A Follow Up Boss virtual assistant can handle the daily upkeep of your FUB account: cleaning contacts, maintaining smart lists and action plans, following up with new leads, and keeping notes and tasks current. A VA cannot make the calls that need a licensed agent. The routine work around your leads is what you can hand over.
One honest note first. We do not have a published Follow Up Boss case study. Our case studies are on BoldTrail, Lofty and GoHighLevel. We scope work around whatever CRM a team already runs, so the guidance below describes the type of work involved, not a claim about past FUB results.
What Follow Up Boss gives a VA to work with
Follow Up Boss was acquired by Zillow Group, announced on November 1, 2023, and per Zillow’s press release it was to keep operating as an independent brand serving all clients. Its help center describes three features a VA would use constantly:
- Action Plans that send personalized texts and drip emails to new leads.
- Smart Lists, such as recently active contacts (via the FUB website pixel) or a daily new-lead list.
- Automations that reassign hot leads to a first-to-claim group and re-engage stale leads.
It also has a large third-party integration ecosystem, which matters when your lead sources feed it from several places.
What we would typically scope
- Lead intake checks. Confirming each lead source is arriving in FUB with the right source label.
- Speed-to-lead. Contacting new leads quickly. According to an MIT and InsideSales.com study of 1.25 million leads, reaching a lead within 5 minutes makes you about 21 times more likely to qualify them than waiting 30 minutes.
- Action Plan upkeep. Reviewing and updating plans so the messages still sound like you.
- Smart List hygiene. Keeping lists meaningful, so your team knows who to call first.
- Database cleanup. Duplicates, stale contacts and missing details.
- Task and note discipline. Logging every touch so nothing lives only in someone’s head.
How we would approach a FUB account
- Read-only audit. We look at your lists, plans, lead sources and team assignments, and write down what is not working.
- Agree on rules. Who owns which leads, what counts as a hot lead, and when a lead goes back to you.
- Fix the foundation. Cleanup before any new automation.
- Run it. Daily follow-up, weekly reporting and regular reviews of what is and is not working.
This is our standard process on other CRMs. We have not run it on a published FUB engagement, and we would tell you so on a first call.
What a typical week might include
To make this concrete, here is the kind of weekly rhythm we would propose for a FUB account, subject to your team and plan:
- Daily: check new leads, make first contact, log notes, and flag anyone who is ready to talk to an agent.
- Twice a week: review Smart Lists for contacts who have gone quiet or who just came back to your site.
- Weekly: send you a short summary of leads in, leads contacted, and leads waiting on you.
- Monthly: look at which Action Plans get replies and which get ignored, then rewrite the weak ones.
None of this is exotic. It is simply the work that gets dropped when an agent is at a showing, a closing or a kid’s game. The value of a VA is that the account is touched every day, not every few weeks. For related ideas, read our post on how realtors can automate lead follow-up.
What we would want from you
We would need access to your FUB account at an appropriate permission level, a short list of your lead sources, and a few minutes on the phone to learn how you talk to leads. We would also want your rules for hand-offs, such as which leads you call yourself and which a VA can warm up first. With that, an account audit takes little of your time, and you would see the findings before any changes are made.
Our transferable work on other platforms (not Follow Up Boss)
To be clear, everything in this section happened on BoldTrail, Lofty and GoHighLevel, not Follow Up Boss. We mention it because cleanup, segmentation and follow-up discipline are not platform-specific.
- Cleanup and segmentation (BoldTrail). For the Faruqi Team’s 14,000-contact database, we rebuilt the tagging structure from scratch and segmented contacts by relationship type and recency before running any campaigns. See how we managed that database and the case study.
- Behavior-triggered follow-up (Lofty). For Tammy Theis, we built a 30-email nurture sequence around Lofty smart plans so follow-up triggers on opens, clicks and replies, not a fixed calendar, and her leads were contacted the moment smart plans flagged them warm. See the Tammy Theis case study and Smart Plans vs manual follow-up.
- Pipelines and deliverability (GoHighLevel). For the NOW Team, we rebuilt an account used as a database around real pipeline stages, and worked on a dedicated sending domain after emails landed in spam. See the NOW Team case study.
A Follow Up Boss account would call for the same order of work: tidy the data, define the segments, then automate.
Who it suits and who it does not
It suits teams that already like FUB and need more hands inside it. Many do, and moving CRMs is rarely worth the disruption.
It does not suit anyone expecting a VA to close deals, or anyone who does not intend to answer a warm lead once it is passed over. Texting also needs documented consent, and the FCC has been revising its consent revocation rules, so your compliance setup matters. This is general information, not legal advice.
Do you need a different CRM instead?
Sometimes the answer is no new software at all. We wrote about this in our post on the best CRM for real estate teams. The point there is that a well-kept average CRM beats a neglected excellent one. For a three-way comparison of platforms we do have case studies in, see BoldTrail vs Lofty vs GoHighLevel.
If you run Follow Up Boss and want a second pair of hands in it, our Follow Up Boss virtual assistant page explains how we work, and a free consult gives you a clear scope and number.