Targeted delivery: Giving customers what they actually want

Hands up if your company proudly bangs on about being “customer-centric.” Right. Now keep your hand up if you’re actually delivering exactly what your best clients want and need. Still got it up? Thought not.

The simple fact of the matter is that most so-called customer-centric businesses are full of shit. They dream up products in a vacuum, chase every shiny new market, and obsess over internal pet projects while customers quietly roll their eyes and take their money elsewhere.

Targeted delivery isn’t complicated. It means making your whole business about giving customers what they actually value — not what you wish they valued. That has to sit at the very heart of your strategy. Get it right and profit follows. Get it wrong and you’re just another outfit with a PowerPoint vision statement and a churn problem.

As Horst Schulze, co-founder of Ritz-Carlton, put it: too many firms “count the money instead of managing the stuff that creates value for customers.” Exactly. Profit is a by-product. Do the thing your customers care about better than anyone else, and the money looks after itself.

So stop with the boardroom daydreams. Start with the bloody customer. Find out what they want. Then bend over backwards to deliver it. Every time.

Your best customers pay the bills — the rest eat your crisps

Let’s kill a sacred cow: not all customers are created equal. Yes, every client deserves respect and decent service. But let’s not kid ourselves — some are worth their weight in gold, others barely cover the tea bags.

Business isn’t a bloody charity. It’s a fight for margins and opportunity. If you try to treat everyone like a VIP, you’ll spread your people so thin that no one actually gets the service they deserve. And guess what? Your best customers — the ones paying the bills — will be the first to notice you’ve gone flaky.

The trick is to segment. Work out who really moves the needle and double down on them. Some of your customers are diamonds. Others are just shiny rocks. Spot the difference. Give the top 10% who generate 40% (or more) of your revenue the love, time and attention they deserve. The rest? Fine — but they get a lighter touch, not the five-course tasting menu.

Think of it like hosting a dinner party. Invite 50 people when you’ve only got one bottle of wine and a packet of crisps, and you’re the world’s worst host. But give six people steak, champagne and good company, and they’ll rave about you for years. Same principle applies in business: better to have a few customers raving than a crowd leaving hungry, pissed off, and never coming back.

Segment like you mean it: Stop showering champagne on your beer-money clients

Most companies love talking about customer segmentation. Few actually do anything about it. They’re still trying to serve a Fortune 500 client with the same resources they throw at some bloke paying £200 a month. Madness.

At ITLab, we tore that crap up. We built “stripes” — cross-functional teams aligned to customer value. The Yellow team? Ten high-value clients with white-glove service. The White team? Fifty solid mid-tier accounts. The Blue team? A hundred smaller contracts. The Red team? One person keeping 600 tiny customers ticking over with self-service. Brutal but fair.

Then we took it to Peer 1. We had 12,500 customers at the time. Guess what we found? The top 5% generated 60% of our revenue… and only 6% of our staff were actually looking after them. Meanwhile, we were drowning the bottom end in attention. So we were underserving at the top so had no way to increase our prices, and making no money at the bottom. Completely backwards.

The fix wasn’t spending more money. It was reallocating what we already had. We shifted focus and talent away from the historical clients and into the clients who could actually grow with us. Suddenly our best customers got the service they deserved, and the smaller ones had self-service options that suited them. Everyone won.

As the CEO of Delta once said: “If two people on any one of my planes are paying the same price, I’ve made an error.” Exactly. Different customers deserve different levels of service. Pretending otherwise isn’t noble — it’s suicidal.

Stop chasing everyone and start serving someone

If your leadership team can’t answer, “Who is our core customer?” in one sentence, you’ve already lost.

At Peer 1, we had 13,400 12,500 customers – from hobby sites to big enterprises – and every exec had a different mental poster child. One was dreaming about a fat enterprise whale, another was hung up on the £2k-a-month average, someone else on the bargain hunters. We were all pulling in different directions. Recipe for mediocrity.

So we launched Project Challenger to get crystal clear. Who actually loved us? Who fuelled our growth? The answer was obvious once we looked properly: mid-sized, high-growth e-commerce firms spending 10k+ a month on hosting. They shared traits – lots of them used Magento and serious scalability needs – and once we saw the pattern, we aligned everything around them.

And here’s the secret: once you’ve found that sweet spot, you have to obsess about it. Work out what keeps them awake at 2am and how you’re the one to fix it. If you can’t nail the simple mad-lib: “We help [X type of customer] who struggle with [Y awful problem] by providing [Z brilliant solution]” — you don’t have a strategy.

For us, those e-commerce clients wanted rock-solid Magento hosting. They needed reliability on Black Friday, lightning-fast page loads, and real expertise in that stack. So that’s what we built. We became world-class at VMware and Magento hosting, and guess what? It landed us Boohoo, Missguided, Waitrose’s wine store, Debenhams’ online platform.

Those dream clients didn’t come because we had a sexy sales pitch. They came because we delivered exactly what they needed. That’s the magic of focus: selling starts to feel like helping. (Because it is.)

Customers aren’t whining — they’re handing you the answers

You’ve figured out who your best customers are. You know what keeps them awake at night. Now here’s the bit most companies screw up: listening to them. And I don’t mean firing off a half-arsed survey and filing the answers under “nice to know.” I mean actively seeking out criticism, bracing for impact, and doing something about it. Even when it hurts. Especially when it hurts.

At Peer 1 we built a Customer Sounding Board — our top 20 clients invited in to tell us, face to face, what we were getting wrong. We’d ask them straight: “If you ran our business, what would you change to make us easier to work with?”

One session, a bloke from Debenhams didn’t hold back: “You keep sending me 29 invoices and then threaten to switch me off. Your credit control system isn’t fit for purpose.” Bang. He was right. Our billing worked fine for small fry paying on card, but for a big account paying quarterly, it was a total clusterf**k. Did we argue? Make excuses? Nope. We thanked him, fixed it, and rolled out a better process. Problem solved.

That’s the point: when customers speak, listen. Really listen. Assume they’ve got a point — because they usually do. Then act. Nothing builds loyalty like a company that not only hears complaints but actually changes because of them.

And don’t leave this to the helpdesk. If you’re a CEO, pick up the bloody phone. Call one customer a week. Go visit them. Ask what’s coming down the road for their business. Stop guessing what to build next — your customers will literally tell you, if you just bother to ask.

Measure what matters: NPS is your early warning system

You can’t manage what you don’t measure. And if you’re serious about targeted delivery, the metric that matters most isn’t revenue. That’s a lagging indicator — it tells you what happened months ago. Too late.

Your North Star is Net Promoter Score (NPS). It’s your smoke alarm. Ignore it and you’ll burn the house down. Fred Reichheld, the guy who came up with it, showed that reducing churn by just 5% can increase profitability by up to 95%. Read that again. Ninety-five bloody percent. At Rackspace, that’s exactly why we grew every single month without needing a new logo on the books — because our existing customers stuck around and spent more. Meanwhile, competitors were shrinking because their churn wiped out all their sales wins.

Here’s the problem: most companies treat NPS like a tick-box exercise. They dump it on some poor sod in marketing who fires out surveys, asks “Would you recommend us? 0–10”, tallies the scores, and then… nothing. That’s like installing a smoke detector and then ignoring the alarm.

The magic isn’t the score — it’s the follow-up. “Why did you give us that score?” That’s where the gold is. And you’ve got to know the difference between relational scores (decision-makers giving you the big-picture view) and transactional scores (feedback after a specific interaction — which are usually 10–20 points higher). If you only measure the latter, you’re kidding yourself. Make sure the people who actually sign the cheques are the ones filling in the surveys.

Do it properly. Get statistically significant responses. Run rolling averages so you don’t freak out over a single bad week. And for God’s sake, show customers you’re acting on their input — otherwise, why would they keep telling you the truth?

Reicheld’s latest update to the framework is spot on: there’s good profit (growth fuelled by referrals and word of mouth) and bad profit (growth fuelled by shoving more through sales and marketing). The more you can tilt towards good profit, the healthier your business will be.

And here’s how you know it’s working: check your Net Revenue Retention (NRR). If the group of customers you had on 1 January is collectively paying you more on 31 December — even if you lost a few along the way — congratulations. You’re over 100% NRR. That’s when you know your targeted delivery is landing, your customers are sticking, and your growth is compounding.

Engineer your business around the customer, not your ego

Customer obsession isn’t a project. It’s not a campaign. It’s a bloody way of life. If you want to deliver what clients actually need, you’ve got to wire that mindset into your culture, your systems, and your people so deep they couldn’t escape it if they tried.

Take Ritz-Carlton. Every single employee, down to the cleaners, gets $2,000 they can spend on the spot to fix a guest problem. No sign-off. No chain of command. Lost luggage? Ruined wedding cake? They can sort it instantly. Legendary.

We nicked that at Rackspace. Told our account managers: you can spend up to twice the customer’s monthly revenue fixing an issue, right now. No forms, no begging a manager. Server outage? Fine — fly a tech team out. Client fuming? Send champagne, credit their bill, whatever it takes. By the time our competitors had filled out three forms to authorise a £50 goodwill credit, we’d already solved the problem and had the customer raving about how much we cared.

That policy wasn’t about chucking money at problems. It was about intent and speed. It told everyone in the business: keeping customers happy is priority #1. End of.

We also put our money where our mouth was with brand promises backed by guarantees. At Rackspace, “Fanatical Support” wasn’t just a slogan. It meant a real human would pick up within 17 seconds, or you got a credit. We guaranteed 100% uptime or your money back. Those guarantees were what Jim Collins calls catalytic mechanisms — commitments so sharp they forced us to live up to them every single day.

The outcome? Zero to £30m in five years. Off-the-charts customer loyalty. And a team that knew exactly what mattered most: the stuff customers cared about, not internal KPIs that made us feel good in a board report.

Serve the right customers, the right way, every time

If you want to scale a proper business, you can’t afford to serve up half-baked crap your customers didn’t ask for. Expectations are sky-high, switching costs are near-zero, and if you don’t give your best customers exactly what they need, someone else will. End of.

But here’s the flip side: nail targeted delivery and you’ll run circles around the competition. When your whole operation is geared to delight a specific customer segment, growth stops being a slog and starts being a compounding machine.

This isn’t fluffy nonsense. It’s hard-nosed business. Solve real problems for real customers, and you create real value. That’s the only growth engine worth having. Get laser-focused on your ideal customers, understand them better than they understand themselves, and then line up your entire organisation to over-deliver.

Yes, it takes discipline. Yes, you’ll have to say no to distractions. But the payoff is massive. Marketing actually lands because it’s speaking to someone, not everyone. Sales feels less like selling and more like helping. Service gets sharper in the areas that actually matter.

Look at Amazon. I had Bill Price on the podcast a while back and what he achieved at the place is nothing short of incredible. NPS of 80 while barely speaking to a human being. They cracked the code: give customers what they really want (fast delivery, no-hassle returns), cut the fluff, scale like crazy. The lesson? Work out what your core customers value most and build your business around delivering that consistently, relentlessly, obsessively.

If you want hot water, don’t boil the ocean. Put the kettle on for the people who matter. Serve them better than anyone else. Do that again and again and you’ll have a thriving business and a tribe of customers who swear by you. That’s the win-win. Target. Deliver. Win. Repeat.

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Written by business coach and leadership coaching expert Dominic Monkhouse. You can order your free copy of his book, Mind Your F**king Business here.