of have to take the lead on there and things like that. With some of these portals. You may save some money but you're going to have to do a lot of this. work yourself through Things like that. But I think it's well worth it. To get this, the main point is that we want to get a marketing assistant in place for you now, so that, you know, you can get some breathing room and get this marketing activity going. So some of these options are really, really great options. I know Jeff's been hiring on Upwork for years and years, my agency in Canada that I'm running right now, a lot of hiring has been happening on Upwork. Using that platform as well, I've used Fiverr from time to time to do a lot of work. So you guys can go in using the job description that we have, you guys can go in and get started with some of these job portals. And, you know, you want to look at somebody between seven and $15 an hour, that's, we'd recommend anything below that, I'm not sure if you're going to get the type of person that we recommended, like with a college degree, undergrad, at least, maybe even an MBA, excellent communication skills and things like that. So but compared to somebody in the US, for example, if you're hiring somebody in the Philippines, Pakistan, India, you know, if you were to hire this person in the US, you can definitely do that, it will usually start out at around $20 an hour and go up from there. So once you figure out who you want to work with, you want to create a job description. If you're working with us, we'll take all of that information from you over a discovery call. And from there, we'll just stick over the process. But if you're doing this yourself, create a job description. We've kind of given that to you add a flair of your own to it and just go to town by posting it on the platform that you want to work with. You're probably going to start seeing people apply, lots of people are going to apply start shortlisting these people. It is time to start shortlisting candidates for your business. This process can be time-consuming, but what you want to do is that you want to maybe have a smaller process there. Were you know, if they don't have they don't meet this, this this this criteria. Like I think there's funny that there's a trick that you like to use when hiring on some of these platforms. Right, Jeff, by asking this trick question.


Jeff Fisher (Chief Growth Officer at RepStack)
Yeah, so there's a couple of different things that you want to see, can they do research? So you know, I have asked for years questions about, you know, like, how do you turn on the readability scale, in Microsoft Word. And the way I word The question is, all I have to do is copy it and paste it into Google. And they will find the answer. But probably 50%, just simply say, I have no idea how to do that. So that's an immediate elimination. Because I need a problem solver. I don't need the problem giver. Right, I have plenty of my own problems, I don't need them to give me more. The other little attention to detail is I usually have them the address of two dear CDMA. That's my cat. And I always say that towards the end of the job post to see if they're actually reading the job posts to the end or they just read the top part. And then applying without actually understanding what the job is about. So again, it's just another little way to weed out. You know exactly who you might be getting to apply for the job.

Azhar Siddiqui (Co-founder and CEO at RepStack)
Yeah, no, that's awesome. Something just, you know, a little bit different. And that would, you know, I think about 80 to 90% of applicants will drop off, right, they're the people who are left now AI is your first batch of shortlisted candidates. Now you want to start talking to them and getting a good feel for them. And then start finding the best people for yourself. start interviewing your shortlisted candidates, by setting up a time and a date and then schedule a meeting. Now you want to go into assessing their abilities. So when you're conducting these interviews, what we really recommend is to do them on video. Just because you get that third-dimensional view of who these people are and you know, what their demeanour is. Because you know, you're you want to surround yourself with people with good energy and good vibes and things like that. So the video will definitely you probably won't be meeting these people maybe ever face to face so Video is the best regard. So let's definitely use video. And another thing that we'd like to do is use slack-based interviews as well because this will allow you to kind of check their written communications as well while you're talking to them. So, also another very important tip for you guys, when you guys are doing this on your own, make sure you go on a video call with them. And make sure that you try to do some kind of written assessment. The best would be just to conduct the interview on slack or do some type of chat and things like that. Then you know, once you've done this process, you've talked to a few people, you want to hire the person that you like, really, really well. And, you know, you obviously, if you're on a platform, that platform will have a contract between you and the freelancer or the virtual assistant. With us, the contract would be with RepStack, and we'll have these virtual assistants work on contract with us, we take care of everything on the back end. So you guys don't need to worry about the legalities and things like that. And worst-case scenario, if it doesn't work out, you rinse and repeat. But you know, just if you're trying to do this yourself, and if it doesn't work out, remember that I think it's going to be the first time that you're hiring a person like this for this particular role. And if it doesn't work out, it doesn't mean that you just give up. Usually, that's what we tend to do as entrepreneurs. If something doesn't work out, we move on, move on, move on. But give this another shot. Because we know, this thing is working for several, you know, fast-growing digital marketing agencies, we got 100 people in these organizations right now fast right now. And, you know, we know that these key roles are working really, really well to help these guys grow. So telling you from experience, do not give up on this person. Just rinse and repeat and keep going.
And just to kind of give you a brief overview of what we like to do. So once you've done so this is the process, if you wanted to go with one of these processes with us, once you've done the discovery call, then usually we'd take over from there, we actually have usually, you know, when we're doing these on a constant basis, because we have quite a bit of demand. Right now we're placing just over one person a day right now, that's how fast we're filling out these roles. So we kind of have to be prepared for this. So we're hiring people already in advance. And our process kind of looks like this: you know, well, there are multiple different levels of interviews, we call them, our ones, our twos, our threes. Once we match a candidate with you with your requirements, we conduct another dry run to see if this person is going to be a fit for you, which will be the fourth interview, then a fifth interview is scheduled with you, the client. But by the time a person comes to this interview, we usually have a 95% placement ratio at that call, just because we've already gone through placing so many of these people already, and B we've already done our vetting process for these guys. And then on top of that, even once you give us the Yes, we have a pre-boarding process where we get them going on a three-day intensive training program specifically designed for your agency. And if there was just the worst-case scenario, a red flag that we didn't pick out in one of these VAs, this three-day intensive training is designed to kind of get them ready to start with you just, you know, hit the ground running. And if there were any red flags, we're going to rest assured that we'll catch that red flag. And, you know, we'll take care of that even before that person on boards with you. So you know you're not doing the rinse and repeat and things like that the owner is on us. So we take care of the entire process. And like I said that just one of the advantages of going with us is that, you know, we've done this several times, you may be doing it for the first time. But whichever option you do pick out, I would recommend, go for placing a marketing assistant with you and get that marketing engine going 40 hours, 160 hours a month, every single month and you'll definitely see the difference there in your agency's growth. So the next process, we just have like a bit of a marketing process, the fundamentals over here. I know I don't want to be teaching you guys, you guys are all the digital marketing agency owners. But like I mentioned before, sometimes, you know, we forget to eat our own dog food, we're doing this for our clients. And we're doing this on a day-to-day basis. But for ourselves, we forget about the basics. And you know, the basics are really, really simple. Get back to basics before you hire this person make sure you have all your thoughts and ideas on a piece of paper or a marketing plan, even better, what your messaging is going to be, who it's going to be for what your target markets are, are you focused on a niche Are you focused on within your city, and what media you're going to be using, like, you know, you don't expect a marketing assistant to come in and start doing your Facebook ads, your Google ads, your email marketing campaigns, and you know, your CRM and every single thing, so you're going to need to prioritize, and you're going to pick out the channels that are going to work best for the market that you're trying to target to, and the message that you're trying to send out as well. So you know, doing a strategy session beforehand, is going to help you kind of be on simpler terms. Like being able to, when you do bring this person on board is going to be so much easier for this person to find out what you're all about. And then start your marketing activities for you. So trust me on this, do this quick activity, you're going to enjoy it. And you may even learn a few things that we may not even have thought about in years about our agencies.

So now, we have a few of these video testimonials and things like that, that I'd like to just walk you through. We have quite a few of these. There's another link over here, we've added a few new ones over here. These are just kind of designed to show you what our clients are doing right now the quick videos, I'm just going to go through a few of these. So you can see what our clients are seeing but also what the VA is doing on a day-to-day basis as well. So we'll start with Ken Tucker's over here real quick.

Ken Tucker (One of the Clients)
Hi, this is Ken Tucker. I just wanted to share some feedback on my experience with RepStack and my VA Umm-E-Laila. It's been fantastic. Laila is just amazing. She's been able to pick up everything that we've asked him to do and turn it around. I think very quickly. It doesn't take a lot of oversight on my part, to give her a task. And if she does need some help, you know, she's very good at asking for additional help or clarification from me or from a technical lead. So you know, she's fantastic, and I can't recommend her highly enough. Thank you.

Umm-E-Laila (Digital Marketing Assistant)
Hello, everyone. My name is Umm-E-Laila, and I am the marketing solutions consultant at Changescape Web (Digital Marketing Venture of Ken Tucker). Today I'm going to show you what the work here looks like. So I start my day off by signing into the Time Doctor. And then I clear out to respond to the emails. And then I log into prospect rocket. It is a Cold Email Marketing tool that we're using. I log in here to check if the campaigns are being run smoothly. After that, I log into the designer to transcribe the podcast that is being done by my client (Ken Tucker). And after transcribing these podcasts, I upload them up on this website to Changescape Web. I also upload all sorts of blog posts relevant to the website. And by using these tools: “Missing Letters” and “Content Deliver” because they allow you to have all sorts of blog posts and curated content, etc. Then there's this website that I have created called brick mortar local.com. And we're planning to use this website to sell our solutions to different customers and potential clients talking about potential clients and customers. We have these tools “df” by “LiT” and “lead Kahuna”. These tools generate leads for us and they allow us to directly improve those eight to the campaigns that we're running currently. I was managing these social media accounts for my client and I designed posters using Canva and Adobe (Photoshop | Illustrator) for Video purposes, I make use of this online video editing towards a video.io, I also use Adobe Premiere Pro, then this five-level domain of Go High-Level local leads IQ that I use for sending out a newsletter every Wednesday to all the contacts. So yeah, that's that. And I'm really enjoying what I do for Chase, cable web, and RepStack. And I can already see what the future holds. Thank you.

Azhar Siddiqui (co-founder and CEO at RepStack)
So this particular view is doing a, you know, from websites to managing their outreach to managing their newsletters, designing them, finding out the target market and the messaging, quite a bit of stuff here. So you know, as each agency is a little bit different, and yours is definitely going to VA. different as well. But you're going to, you know, the baseline is the same, right? Start out, get this stuff in this, this information on paper, and get going with this stuff. Because you know, just imagine a person like Malala, working for you 160 hours a month, what kind of impact that's going to have on the sales results, eventually, from after 30 days to 60 days after 90 days of that. So this is another one of our VAs I'm going to skip past the clients. But we'll take a look at who the author is.

Rija (RepStack’s Account Manager)
Hi, everyone, my name is Rija and I work with Pollianna, I'll be giving you a peek into what I do throughout my day as a RepStack VA, the first thing that I do is that I make sure that my time doctor is up and running to log all my work hours and my work activities. Then I made sure to log onto my Basecamp, which is a CRM where I and the rest of the Pollianna employees, stock and correspond regarding our upcoming projects, any bottlenecks that we're facing, and any correspondence that's required to make sure that everything's running smoothly, I move on to my stuff. And I check out what my assignments are. And based on the importance and urgency of a particular assignment, I take on that project. And I start working on that. So it depends if I have to work on Google Docs or Google Sheets. So for example, I have to come up with a new script, I'll open my Google Docs, I'll write my script, I'll add my manager, and I'll add my boss to it so that he can directly make changes to it. And just, you know, make the process very streamlined.
Currently, I'm working on a four-week outreach campaign with Polianna for about 100 prospects, through which we cold-call, email them, and reach out to these prospects through social media platforms. For social media, I have access to my boss's Facebook group, and Facebook account. From here, I reach out to different businesses, and just let them know that, hey, we're Polianna we do this, would you be interested in taking on SEO for your HR business, I do the same for LinkedIn. And the same for Instagram. So once I'm done with social outreach, I move on to my calling outreach. And I use the platform called Go high level for this purpose. And it lets you call prospects from my country to any country specifically for this project, we're targeting US citizens. So yeah, just from sitting at my home, I can call up people and I can tell them about the awesome things that Polianna is doing for them. And if they would be interested in becoming a part of our legacy. Once I'm done with making the calls during the social outreach, going through their emails, and letting them know about our offers and our prospects, I move on to a few pieces of training, if I have the time in the day, I log on to my members. seven figure agency account. And you can see that we have, you know, availability of this awesome resource of lots and lots of training about how to land clients and how to basically excel in your business. Once I'm done with everything that I did throughout my eight hours of work, I moved back to Basecamp. And I fill out an end-of-the-day report. So at the end of the day report entails everything that I have done in one single day. And all the targets that I've met and it also gives me and my bosses and the rest of the employees have Polianna look into a peek into what you know could be expected in the next couple of days. So this would be it from my side. I hope you all have a good day. Take care bye-bye.

Azhar Siddiqui (co-founder and CEO at RepStack)
Excellent. So there are a few more over here. You guys are welcome to take a look at them. I also wanted to show you this is another one of the links. Also within our how, you know, your experience with drip stock has been so far and how the ways are fine. Yeah, Don, do you want to start first? autoplay, I forgot about that. Awesome. Okay, so um yes, skills you should be looking for. So, before I go into these skills, there is a link to this particular Mashood, we should have it over here, right? Towards the end. Yes. So yeah, this particular document will give you more information, more peek into some of these VAs, and then also share a day-end report with you as well as some sample day-end reports from some of our VAs are doing some amazing job. So you can see what type of work these guys are putting out every single day for their clients. So moving in, back, and like to kind of wrap this up for you guys, because we're approaching the one-hour mark, the skills that you should be looking out for when you're hiring this marketing assistant. Some of these things are content marketing, social media, and video editing is really, really important these days. Because our marketing assistant is with us on this call, he's going to take this webinar's video, and he's going to start chopping it up into bite-sized pieces for different social media platforms and different Ad platforms that we have campaigns currently running on. So it makes our job really, really easy. Graphic designing, again, a marketing assistant should be able to put together that graphic design or that post, or that presentation that you wanted. Canva is a good platform, they should be really well acquainted with Canva. At a minimum, if they have some better graphic design platform experiences, then even better, but at the very least camera, they should have the expertise, that marketing strategy, if they've gone and done their undergraduate in business or marketing, things like that they should be able to do some of this stuff for you. sales experience is a plus. Jeff, I'd like to kind of ask you why are we kind of emphasizing or what kind of saying sales experience is a plus, these guys are obviously going in for a marketing assistant role. But what's the link here with the sales experience?

Jeff Fisher (Chief Growth Officer at RepStack)
Well, you know, at the end of the day, marketing's goal is to generate sales. And so the more they understand the connection between marketing and sales, but also the difference between the two, the more successful they're going to be as a marketing system for you. And also, it happens occasionally, where you'll find a marketing assistant that really should have been a salesperson. And so they'll start pointing out things that you can do things that you can approve of, and pretty soon you'll realize, Hey, I have more than a marketing assistant, I have a salesperson here as well. But don't expect most marketing assistance is not going to do that. meaning they're not going to jump from one to the other. Marketing Assistance tend to be shy, they don't want to be out on stage, or a salesperson likes the, you know, the front of the curtain stage kind of stuff. But the more they understand about how you sell what you sell, why you sell it, the better they can craft the marketing messages that you're trying to send out and make sure that they're congruent with the salespersons. You know, presentation and all those kinds of things.

Azhar Siddiqui (co-founder and CEO at RepStack)
Yeah, yeah. Well, that's an excellent insight. Because if this person is running a cold outreach campaign, and, you know, the next day, they log into their outreach campaign, and they see that there were about five or six people who clicked on the appointment link for their sales team but never booked the appointment. This person should be able to jump on the phone, say, Hey, Joe, I saw you click on that link. But you never booked that call? Can I help answer some questions and book that time and for you. So at least you know, like have them land. This is also something that you would have to kind of with the job description and things like that. You'd have to kind of be upfront about that, Hey, are you going to be comfortable with this because you know, if you don't talk about this and expect them to do something like this, then like Jeff said that most of these people are not inclined towards that. But if you find the right mix of character, the right mix of education, people who are willing to move fast and grow then You know, you may find that perfect match where you know, these people are going to be able to do those key calls and assist the sales team just pre-booking some of these calls for them. Just definitely an added advantage, as so now we kind of want to revisit some of the hiring techniques, or the processes that you guys should have the pre-screening processes, just a few points, we're going to go over some of these, you know, if you can ask the candidates to send you a recorded video. Very, very good. Because you know, you may be doing again, this could be added step before you go on a cloud zoom call with them, where you get all these candidates that you shortlist and get them to send you a video, or recorded video and ask them something specific in there, you'd be able to do a lot of things, you'd be able to screen more people, you'd be able to check out the accents, how they speak, if there are any grammar issues and things like that, and the only book appointments with people who have, you know, who kind of fit the bill for you. And there are also some assessments. Colby is one of them. We at RepStack offer one free Colby assessment for any clients who want to work with us. All our candidates also take a disc assessment as well. So I do recommend, I believe there's a Tony Robbin's disc assessment that you're gonna have them take and it might not cost you anything that might be wrong, but you can definitely look that up to “Tony Robbin’s disc assessment”. But with us, you get one free Colby, and all our candidates come with disc assessments kind of helps you figure out if this is the right person for this role or not.

Jeff Fisher (Chief Growth Officer at RepStack)
A little trick here is are when you're doing this pre-screening, you only need to ask one question. And the question. I like just two questions. I like that. One is what is your favourite holiday? And tell me about it, tell me why it's your favourite holiday? or number two, tell me about your favourite hobby, whatever that may be, and tell me why it's your favourite up? And what I'm able to see or hear if I'm only getting phone messages. Are they enthusiastic? You know, because they just drone on about their special holiday. That's not the person you want. You want somebody that when they're talking about their holiday hobby, wow, this is over the top, this is why I love to do it. This is you know, they can barely slow down their speaking is they're trying to get it all across them why it's important to them what they gain from it. So just a little trick in there in the pre-screening process to help eliminate another person if not good.

Azhar Siddiqui (co-founder and CEO at RepStack)
Excellent, excellent. Yeah. So you know, interview process, tell me a little bit about yourself. So, you know, after the pre-screening, obviously, you want to conduct an interview. You know, we do this on a daily basis, as I said, you know, we go through our candidates, sometimes Five, six, sometimes even up to seven, eight interviews. So you know, but if you're going to be doing it yourself, then here are some questions, including what Jeff just told you. Some of these questions can be asked over here. Some are really cool ones. Like if we, if we contact your last employer, this one is really cool. The last employer and asked them to rate you on a scale from one to 10. You know, what would that be? So you know, you get to find out cuz, you know, are they giving themselves a 10 out of 10? Or, you know, a nine, but are they giving themselves better for a Lauric score like six, seven, or something like that, then you know, there might be something going on there. So, once you're doing this on a constant basis, you get to find out what the right answer is there. So try this question on your next interview too when you're hiring your virtual assistant for your marketing department. Expectations to communicate, this is extremely important. Once you've found the right person, as I said before this, you know, you want to have really clear expectations for your virtual assistant. Because if you don't, then how are you going to hold them accountable once they're on board with you? So like we said that responsiveness we've been looking out for this right from the get-go, and we want to let them know again that hey, this is what I want. When you come to me. You want to come to me with a solution to that answer to that question. be resourceful. Honesty is extremely important. You know, honesty is I think one of those things Where once there's a question mark there, it becomes extremely hard to get back at. So you know, usually a deal-breaker on our side over here. innovate, work hard, obviously, you know asking for not everybody is good at asking for help. So make sure that they have an environment where they can reach up to you. And they can ask for help. So, you know, as those expectations said, on our end, again, if you're working with RepStack, we'd preset these expectations for you. And then when you officially onboard your virtual assistant, you can expect to set some more customized expectations. But these are really basic ones. And we'll make sure that these are already set up for you. So pre onboarding is a process that is exclusive to us. If you can kinda if you were hiring somebody on Upwork, for example, and you can kind of convince them to work for you on a trial basis, or even for free for 16 to 20 hours or something like that. That's great. But you may lose a lot of good people because people usually don't want to do that. But with us, this is kind of like that failsafe that we created for our clients. It's called the pre onboarding process, we train your virtual assistant explicitly, on the things that they're going to be working for you when they onboard with you. And we try to catch any last-minute red flags and things like that if they pop up, but we also get them to communicate with you during these three, four days of training, send you their damn reports, you start communicating with them. And by the time they are officially on board with you after completing this, it's completely free of charge to you. And we pay the VA, their full salary for this time as well. But it just minimizes the risk for you so that you don't onboard a person that is not the right fit for you. So if you can try to replicate this process, if you're hiring yourself, then I'd highly recommend it. One of the things that we do during this process is stress tests that work from home setup. Over here, you want to check the internet speed, we usually recommend a minimum of 15 Mbps, if they're going to be making phone calls and things like that, do they have a power backup in place, a work laptop with the right hardware is ready to go. Especially if they're going to be doing graphic design and video editing, they're going to need a strong work machine. And the additional hardware that they need. A VPN is really important. Home Office setup is really important. Like they shouldn't be working from their bed, they should be working, they should have a proper dedicated work area where they'd work out of camera and lighting. And all of this stuff is really, really important. We also use Time Doctor to track the virtual assistants, or computers while they're on the job so that we know that they're doing what they're supposed to be doing. And most, I think at least with Upwork, you can do some type of tracking as well. And finally, now, everything is happening, you know, you've done all of this stuff, you've done pre-screening, you've got the person, you signed the contract. Now you're ready to hire this person, and you're ready to onboard this person, really, really important time. You know you want to have some of these things taken care of in advance, you should plan your day one video virtual assistant ahead of time, so that you know they feel welcome, introduce them to your team. And then go through our you know, you know, if you have all this stuff laid out for you in advance, it's going to make not only your job a lot easier, but this person is going to think that, hey, I made the right decision. And from day one, you create a great, great example for them. So some of these things are what tools need to be set up for them. Who will set these up, create a checklist for this stuff? So all the tools, the emails, the Google Doc access, outreach campaign tool that they need to use the video editing, graphic design to things like that. So there are so many different tools that they probably need to use, what will their orientation process look like? day one, accessing tools, software, communication, communication expectation. So, you know, again, you know, you want to reiterate those expectations if you haven't done that already. How will they be trained in what you expect them to do? Training is going to be created Guys, don't expect your virtual assistant, who’s got all again, you know, when we started this, we talked about hiring for enthusiasm hire for a person who has the capability of learning, and then let them learn, you know, give them time to train, give them time to train on a particular skill set or a particular to and, and see them improve, hey, if they don't do what they're supposed to do, if you allow them to train this odd hour of training and things like that, then you can hold them accountable. But if you don't do that, don't expect them to know everything from day one. Because you are everybody's digital marketing agencies runs just a little bit differently. And you need to allow them that time. What will they be expected to report daily, weekly, monthly, like I said, we have a process, we've shared that with you, you can just follow this a similar template, you can show them that, hey, this is how I want you to report back to me on a daily basis. So that daily report they and report come back to you. We also send out a Time Doctor weekly report to our clients and things like that. So there are lots of different options. But definitely, they should be reporting back to you on what they've accomplished on a daily and weekly basis. How will you gauge their performance, you know, you want to have you want to take out some time from your calendar, and that this should be one on one time or whoever whichever manager they're reporting back to, you know, let them ask the questions that they may have, and give them this time to bring up problems that they're facing so that you can kind of help them grow. And by helping them grow, you help your agency grow as well as ongoing training, management, and accountability. So, again, extremely important processes, ongoing is going to be key here, this person should not be in a lull, or just be given this one-dimensional task, these guys will do a lot of multitasking for you. But they need to train on a lot of these things. There. And with us, obviously, we take care of a lot of bi-weekly training, weekly training, and things like that we have like all Success Academy for our virtual assistants. But if you guys are doing this yourself, there are platforms out there like Udemy, Coursera. Other places like even YouTube, need to train on something, things like that. But ongoing training is a must if you want your virtual assistant to do great for you guys. Is there anything that you'd like to add on the training side, Jeff?

Jeff Fisher (Chief Growth Officer at RepStack)
Just remember that you have to invest time and training? You know, you can have them work to the maximum every single day. But if they're not improving, they're not going to find better ways to market for you. And part of your goal is to, you know, put them in a good place where they can look at and study things that you may not have time for. And let them train on their own as well as attend the rep spec training that is available to them every single.

Azhar Siddiqui (co-founder and CEO at RepStack)
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Um, so I guess this is we have some performance benchmarks for you guys over here as well, there's a Google document that you can look at, you can look at some more of our virtual assistants who are doing some amazing work. And check out you know, kind of try to emulate that for yourself. And then my Our team has also kind of come up with this ultimate hiring checklist for your marketing assistant. A really cool checklist excess, specifically for marketing assistance. So go through this, and it's going to give you some great pointers as well. And then finally, if you guys want to work with us, our process is extremely simple. There is a link to booking a free discovery call over here. Just click on that then jump on a call with somebody from our team. And we'll guide you through the rest of the process. But I just wanted to thank everyone for taking the time. And if anybody has any questions right now is a good time to ask. Okay, so I have a question here. Should I be hiring a sales assistant first? Shouldn't I be hiring a sales assistant first? So I know Jeff you’d like to say hire a marketing assistant first, but why didn't let you take this question, what's the reason? or the science behind hiring the marketing assistant for us instead of the sales assistant?

Jeff Fisher (Chief Growth Officer at RepStack)
Well, if you're one of those exceptional agencies that have more sales than you know what to do with, then hire a sales assistant first. But what we've seen consistently is, you know, keep in mind, a sales assistant is going to need hundreds of leads over the course of a month to work through. So if you only have 20, or 30, leads for a sales system to work on, they'll be done by the third day that they're working for you. So you're much better off get the marketing system to get your sales and lead count up before you start hiring a salesperson.

Azhar Siddiqui (co-founder and CEO at RepStack)
Excellent. Excellent. Yeah, no, that's, that's perfect. You want to get your marketing engine going so that it can start feeding the sales department. That's what we did. That's what most people do. But in some cases, like Jeff said, that if you're, you know, if you're already fast-growing, you may have a need of hiring a sales assistant. And then at that point, yeah, by all means, hire the sales assistant first, but in most cases, a marketing assistant should be your go-to for that key role. Another question I have here is, you talked about three key roles in an agency, what are the three key roles, so so we've kind of identified these, and, you know, between Jeff I, and the experience that we've had running our own digital marketing agencies just been coaching agency owners, to get to a million dollars and above and running his own placement recruiting company. You know, with that, the experience that we got, especially in the niche of digital marketing, we found out three key roles that are extremely important, when, when hired would help the agency owner step back from the day today and get massive, activate massive growth inside that agency. And those key roles where we talked about today, one of them is the marketing assistant.

The second one is the sales assistant. And the third one is the account manager. So you know, these three roles as agency owners like myself, I've been doing these for years and years. And, and, you know, I didn't realize that, hey, I can step back, I was taking home, you know, in my agency, I'll be honest here, I was taking home between 120 $250,000 a year, I wish it was a month, but it was a good amount of money for myself. But I was doing my marketing-related work, I was doing my sales-related work. And I was doing all that client-facing work. And, you know, 10 years, a decade of doing that stuff, it gets old. And you know, and I was just stuck in the same, right, it was a good amount of money. But I had to just keep on doing the same work over and over again, focus on marketing, bring in some deals, focus on sales, and then start focusing on account managing. And then as soon as I drop a few clients go back to marketing again. And then this is the same vicious cycle over and over and over again. 

But it wasn't until we started placing some of these people for ourselves. And now our amazing clients, that we realize that, hey, these are the key roles, you want to have the marketing assistant do this exclusively for you 160 hours a month, then you put in a salesperson who starts booking discovery calls or booking these appointments for you on a daily basis. Like I say you want at least three to five a week, 15 a month. And then you have these account managers who were actually taking care of we're as enthusiastically as you are about taking care of your clients passionately, and they're taking care of this though it's not rocket science that we do. So you know, having these people Good, well-educated people with clean accents. And you know, marketing business degrees, bring them on board and just start seeing the magic happens. So that's why we, you know, it's not just coming from, we pulled it out of a hat. But, you know, I've implemented in my agency, Jeff's been coaching these roles for years. And now we're seeing with over 100 viewers that we place with digital marketing agencies across the US. We're seeing these people go in and start doing some amazing work for their clients and helping them step back from, you know, this vicious cycle that we agency owners kind of get caught up in. Alright folks, thanks for we are a little bit over our time limit today but I really appreciate everybody who joined in. And we'll be sending out a replay shortly after this as well. And if you guys have any questions, feel free to reach out to us. I hope that this session was helpful to you and will help you land your first marketing assistant for your agency.