115 I Tracked 120 Clients Over 5 Years. Here's the Real Customer Journey Nobody Talks About

Do you know where your best clients are really coming from?

If you're relying on gut instinct to decide where to spend your marketing time, you might be working much harder than you need to.

In this episode of Beyond the Clinic, I'm sharing what happened when I analysed the data from 120 paying clients over the last five years. The patterns completely changed the way I think about marketing for dietitians and other health professionals, and they challenged some of the biggest assumptions we hear online about customer journeys, freebies and webinars.

You'll discover why some people buy almost immediately while others quietly follow your work for years before investing, why your highest-paying clients may take the longest to convert, and how understanding your own buyer journey can help you make far better business decisions.

If you've ever wondered whether your marketing is actually working, this episode will encourage you to stop guessing and start taking a more evidence-based approach to growing your business.

In this episode you'll learn:

• Why evidence-based business is just as important as evidence-based practice.
• The surprising truth about where my clients actually come from.
• Why Instagram isn't doing as much of the heavy lifting as I once thought.
• What my data revealed about freebies, lead magnets and email nurturing.
• Why many buyers need multiple touch points before they're ready to invest.
• How a simple offer ladder can increase repeat business and lifetime customer value.
• How the buyer journey has changed dramatically over the last five years.
• Why your highest-paying clients often take the longest to make a decision.
• What my client data says about webinars (despite everyone saying they're dead).
• Practical ways to improve your marketing for dietitians using your own business data instead of assumptions.

If you enjoyed this episode, make sure you subscribe so you don't miss Part Two, where I'll explain why buying behaviour has changed and what you need to do differently in your business to keep attracting clients in today's market.

Lets keep in touch!

Website:  https://www.sarahalmondbushell.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dietitiansinbusiness/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dietitiansinbusiness
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@BeyondTheClinicPodcast

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Transcript

Do you know where your best clients are actually coming from? It's probably not what you think. In this episode, I'm going to show you how to properly identify what's actually driving the best clients to your business. I'm going to show you in a really simple way, how you can start understanding your data and what I call your most profitable customer journey so that you can double down on what's working and stop wasting your time on what isn't.

This is a really important thing to do because just like we practice evidence-based medicine, we also need to practice evidence-based business if you want your business to work and actually bring in clients. And also because it's very much possible that the thing that you're spending the most time on right now isn't actually the thing that brings in your best clients or the most revenue. But don't worry because today's episode is going to show you how to stop doing that.

Over the last five years, I've tracked the real data behind 120 paying clients in my business and what I found completely changed the way I make decisions in my business today. In this episode, I'm going to walk you through the real customer journey inside my business, where clients actually come from, how long they take to buy, what role my freebies play and where they don't, and the surprising behaviors of my highest paying clients. And more importantly,

what all of this means for you. So you can start attracting clients and growing your business in a way that's evidence-based and not guesswork. Now, the goal with this episode is to help you make smarter decisions with your time and your energy and your content.

Now, just to give you a little bit of background here, the reason that I decided to do this was I had a hunch that buying behavior was changing. People were taking longer to make decisions. There's so much free information online now, particularly with AI. And because of AI, people are less trusting. They don't know what's real and what's not real. And so they are taking a lot longer to trust us and to make buying decisions.

And I was also hearing my colleagues and my friends and my clients saying, Hey, it's business slow this month. I don't know why, but I've not got as many clients this month compared to this time last year. And so I thought, you know what, Sarah, I need to investigate this a little bit more. And that's exactly what I did.

So I'm gonna start by sharing with you a few stats from my own business so you can see what this actually looks like in practice. So firstly, in my own business, Instagram is the number one identifiable source of clients. I ask people where they heard about me, but it only actually accounts for around 20 % of known sources. Now the other 80%, when I combined referrals,

word of mouth, in-person networking, BDA events, Facebook groups. Well, you know what? That accounts for a whole lot more than that 20 % that come from Instagram alone. It's very easy to assume Instagram's doing all the heavy lifting because it's where I'm visible every day and it's where I'm putting most of my daily effort. But in reality, your clients might be coming from a much wider mix of different touch points.

many of which are quietly happening in the background and often take quite a lot longer for them to convert. And that's a really important takeaway because it means your business is probably more multi-channel than you think. And of course, if you're only focusing all your energy on one platform like Instagram, you could be underestimating the impact of everything else that brings people into your world. That brings people into your world.

But when I look at the data more closely in my business, there was a much bigger issue hiding underneath all of this. Around 50 % of my client sources were completely unrecorded, which means for half of my clients, I actually didn't have a clear data point on how they found me. And that's not because the information didn't exist, it's simply because I hadn't recorded it.

It wasn't until a few years in that I started asking people, hey, where did you find out about me? And so this is why I think it's so important to always ask people on your inquiry forms where they first came into contact with you and your business. Once you start tracking this properly, you stop guessing where your clients are coming from and you start seeing patterns that you might not have noticed otherwise.

Okay, let's move on to freebies because this is another area where the data tells a really interesting story. So the common advice that you hear online is that you have to start your business with a freebie. You've got to have a lead magnet first and grow your email list and then nurture people into buying. And whilst that's not wrong, don't get me wrong here, it's fundamental part of business. It's not the full picture because in my own data,

42 % of my clients never actually downloaded a single freebie before they bought. So they didn't come through my nurture sequence. They simply discovered the business, followed along with my content, and then went on to buy. 42%. And what that tells us is really important. There's people in my audience who don't need long nurturing journeys. They are what we would call most aware. They already know that they have a problem, and they trust you enough

and they're actively looking for a solution. They just need a clear path to work with you. But that's only one side of the story because on the other side,

For the 58 % of people who do download your freebies, the pattern looks very different. Those clients don't just typically download one resource. My data shows that those clients tended to download two or three different freebies before they felt ready to buy. And that's telling us something as well. It tells us that for some people, trust builds over time through repeated exposure and each free resource acts like another touch point

that moves them closer to a decision. So for me in my business, this means that I have two completely different buyer journeys happening at the same time concurrently. One group of people who need very little nurturing, who are ready to buy quickly, and another group who need more time, more exposure, and more touch points before they're ready to buy.

And this is likely to be similar in your business too. So if your entire strategy is built around only one of those pathways, like advertising your services on a directory, you're probably missing a large portion of your audience. Because the people who are ready now don't want to wait through a long nurture sequence and the people who need nurturing just won't convert without it. So actually you need both. You need a free re-funnel for the slower buyers and a direct path for purchase.

for the people who are ready to act straight away. If you only set up one in your business, you're leaving clients and revenue on the table.

Now, another really interesting pattern that showed up in the data is that around a third of my clients were repeat buyers. So in other words, huge amount of people who went on to invest in high level support had already bought something less expensive from me before. And I think this is something a lot of people underestimate in their business.

because it's very easy to focus all of your energy on trying to get brand new clients all of the time. When actually your best highest paying clients are often already in your world. They just haven't bought the next thing yet. So this tells us that your past clients are one of your most valuable assets in your business. And this is one of the reasons that I recommend having low cost offers in your business, like a digital product.

These low cost offers aren't just about having another revenue stream in your business. They can actually do something much more powerful than that. They're trust builders that create future premium clients because they give people a low risk way to experience what it's like to work with you and leave people wanting more, especially if they've already had results or lots of value from that low cost offer.

So this is an offer ladder and I really recommend you having one of these set up in your business. Now the next pattern, I think might be one of the most interesting ones of all, and it's around the time it actually takes people to go from discovering you to buying from you.

and this was actually the revelation that made my hunch really make sense. So when I looked at the full data set, the average time from someone joining my list to purchasing was around three months. But within that average, there were people who bought almost immediately and others who took years before they made a decision. But the most interesting thing here is how those numbers have changed over the years. So back in 2021, things looked

very, very different. Half of my clients were buying within just a month of discovering me. But as we move through the years, that changes dramatically. By 2023 onwards, the average time jumps to over a year and more and more clients are sitting in that slow buyer category. People who take 12 months or more to decide that they want to work with me. And by 2025 and the start of 2026,

What I found is over half of my buyers have been on my email list for over a year or longer before purchasing. Some of those clients have been in my world for years. In some cases, up to four and a half years before they finally decided to invest in my highest ticket offer. This is a huge shift when you compare it to those early years where people would buy relatively quickly.

And what this tells us is really important. Decision making in your audience has slowed down significantly. People aren't just seeing something once and buying straight away. They're watching, they're observing, they're following along with your content for months, sometimes years before they're ready to take action.

The buyer journey has changed.

My data showed that my highest ticket client ever was on my list for four and a half years before buying. And my highest ticket buyers do tend to have the longest nurture periods in general. So if you've been feeling like people are just taking longer to make a decision, that business is slower. This isn't just you, it's a wider shift in how people are making purchasing decisions.

And I think this is why it's really important to stay visible long enough for people to build trust with you over time. It also means it's a really good idea to have different ways of selling the same thing, because if someone is sitting in your world for years and seeing the same kind of content and the same offer presented in the same way, they will likely start to tune out, not because they're not interested, just because they've heard you say it a million times already.

So I really encourage you to think about different entry points into your call offer and different ways of talking about what you do. That way, the more likely you are to stay relevant for people at different stages of their decision-making journey. Now, there's one last bit of data that I want to share with you here. And this one's really going to change how you think about selling, I'm sure. My data showed that almost half of my clients attended a live event before they bought from me, over half.

And when I say a live event, I'm basically talking about webinars or three or five day challenges. Now there's loads of noise online at the minute that webinars are dead. People don't show up anymore that they've lost their effectiveness. But actually my data tells us something completely different. And interestingly, I've had similar conversations with some of my coaches and mentors recently and their webinars are still working as well. Because the majority of my clients have

been through a webinar before they decide to work with me. It evidences beautifully in my business. But even more interestingly is this is actually happening long after I stopped actively running them. So in 2024, 85 % of my buyers had attended a webinar before purchasing. In 2025, that was still quite high, 65%.

even though I hadn't run any new webinars since the April of that year. And by 2026, nearly half of my buyers, 47 % to be specific, had still attended a webinar at some point in the past, despite there being over 15 months with no new live events of any sort. So this meant that people who attended my webinars way back when,

In 2023, 2024, 2025, they were still converting to paying clients over a year or longer later. And so this tells me that webinars aren't just a chance to convert clients there and then. They're not just about showing up live and hoping someone buys at the end. They're actually a huge trust building asset.

that continues to work in the background for a very long time after that live event has ended.

So hopefully this episode has given you some food for thought when it comes to where your clients are coming from and what's really influencing their decisions to buy and that the buying behavior has changed. I really recommend you start looking at your own data and the journey people take from finding you to buying from you because you can learn so much from that. As you can see from today's episode.

Now in part two of this series, I'm going to go deeper into why it's taking longer for people to buy from you and most importantly, what you need to change in your strategy because of that. So make sure you come back next week for part two.

Bye for now.