A client spends 8 months researching you before they call.

Start with the number that should worry you more than your follower count.

The average B2B buyer researches alone for eight months before they ever speak to a seller. The full decision runs about eleven months start to finish, and 6sense's tracking of 934 B2B buyers found sellers only get invited in for the final three. For eight months, the decision gets made without you in the room.

That isn't a guess about attention spans. It's what buyers actually do with that time: they search, they compare, they read whatever they can find about the people who might solve their problem. By the time they call, most of the decision is already made.

Which changes what a consultant, coach, or advisor should be optimizing. Not the pitch on the call. What's findable about you before it.

The eight months you never see

This is what that window looks like when someone actually measures it.

6sense's 2024 Buyer Experience Report, built from 2,509 B2B buyers, puts numbers on how far that solo research goes before anyone reaches out: 69% of the purchase process is already behind them by the time they contact a seller. 81% already have a preferred provider picked. 85% have already decided what they actually need.

Read the middle number again. Four in five buyers have already chosen who they want to work with before you know they exist. The call isn't where you win the client. It's where you confirm a decision that was mostly made without you, based on whatever they found while you weren't looking.

What gets you invited, and what gets you cut

So what decides who gets found favorably in that window? The Edelman-LinkedIn 2024 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report surveyed roughly 3,500 decision-makers across seven countries, and two of its findings sit on either side of the question.

86% say they're more likely to invite a firm producing high-quality published thinking into their RFP process. Not a firm with a nicer logo. A firm whose thinking they'd already read.

25% say a competitor's published thinking led them to end or significantly cut a relationship with a provider they already had. This isn't only about winning a new client during the eight months. It's also about defending the retainer you already have, from a competitor who is publishing while you aren't.

Put the two studies together and the shape is obvious. Buyers spend most of a year-long decision researching alone, and what they find during that stretch decides who gets the invite and who gets quietly dropped, whether they're a stranger sizing you up or an existing client comparing you to someone who publishes more than you do.

The audit: what's actually there when they look

Open an incognito window and search your own name and firm the way a prospective client would. Most experts find one of three things.

• A LinkedIn profile last updated around the time they changed jobs, with no recent activity.
• A website with a bio, a services page, and a contact form, none of which prove anything about how you actually think.
• Nothing organized at all: a scattered post here, a podcast appearance from two years ago, no single place that adds up to a body of work.

None of those three survive eight months of scrutiny. A website proves you exist. It doesn't prove you understand the buyer's problem better than the alternative they're also researching. A body of published work does that job, because it's still there, dated and specific, every time they come back to check, and most buyers check more than once.

Most of the people who will eventually hire you aren't ready yet. That's exactly why the archive matters more than any single conversation: they'll find it long before they're ready to call, and what's there when they do is what gets remembered.

Your practical step

This week, run the audit for real:

1. Search your own name and firm in an incognito window. Write down the first five results, honestly.
2. Pick the one piece of thinking you'd want a prospective client to land on first. If it doesn't exist yet, that's this week's writing.
3. Publish it somewhere dated, with your name on it, on a page you control, not just a platform post that a feed will bury by Friday.

Do that consistently and the eight months start working for you instead of past you.

Nashra keeps that archive in one place: everything you publish lives on your Hub, dated and searchable, and every reader who finds it can become a name on your list instead of a visit that disappears. Publish what you'd want found, and let the eight months work for you.

Sources: 6sense 2024 B2B Buyer Experience Report (2,509 B2B buyers); 6sense analysis of B2B buyer outreach timing (934 B2B buyers, 2023 data, published January 2024); Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report (2024, approximately 3,500 decision-makers across seven countries).