It seems that the latest trending hustle on Linkedin is virtual assistants or ‘VAs’ reaching out, somewhat aggressively, to first recognize the amazing work you and your business are doing (also known as buttering you up) before immediately switching to their ‘pitch’ where they offer to take over lots of your tedious and non-strategic work by becoming your VA.

So, I know it’s hard out there, and everyone is ‘hustlin’ to make a ‘livin’, but this whole approach isn’t convincing the hardworking OGs. Indeed, more than ever, I’m now convinced that highly overt and unsolicited sales pitches simply don’t work, and if anything, they only serve to irritate the intended target.

Going forward, in the digitally fuelled ‘Attention Economy’, we currently live in, sales are inherently being driven by ‘inbound marketing,. Put simply, inbound marketing is where thought leadership content, for instance, enables interested and prospective clients to find you online rather than you hunting them down.

This sort of content could be social media posts, YouTube or TikTok videos, infographics, blog posts, etc. Essentially, anything that ‘pulls’ interest in a contextually relevant manner that eventually leads to sales. This is the stuff that makes search engines like Google and social media like TikTok work best by surfacing content that ‘answers the questions’. Hence, inbound marketing.

So, my piece of advice to all those VAs on Linkedin looking for clients is to create thought leadership content that demonstrates their understanding of the needs of senior executives and how they can solve for their challenges with proven success stories that would then pull in prospective clients rather than push them away.

Basically, we don’t like being sold to, but rather, we like to get informed about things we don’t know about that could be really important, or get educated and learn a new skill that could be useful in our work and finally, even entertaining and humorous content that is relevant to our regular struggles in work scenarios could make us take you seriously as a VA. Trust me, it’s a winning non-pitch! 🙂