Virtual sales assistant: tasks, costs and how to hire one

A virtual sales assistant researches prospects against your ideal customer profile, runs your cold email sequences, works your LinkedIn, keeps your CRM accurate, books discovery calls into your diary and nurtures the leads that went quiet. They do not close, price or negotiate; the person who sells still sells, with a full diary and a clean pipeline instead of an empty one. Hire on a written profile, a trial task and a first fortnight run on approval. A dedicated virtual sales assistant from Ant Assist costs from £5 per hour on the entry rate, on UK hours, working in your tools under your brand.

The title is used for two different jobs, and only one of them is a virtual assistant. A salesperson who works remotely, closes deals and earns commission is a remote sales rep. A virtual sales assistant supports the people who sell: they build and feed the pipeline and keep it honest, so that the founder or the rep spends their selling hours selling. This guide is about the second role. If you need someone to take a discovery call and close it, that is a hire for your sales team; if you need the twenty hours a week of work that has to happen before and after those calls, that is a virtual sales assistant.

The six tasks below are the ones our lead generation VAs own from day one, and they are the whole of the sales work that is not selling.

Prospect research

Researches and qualifies leads against your ideal customer profile, sourced from LinkedIn, industry databases and your existing CRM, and records why each prospect fits so the outreach can say so.

Cold email outreach

Runs multi-step email sequences using your tools and your messaging, drafted to your tone and reviewed by you before they go live, with the replies triaged and the bounces cleaned. No spray-and-pray.

LinkedIn prospecting

Sends connection requests and follow-up messages and engages with prospects' content to warm them up before outreach, from your account or a connected tool, under your brand.

CRM hygiene

Keeps your pipeline accurate by updating contact details, logging activities, moving deals between stages and removing duplicates, so the forecast you look at on Monday is real.

Discovery call booking

Manages your booking link, qualifies interested prospects, sends prep materials and confirms attendance, which is the difference between a diary of meetings and a diary of no-shows.

Lead nurturing

Re-engages cold and dormant leads with sequenced follow-ups so opportunities do not fall through the cracks: the enquiry that was not ready last quarter, the proposal that went quiet, the customer who stopped ordering.

Different stack? These are examples. Your VA is trained on your tools and your process during onboarding and works inside your accounts, not ours.

They do not close. Discovery calls, demos, proposals and negotiations stay with the person whose name is on the deal. They do not set prices, offer discounts or agree terms; anything with money in it comes to you with the context written up. They do not decide who the customer is: the ideal customer profile is yours, written with your VA and refined together from response rates, and your VA researches and contacts only the prospects who match it. And they do not send anything in your name that you have not approved the shape of: every sequence and every template is reviewed by you before it goes live. A virtual sales assistant makes the seller more effective; they do not replace the seller.

Write the profile first. Industry, size, geography, role, the trigger that makes a prospect a buyer now and the disqualifiers. If you cannot write it, no assistant can research against it, and the first weeks will be spent writing it together anyway.

List the tools and the access. Your CRM (or the decision to set one up in onboarding), your outreach platform, your LinkedIn, your calendar and booking link, your domain for sending. Access goes through a password manager, never a shared login, under an NDA and a data-processing agreement.

Test on a real task. Give a candidate, or the provider's proposed assistant, ten companies and the profile, and ask for the qualified ones with the reason and the right contact. Then ask for a three-step sequence to one of them in your tone. You are testing research judgement and written English you would send under your own name.

Ask how they report. A daily or weekly line: prospects researched, sequences running, replies, meetings booked, pipeline moved. A vague answer means you will be chasing for updates, which is the job you were trying to remove.

Run the first fortnight on approval. Sequences drafted for your review, bookings copied to you, the CRM checked weekly. Ownership widens as the profile and the messaging prove themselves. Most clients have their VA active within 5 to 7 working days of signing up and at full productivity within the first two weeks.

If you hire through a managed provider, ask the provider the same questions about the assistant they propose, and expect the answers to come with the assistant's name attached. For the general hiring process, read our guide to how to hire a virtual assistant for lead generation.

A managed lead generation VA from Ant Assist starts at £5 per hour on the entry rate: the first 6 months on the Entry tier, 3 months on Mid, 1 month on Expert. After the promotion, the lead generation rate card applies: £5.50 per hour full time on the Entry tier (160 hours a month, £880) or £6.50 per hour part time (80 hours a month, £520), with Mid at £6.33 and Expert at £6.88 per hour full time for assistants with longer experience. There are no platform fees and no commission on top, and the rate includes the assistant's time, our office facilities in Cairo, and the supervision and management that keep quality up. Your CRM and outreach tools are yours and stay in your name.

Hours set the price. Supporting one seller with research, sequences and booking is usually a part-time role; running a full outbound line across several segments, plus LinkedIn and nurturing, is full time. For the comparison against a UK employee, line by line, read how much a virtual assistant costs in the UK or put your own hours into the calculator.

What the £5/hour entry rate includes

• Dedicated VA, never shared
• UK-hour aligned support
• Management and supervision included
• Recruitment and onboarding included
• Office infrastructure included
• VA replacement available
• No NI, pension, or holiday costs
• No long-term contract, rolling monthly

A virtual sales assistant fits any business where the person who sells is also the person who prospects, and therefore does neither well. The role is described on the lead generation virtual assistant page; its specialist versions are the appointment setting virtual assistant, the outsourced SDR, the LinkedIn outreach assistant and the caller behind an outsourced cold calling UK campaign. All are one named person, on your hours, under your brand, with a UK team supervising quality, and if the fit is wrong we replace the VA and carry the handover, with no re-recruitment and no restart from zero.