What VAs cost, what good ones produce, and the benchmarks to hold them to — so you can tell a performance problem from a pricing one.
This guide is the detail behind a service I run for clients. If you would rather hand it over than do it yourself, see Virtual Assistants.
Trained cold callers run $3–$5 per hour depending on experience and hours. That is the caller cost, paid for the hours worked. My management fee is separate and depends on team size — it covers recruitment, training, daily oversight, spam monitoring, KPI reporting and replacing anyone who is not performing.
Pricing is quoted per operation rather than published, because a single caller on part-time hours and a five-person team across three markets are not the same job. Tell me the shape and you will have a number the same day. Full detail on my cold calling page.
Worth being blunt about the maths: a caller at $4/hour working 30 hours a week costs roughly $480 a month. If that produces one additional contract a quarter, it has paid for itself several times over. If nobody is managing them, it produces nothing at all — which is the entire reason management is not optional.
Without numbers you cannot tell a bad week from a bad hire. These are the ranges I manage against — yours will shift with list quality and market, but the shape holds:
| Metric | Typical range | Investigate below |
|---|---|---|
| Dials per hour | 60–100 | 50 |
| Contact rate | 5–12% | 5% |
| Leads per 100 contacts | 3–8 | 3 |
| Talk time per hour | 8–15 min | 6 min |
| Callback show rate | 40–60% | 35% |
The figure that matters most is contact rate. If it falls below about 5%, the problem is almost never the caller — it is flagged numbers or stale data, and no amount of coaching fixes either.
The job of a first call is not to negotiate. It is to find out whether there is anything worth negotiating about, in under four minutes:
A caller who establishes those five things and books a callback has done the job perfectly. A caller who tries to agree a price has exceeded it, usually expensively.
Tell me the hours and markets you need covered and I will tell you what team size makes sense.