How to Maximize Un-Billable Hours (And Not Squander Them)

When you're not delivering on billable client work, what could you do with your time? What should you do with your time? Let's break it down on the podcast. Welcome everyone to a another episode of Breaking Biz Dev.

I'm Mark. He's John, and we are here today to talk about Unbillable. Hours. Yeah.

Yeah. John, Whether we like it or not. we're gonna talk about time. Yeah.

We're gonna talk about, talk about time a little bit. So, yeah, you know, whether you're a marketer, sales professional, firm, owner do, or seller, whoever else, it's like, you know, this interprofessional services firm, this is part of your reality, right? That old sort of unbillable hours overhead. Utilization, you know, we've got such an obsession with time.

and we're gonna talk a little bit about what you and I view as kind of a, a way to look at your unbillable hours from two perspectives, you know, From a marketing perspective and from a sales perspective, right. So this is an episode for sure where we are leaning into that sort of marketing and sales continuum and we are taking that big ugly beast business development. And we're breaking it up. We're pulling it apart.

we're looking at, how you can, look at that big lump of, unbillable time. And rethink, and maybe clarify how to best use that time to achieve what you want to achieve. So that's what we're doing today. Yep.

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We read them and we act on the feedback too. So that's definitely helpful for us to know what's resonating with you and how we should evolve the show. Yeah. Or, you know, if acting on it means that we read it and we're like, ah, it's a dumb idea, then, you know, we, we do that now.

Um, but we could, no, it's good to take. Input and act on it. You're, you're, you're totally right. Alright, so John, let's set the stage a little bit for this conversation you touched on it earlier where it's like billable versus unbillable time, but that only tells one part of the story and it's really like how do you use that unbillable time that you have, that finite time, the margins where you need to invest the time to take your business to the next level.

Like that's what we're talking about. Um, and it's, there's many different things that you could do, but what should you do during those times? And then I think that's really what we're gonna get after today. Like you mentioned, mark, the marketing and sales continuum is one tool that we'll use.

I love this example that you mentioned earlier when we were planning for this episode. It's how I structure my days is in time blocks, right? So as you're thinking of this, think of like two color time blocks on your calendar, one's for your billable time and one's for your unbillable time. And What does that look like?

Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure. Yeah. and, and this is, you know, unlike a potentially other sort of vaguely measurable or unmeasurable things you have out there in your world, this is. This is completely measurable, right?

Because everybody is unfortunately chained to this beast, and it's really easy to measure, um, this whole billable versus unbillable time for sure. let's go through this exercise of, okay, well how should I be using my own billable time? Like what's the first step? And so I think the jumping off point where I'd like to start is taking stock of what resources that you have available to you.

So I think that's the first step in this whole process of like understanding what you need to focus on is what do you have available to you? Yeah. So like time is the one thing that you do, right? Time, budget is another.

And then skills, I think those are kinda like the three things that come to mind, and that's how we've organized this. So in terms of time, obviously what percent of your time should you devote to sales and marketing activities? but then within that, how much should you devote to sales? How much should you devote to marketing?

I'm always trying to impress upon our dear listener that some of this incorporates a little bit of a mindset shift, right? So where most busy professionals out there in professional services firms are staring at their billable hours and how what they're spending their time on here. This project here, this project, they're doing this, whatever else, they are laser focused on all of that. And this other stuff is just sort of laying there that they're not really looking at what we want.

This is a shift, folks. We want you to take your eyeballs off of the billable hours. And refocus on these unbillable hours as a powerful, important part of your personal and your organizational success, right? It's like we, need to stare at these and really put 'em under the microscope and say, okay, so how, how well am I, leveraging and using those hours?

For sure. And I'll add this little layer on top of it, and I think I've mentioned this in the past, is that a lot of firms will set sort of. A utilization rate or a goal or whatever, you have to be this much billable and There are oftentimes penalties or sort of concerns around people who don't hit utilization rates, but there is rarely the same reaction from the leadership when someone exceeds that number. it's like, oh, your goal was 75% and you hit 85% high fives all around.

Great job. It's wait a second. yeah, wait a second. What was the opportunity cost of that 10% that you didn't spend doing that?

Really important unbillable stuff. So that's a little nugget I wanna make sure is said. And who knows? I might even come back to that later on in this podcast.

'cause I think it's so, so important. It's a soapbox worth stepping on from time to time, mark, and I'm glad that you do. I'll soapbox, I'll soapbox that All right, so, so there you go. So how should we slice and dice that time?

How should we budget that time? How should we plan for that time, John? Yeah. So let's take it a step further.

And I, I don't think we can answer that question right now. So I think we still need to take stock of some more resources. So let's just say that we have, let's, I like that 75, 25. Let's just say that's our target, right?

Just for the sake of argument. So of that 25%, how should you spend that time? That's, you know, one day a week or if you're looking at your calendar, that's a couple hours a day, right? I think first you look at, okay, how can the firm help you?

How can the firm support you? In what ways is the firm willing to allocate some of their marketing spend or, budgets, seta asides to business development. Are they willing to invest in sales training? Are they willing to invest in podcast promotion to amplify your voice or pr or speaking gigs, or, you know, having you attend a conference?

What is the firm willing to do? What are the investments they're willing to make in you as an individual? Sure, sure. Makes, makes total sense.

We've got this pile of 25%, you know, or whatever it is, you know, whatever those hours are, you know, if it's, you're working 40 hours 'cause we all work exactly 40 hours a week, right Sean? 25% is 10. Right. Whatcha gonna do, like, how are you gonna spend, you spend that 10 doing, HR related stuff or, or you know, administrative stuff that you can't bill.

To a client or, doesn't get incorporated into a project is like you, but there's the other stuff too. So we got this pile. how are we gonna divvy it up? How are we gonna spend it?

And then the next thing what skills do you have? You know, what are you good at? What do you bring to the table that can help your firm go to market better or to sell, more deals? So, you know, are you a good writer?

Maybe in a marketing sense, you could do emails or blog posts, or maybe in a sales sense, you know, maybe that's messaging sequence and proposals, right? Are you good at speaking? You know, would you play well as a podcaster or, you know, would you be good at events doing speaking engagements? so there's a couple of other skills that we have here on our list.

Networking I think is a pretty critical skill for both marketing and sales. And then, um, curiosity I think is a soft skill we've talked about, uh, from time to time, for sure. You know, and, all of these skills, have marketing components and sales components as like, when you're actually sitting down, you're writing, am I, am I doing a writing, a marketing piece, or am I. Writing, is the writing that I have now, contributing to a proposal.

am I writing a statement of understanding inside a proposal? And that's, yeah, that's, that's, um, you know, that's sales stuff. So there's marketing stuff and sales stuff in all of these. in curiosity it's you love the research, right?

That's, that awakens the curiosity in your. Your brain, you know, when we are being curious in sales and using that skill of, you know, good, good intentional curiosity are, are we using it to advance new opportunities? Are we using it to deepen our understanding of our clients or our prospective clients? So sure.

All of these things and, you know, proposal development, marketing can play a role. you know, sales plays a lead role. Marketing plays a supporting role in proposals. Absolutely.

Sure. So skills that you have can be applied across those things. I always think of Apollo 13 when, you know, NASA's in on the ground and they've got to lay out like, here's what they've got up there. You know, the roll of duct tape and they've got this tubing.

How do we fit it together? Right? So this is what you've got. How do you fit it together?

All right. there's your NASA reference folks. Way to go. You're listening to breaking biz dev the podcast that beats up, breaks down, and redefines business development for the professional services firms of tomorrow.

Your hosts are John Tyerman, founder of Red Cedar Marketing, the podcast marketing company for experts and professional services firms, And Mark Wainwright, principal consultant and founder of Wainwright Insight, the fractional sales manager and sales consultant to professional services firms. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us by following the show and leaving a review on Apple podcasts and now back to the show. All right. So, um, now that you've taken stock, um, what are you trying to achieve, what is the strategy of your sales function, of your marketing function?

Are you trying to. Expand accounts. Are you trying to bring in new logos? Are you trying to expand market share in specific verticals?

Like there's a number of different directions that your marketing strategy strategy should go in your sales strategy. So let's break it down. Mark. What are some, goals of your overarching sales organization?

So, I have this broken up into three. Buckets, and I think they're, they're both good from a sales perspective. you could view your your unbillable, time to be invested when you're doing sales activities in three different areas. One is sort of the long term opportunities, right?

And a lot of times this might find you partnering, you know, with marketing. Right. So long-term opportunity stuff that's further out there, six months, nine months, 12 months out there, right? These are things that are going to yield results down the road, right?

Bucket number two, current. Pipeline, what opportunities do you have that you need to spend time on today? What opportunities are in your opportunity pipeline? What do you need to do to advance those to a contract?

And the third bucket, Third is existing clients. Some people might say, oh, I need to overweight on my existing clients. Depends on your strategy. It depends on what your organization needs.

But sure. How are we building trust and relationships with our current clients so that we can grow with them, We can grow revenue, we can gain a larger share of wallet, What is their spend across all the people who do what you do? And what of that do you capture? Can you grow that right?

Are there more people you can meet, et cetera. So sure, those are good. John, you have three buckets from the marketing perspective. Yeah, when thinking through this and how could you use your time from a marketing perspective, I broke it down into three buckets.

So the first one is, brand awareness. So this is really, and the goal of this aspect of marketing is reminding that 50% of the market, that's they're, maybe they're satisfied with their current provider, right? Or they're satisfied with their current status quo of things, reminding them that you exist. So that's one goal of marketing is reminding the broader market that you exist.

The second one here, and this kind of overlaps with your long-term opportunities, one from a sales perspective is, what I call demand generation. And this is really, it's more of like what you speak about and how you go about marketing and it's really about highlighting and amplifying those buyer pain points. The goal with this here is I mentioned half of the market is satisfied with the current provider. Let's just say 45% is maybe they're not quite so satisfied or maybe they're dissatisfied with their current provider or the current status quo, the current state of things, amplifying the pain points, highlighting that stands out to them.

Um, so that's one goal of marketing is to generate more demand. And then if you've got half the market that's satisfied and 45% that maybe they're dissatisfied, the remaining about 5%. That's the tiny sliver of the market where they're actively seeking solutions, And so to capture that market, that's where the lead generation exercises come into play. my brain is firing off with a whole bunch of different things in, in, in all of those.

I think it's, I think it's, um, it's a great comprehensive list. So, so we took this and we laid it out on our marketing to sales continuum, one to five. For those who are unfamiliar, we often bring this in, ones or the sort. Marketing end of things.

And as we move to the twos, there's a marketing led, sales supported. Three is, you know, either a good place to be or a terrible place to be. It's the middle, right? Sometimes it's the messy middle.

Four is sales led, marketing supported, and five are sales activities. So there's your navigation right there. And so how did we lay all these out across that, John? I think it comes to no surprise that brand awareness was far on the one end of this spectrum.

Marketing led, marketing supported. Totally. and then let, let me throw it to you on the other end of the spectrum, what's totally a five Yeah. Existing clients, right?

People that you as a doer, seller or, you know, whatever your role is that you are client facing and working with them day to day on, you know, current projects, new projects, whatever else it is. are you gonna take some time, out of your unbillable hours and, and, and put some effort towards them? Sure. That's a five.

Okay. Coming back to the other end of the spectrum on twos, which are marketing led, sales supported, I would. Put demand generation here, right? Because sales folks are, you know, hand to hand, they're talking with prospective clients.

They have unique perspective on the pain points that the market is dealing with, and that should be relayed to the marketing team so that they can communicate those messages in a broad way. Flipping back to the fours over here, pipeline activities for sure. Right, so marketing supports sales when you develop, you know, good client-centric proposals. So there's writing involved, there's some design involved.

Everything else, you know, John, I'm not one for proposals that look like brochures, but for sure most organizations out there will, you know, kind of wrongly look at proposals as that's, that's marketing, make it look pretty, but. As we know, it's a sales tool. It needs to be client-centric. It needs to be meaningful, it needs to include outcomes and, you know, pricing options and all that stuff that are, you know, born of sort of the, the, the sales world.

So yeah, pipeline. And then that's, that's a number four. So we find ourselves back, back in the, in the, in the middle. And maybe these aren't so messy.

Maybe they're not so messy. I've got lead generation from a marketing perspective here in the middle, and I think that totally makes sense. Yeah. and I hinted at it earlier is that, you know, the long-term, the work that you do from a sales perspective on long-term op opportunities is gonna inevitably have you working very closely with marketing resources For sure.

So, yeah, so there's your five buckets. We've spread all those things out across the spectrum and it's, you know, you should. What is the plan? What hours, what time do you have to invest?

What are you good at and how does it slot into all five of those? I think that's, yeah. Fantastic. you have it, folks.

We've broken it down and put it back together in a couple different ways. Looking at it from just sales investment time, investment from marketing time, investment from the skills that you need to be able to do that. So let's tie it all together for our listeners in this last segment, and let's give them examples of what each of these different marketing and sales activities look alike on the continuum. We'll, we'll, we'll take a step deeper into each one of these and give some examples here.

Why don't you start us off with, uh, the, the, the one that we pointed out there, which is brand awareness. when you're trying to maintain your brand awareness among that 50% of the market, maybe they're satisfied with their current provider. your goal is not to generate leads. It's to remind them that you're there, We talked on an earlier episode, the, the psychology of familiarity, the mere exposure effect, I remember that.

Yeah. and I think that psychological principle applies here where brand awareness, you wanna regularly make sure that your brand is top of mind, that is seen by your target audience. So podcasting at regular frequencies, posting on LinkedIn. Writing a newsletter if writing's, more of a better skill of yours.

doing regular webinars or workshops, those kinds of things at a regular consistent cadence. That's the key to brand awareness. All right. How about an example of a number two, right?

That was a demand generation one. for demand generation, I think, like I mentioned earlier, the messaging is really important when it comes to demand generation. I think on an earlier episode we were talking about, referrals and we were talking about symptoms versus core problems. Well, like, that's a good way to think about it in terms of demand generation.

Talk about the symptoms of the problem because that's what the buyers feel, right? They feel the symptoms. They're not aware of the core problem. They don't know how to fix it.

That's what you are for. But they totally feel the symptoms and so that's an example of demand generation. They look at their arm and they're like, oh, doc, I got this thing. You know?

Right. It's, you know, they're like rash. yeah, so that's an example of demand generation, and that's a little bit less about the tactical delivery and cadence, and it's a little bit more about the substance of what you talk about. so what about some long-term opportunities, mark?

Now we're starting to get into the threes, the sales perspective of things. What are some examples that our listeners can do along this one? if we're looking at long-term opportunities, it's relationship building, right? It's, it's, we're clearly identifying who, who are ideal.

Prospective clients are, where we're putting some good filters in place, and we are Pursuing relationships with them. Maybe we're, you know, using prospecting, right? Prospecting is where we use the, putting these sequences together of interaction where we can get their attention, build awareness, and there we go. There's, building some stuff we've talked about in the past.

A good referral process in your organization where you're getting introductions that spark conversations that lead to potential future opportunities down the road. there's a bunch of different stuff you can do maybe you're a doer seller who wants to position themselves as a thought leader in a particular area of expertise, you know, so it's. Working very closely with the marketing team, identifying particular opportunities, audiences that you can get yourself or your content in front of, and then executing on a plan to do so.

So yeah, those are really good sort of long-term stuff that sits right in the middle there. Yeah. And I love the thought leadership conversation and how marketing supports the doer sellers, because that's really where it can kind of take that individual to the next level. And when they're able to express and educate the market.

More of like a scalable way. That's one of the big unlocks to business development for a lot of firms. and then there's some sort of slight, you know, you turn the, you turn it slightly a little bit and you look at it from a marketing perspective. there's some things that are happening there in the middle that we mentioned.

Yeah. So in the middle, from a marketing perspective, lead generation is a big thing, and this is really the kind of like the connection point between marketing and sales. We've talked about it in the past. inbound lead flows, outbound prospecting as two kind of examples of lead generation activities, so managing that inbound lead flow.

So that could look like you're a marketer and you get an inbound inquiry on LinkedIn because you're out there talking about. The company, where does that lead go? Right? Where, who does that go to?

Like, what's the process? What, where does the pipes lead to internally? And I think that's something that can be managed, um, by a number of different people. So that's just one example.

Good, good. I like that. So, continuing along that, continuum to number four here, right. Pipeline proposal strategy.

It's not just sitting down and starting to write, you know, it's, establishing a really good connection with your perspective clients, articulating a deep understanding, proposing ideas and options that align with that understanding and the client desired results. putting together these. Three option tables in pricing, for your prospective clients, and then hopefully starting to create connections between your new opportunity pursuit teams or individuals and the larger team that is potentially involved in delivering this, this work.

Then ties us into that last one, right? since we're working with existing clients, we've got a team of people helping support them. How do we support them more? What relationships can we build between our two organizations that maybe go above and beyond?

Sort of one person from our side and one person from their side? How can we grow that? we can do a ton with our existing. Clients that continue to build and strengthen that relationship.

we can do things proactively. So making sure we're on track, making sure we're monitoring the progress of, are the clients actually getting what they want? Are they moving towards that big desired outcome? So yeah, those are a bunch of things that are across that spectrum.

And here's an, here's an interesting, spin on that too with your existing clients. Those proactive check-ins can also be marketing touchpoints. I'm thinking of like, with your existing clients capturing the client success story on a podcast interview or, collaborating with them in some creative way. Um, interesting.

Yeah, there's a lot of crossover here, but this has been a really, fun episode Mark to put together to look across the, the marketing and sales continuum. I think our listeners will get a lot of value about. Um, you know, thinking through how they should structure their unbillable hours. yeah, I, I, um, there's not enough emphasis on it.

Everybody's staring at the billable hours and not enough on this. And, you know, again, if we exceed targets, there's high fives all around, but. That digs into this really valuable time that we can use to advance ourselves, our organizations, you know, pave the path for a successful future, all that stuff. So, you know, this is really important stuff.

Thanks John. I have enjoyed this. And go, uh, go spend your unbillable time wisely, folks. Until next time.

Until next time.