Many of you already know the story of Optimal Usability. The short version is that Sam Ng and I started out sharing a desk at the CreativeHQ business incubator in Wellington. We spent $500 on branding, and then went out and had 165 coffee meetings in our first year of business, trying to convince people of the benefits of usability.

Four years later, life is quite different. We are now New Zealand’s largest usability consultancy company and had the honour of winning the Start-up of the Year award in March 2006. The main reason for this success is that we have been able to attract a great set of clients. Here in New Zealand at least, most of them are well known brands.

A lot of people have asked us what we put in our secret sauce to win work with these organisations, so I thought I’d share a few thoughts on how we’ve muddled through. We’ve made our fair share of mistakes along the way and learned a lot.

One key thing we did was to explicitly choose the clients we wanted to work with. We drew up a wish list of some of our favourite brands, or companies whose usability drove us nuts, and targeted them.

Every year we also think about the “watershed” projects that we’ve done, the ones that have really made a difference, or have been a lot of fun, or were really interesting and challenging. We try to figure out what made them so good, and aim to get that kind of work again.

Do these two things often enough and you eventually come up with a picture of your Ideal Client. For us, they usually have most of the following characteristics:

• Customer focused. There is no point working for clients who see their customer experience as an expense.

• Want a partnership. Our Ideal Client would prefer to have an ongoing relationship that involves multiple projects rather than one-off assignments.

• Many customer touchpoints. Our Ideal Client has several interesting interfaces to get stuck in to: a call centre, website, IVR, store, out-of-the-box experiences.

• Large number of employees. This means that they are more likely to have large internal systems, and could benefit more than smaller companies from increased employee productivity.

• Global links. This gives us opportunities to work for overseas parents, subsidiaries and partners.

Identifying the right clients is really just the start of the sales process, and I could rant about it a lot more than I have. If you are interested in learning more about the next steps, I recommend the following books:

• The Trusted Advisor by David Maister

• Clients for Life: Evolving from an Expert-for-Hire to an Extraordinary Adviser by Jagdish N. Sheth and Andrew Sobel

• Making Rain: The Secrets of Building Lifelong Client Loyalty by Andrew Sobel

- Trent