Building new capabilities sounds straightforward. Identify what you need, hire the right people, invest in the right tools, and watch your organization transform.
The reality is messier.
New capabilities don’t just slide smoothly into existing organizations. They challenge established ways of working, threaten existing power structures, and often require abandoning strengths that took years to develop.
At the distribution company, this reality played out like a slow-motion organizational civil war. The new customer experience capabilities they invested millions to build didn’t complement their existing sales capabilities - they declared war on them.
The Philosophy Wars
The conflict wasn’t just about processes or reporting structures. It was about fundamentally different beliefs about how value gets created.
The sales team had spent decades building capabilities around relationship management, consultative selling, and personalized service. Their philosophy was simple: customers buy from people they trust, and trust comes from understanding their business deeply enough to provide tailored solutions.
Every system, every process, every metric reinforced this philosophy. Salespeople were measured on relationship depth, not transaction efficiency. Customer interactions were designed for maximum personal engagement, not minimum time investment. Success meant becoming so embedded in a customer’s business that switching vendors would be painful.
The CX team brought a completely different philosophy: customers want to buy efficiently, and efficiency comes from removing human friction wherever possible. They believed value was created through transparency, speed, and customer control.
Their capabilities centered on digital self-service, automated workflows, and data-driven insights. Success meant making purchasing so smooth that customers barely noticed the vendor - they just got what they needed, when they needed it, without hassle.
These weren’t just different approaches to the same goal. They were opposing theories about what customers actually valued.
The Transparency Wars
The capability conflict became visible immediately in debates over pricing transparency.
The CX team wanted to display pricing online, allowing customers to see costs, compare options, and make decisions independently. From their perspective, transparency built trust and enabled efficient purchasing.
The sales team viewed pricing transparency as strategic suicide. Their pricing model was complex, relationship-dependent, and designed to reward loyalty. Different customers paid different prices for the same products based on volume, history, and negotiation. Making this visible would expose the inconsistencies and eliminate the sales team’s ability to craft customized deals.
More fundamentally, the sales team believed that pricing conversations were relationship opportunities. When a customer called to discuss costs, that was a chance to understand their business better, identify additional needs, and strengthen the partnership.
The CX team saw those same conversations as friction points. Why force customers to call for information they could get instantly online? Why make them wait for a salesperson’s schedule when they needed to make purchasing decisions?
Both teams were building capabilities to support their philosophy. The CX team developed transparent pricing tools, comparison features, and instant quote generation. The sales team refined relationship management systems, deal customization tools, and consultative selling processes.
They were building conflicting definitions of customer value into the foundation of the business.
Caught in the Middle
The technology team found themselves in an impossible position. As an internal support function, they were constantly forced to choose between what the CX team was requesting and what the legacy sales culture demanded.
The CX team would submit requirements for customer self-service features: online account management, automated ordering, transparent inventory visibility. The sales team would push back, arguing these features would “commoditize” their relationships and reduce customer engagement.
The tech team would build compromises that satisfied no one. Self-service tools that required sales approval. Transparent pricing that was hidden behind login requirements. Automation that still routed through manual processes.
Every development cycle became a negotiation between competing visions of how the business should operate. The tech team couldn’t build coherent capabilities because the organization hadn’t made coherent choices about what capabilities it actually wanted.
The Integration Illusion
Leadership kept insisting that the new CX capabilities would “enhance” the existing sales capabilities, not replace them. They painted a picture of harmony: technology handling routine transactions while salespeople focused on strategic relationships.
But capabilities don’t integrate automatically just because leadership declares they should.
The sales team’s capabilities were designed around control - controlling customer interactions, controlling information flow, controlling the pace of transactions. The CX team’s capabilities were designed around customer autonomy - letting customers interact when and how they wanted.
These philosophies couldn’t coexist without fundamental changes to how the sales team operated. Either salespeople needed to become facilitators of customer self-service, or the self-service tools needed to maintain sales involvement.
Neither team was willing to make those changes.
The sales team wasn’t interested in becoming order facilitators instead of relationship builders. The CX team wasn’t interested in building tools that perpetuated inefficient processes.
The Capability Death Spiral
As the conflict intensified, both teams began building defensive capabilities.
The sales team invested more heavily in relationship management tools, customer entertainment budgets, and consultative training. They were doubling down on what made them valuable in the old model.
The CX team accelerated their digital transformation efforts, building more sophisticated self-service tools and automated workflows. They were racing to prove the new model could work.
Instead of capability integration, the organization achieved capability duplication. They had two customer service philosophies, two technology platforms, two measurement systems, and two definitions of success - all competing for the same customers and the same resources.
The Strategic Tests for Capability Reality
The distribution company’s capability conflict was predictable and preventable. Here are the tests that could have identified the problem early:
The Customer Evidence Test: What specific customer behaviors, feedback, or pain points drove you to build this capability? Can you point to concrete evidence that customers are asking for this solution, struggling without it, or choosing competitors who offer it?
The Philosophy Test: Do your new capabilities assume the same things about customer value as your existing capabilities? If not, how will you manage the conflict?
The Integration Test: Are you adding capabilities or transforming them? Addition is easier but often creates redundancy. Transformation is harder but creates coherence.
The Resource Test: Are your new capabilities competing with existing ones for customer attention, organizational resources, or leadership support? Competition between internal capabilities is usually more destructive than competition with external threats.
The Measurement Test: Are you measuring success in ways that reward capability integration or capability protection? If different teams are optimizing for different metrics, they'll build different capabilities.
The Path Not Taken
What could the distribution company have done differently?
Instead of building CX capabilities alongside sales capabilities, they could have built hybrid capabilities that served both philosophies. Customer-controlled pricing for routine orders, relationship-managed pricing for complex deals. Self-service tools for familiar transactions, consultative support for new challenges.
Instead of letting teams build defensive capabilities, they could have required collaborative capability development. Every new tool needed to enhance both efficiency and relationship value. Every process change needed buy-in from both customer self-service and sales engagement perspectives.
Instead of measuring teams separately, they could have measured them together. Customer satisfaction scores that required both efficiency and relationship quality. Revenue metrics that rewarded both transaction volume and relationship depth.
But these approaches would have required something the organization wasn’t willing to provide: clear strategic choices about how they wanted to compete.
Without those choices, capability conflicts became capability wars. And in capability wars, customers always lose.
Photo by Christine on Unsplash
Mini-series
The Five Realities That Shape Strategy
The difference between strategies that transform organizations and those that drain millions? Five realities that successful leaders face head-on while failing ones rationalize away. Learn to recognize and master them before they master you.
