Clearly Explain What You Do

Whether you’re just starting out as a Virtual Assistant or have been in business for a while, you need to clearly describe the work you do – in a concise way – so that people will remember.

In this episode of the RocketGirl Show, I'll talk about how to clearly explain what you do as a virtual assistant.

TRANSCRIPT 

I'm Belinda Wasser also known as RocketGirl. Today, we're going to talk about how to clearly explain what you do.

When you're a virtual assistant, it's very important really for that matter no matter what you do for work to be able to clearly articulate what you do and the reason you want to be able to do that is so when someone asks you in the moment, it's not necessarily about getting hired right then, it's about creating something for them to remember so that they can refer you.

A lot of you have heard me say this recently, one of my favorite questions is "Do you have a dentist that you like?," because I love my dentist so much. I saw him yesterday. I love him. I love him and I love to refer him and I love to generate business for him. By being clear about what you do and being clear about how to talk about it, the same thing is going to happen for you.

Two people will be talking, you won't even be in the room and one of them will say I need some help with XYZ and they'll say, "Belinda knows how to do that." So this is what we're trying to generate here. This is the result we're looking for when we're getting clear about what we do for work.

Alright, so when someone asks you what do you do for work, most people treat this like a trick question and what I mean by that is they don't think about it ahead of time. They don't have something prepared. And what I found is the newer you are the more you talk. So what happens is you're kind of panicking, you haven't prepared. You don't know what to say. You might be even having like a mini anxiety, if you're new I know that's what happened to me and then what happens is you, we talk talk talk talk talk talk and we overwhelm the person they have no idea what we're talking about and since we don't have the language down, it's very confusing.

All right, so I'm going to tell you right now how to fix this. This is what I say when someone asks me what I do. I'm going to read it. Okay although I do have it memorized. I'm a virtual assistant I work with solo-professionals and small business owners. I specialize in helping them with all the admin pieces of their business like email newsletters, website updates and calendar management. Your three things can be anything. You can pick them however you want them to be actual things that people know what they are and can relate to.

All right, so sometimes people will say I specialize in helping women entrepreneurs get back to the work they love so they can be more profitable. And while I get the sentiment of that, I actually have no idea what that means. Now and keep in mind I offer pages of services. If you go to my website rocketgirlsolutions.com, click on Services, you will see, you know service after service after service, but if I were to list all of those in that moment of what do you do for work, people are going to be so overwhelmed. So I chose the ones that, that listener, the person I'm talking to is going to identify with.

So for example, people know what an email newsletter is, right. They know what a website update is and they know what calendar management is, most likely. Now. I like I said, I do a lot more stuff. These are not my highest end or my lowest end, you know, but there there are things in the sweet spot of people being able to remember because if you're doing website updates they're probably thinking well maybe she creates them or maybe she can help me change my pictures on my website or you know email newsletters you know maybe she can help me put them on my you know put them on my website or do my social media. So that's why it's so important to be crystal clear.

Now once I say this statement I stop talking. I just stopped talking and it's very difficult to do I had to practice this really for some time but I do remember I even remember where I was sitting I was on the phone with a potential client and I was not having a good close rate for a period of time before I figured this out and I remember hearing the moment when I overwhelmed the prospect and I thought that was it, right there like she's not going to hire me and that's okay but I heard the moment and that's when I realized I had to stop.

Okay, so you need to really stop talking. Now, I know this is an oversimplification. I know if we were in corporate we spent a lot of time trying to get really super high end titles. But in this case it actually will work against you. You want to be you know, you want to be understood for exactly what you do. Now, there's a couple of myths that I'm going to bust through right now.

The first thing is the fear and I get it the fear that when you say those three things, you know on website updates, email newsletters, online scheduling or whatever it is, PowerPoint presentations or event planning whatever you choose that the person's going to think that's all you do. I promise you they will not. If they are curious what they'll say is oh, what about this or oh what about that? I've never seen a situation where someone's walked away and said, oh, well, they can't help me because you know, I need help with this and they only do that. That really doesn't happen. Okay, so just let that one go.

The other one is that people are afraid that if their titles not important enough that they won't be able to charge, you know, the amount of money they want and this is also not true. I started my business 10 years ago at $50 an hour. I currently make between ninety and a hundred dollars an hour depending on it how much time people prepay of my time and that's never been a limiting factor.

The part that gets in the way when choosing your rates is really the courage to say it out loud the courage to not negotiate. That's what determines your rates, not what you call yourself because if you knew some of the things that people ask me to do, they're really low tech analog, you know, not even on the radar charts of you know, most virtual assistants. You would be surprised and they happily paid me for it because they don't want to do it themselves. So that is what I want to talk about today. It looks like we have a comment.

Let's see who is popping in here. Hello Tammy. Happy Friday. Thank you for being you. You're very sweet. You are welcome. I appreciate that, that you like what I'm offering. So thank you. Thank you for saying that. Okay. So before we go today, I want to make sure that you know about my free online classroom. I bring it up because not only are we streaming this video on three places on Facebook. It's also on Periscope. It's on our YouTube Channel, please click the Subscribe button if you're watching on YouTube and you'll be notified every time we go live.

Also after this is completed its downloaded and uploaded to LinkedIn. So that's why I want to make sure you all know about this free online classroom. Just type The Virtual Assistant Connection in the search bar at the top click the join button and you will be welcomed into our community. It's over 12,000 members. There are tons of videos just like this. We have over a hundred videos like this. There are blog posts and articles and all kinds of freebies. And the most important thing is the community. Everyone is in the community is wonderful supportive helpful, and I'm just grateful to be a part of it. So please join us over there on on our Facebook group. And in the meantime, my name is Belinda Wasser, RocketGirl, signing off, bye-bye.