Customer Reality
What Happens When Every Team Has a Different Customer in Mind
6min June 16, 2025
The first crack in any failing strategy usually appears here: in conflicting definitions of who the customer actually is.
It sounds absurd, right? How can an organization not know its own customers? But I’ve seen it happen dozens of times, and it’s always the same pattern. Different teams, different departments, different leaders - all confident they understand the customer, all serving completely different people.
The distribution company I wrote about in Part 1 faced exactly this reality. And the collision between their sales team’s customer and their CX team’s customer destroyed a multimillion-dollar transformation before it could take root.
The Sales Team’s Customer
Any good salesperson knows that the strength of the relationship determines the strength of the account. At this distribution company, the sales team had built their entire approach around that principle.
They knew their customers by name. They understood their businesses, their challenges, their personalities. They were available when customers called, responsive when problems arose, and consultative when big decisions loomed.
Their customer valued personal relationships. Trusted advice. The comfort of knowing that when something went wrong, they had a person - not a system - to call.
This wasn’t just theory. The sales team had decades of evidence supporting this customer reality. Long-term accounts. Personal referrals. Customers who stayed loyal even when cheaper alternatives emerged.
Their customer definition was simple: businesses that value relationships over transactions, quality over efficiency, and personal service over self-service.
The CX Team’s Customer
The newly hired customer experience team started with a different approach entirely. Instead of relying on relationship history, they conducted systematic research. Surveys. Interviews. Behavioral analysis. Data.
What they discovered challenged everything the sales team believed.
B2B customers were increasingly frustrated with having to wait for their salesperson to process simple orders. They wanted self-service options for routine transactions. They wanted faster response times, not just personal attention. They wanted technology that removed friction rather than requiring human intervention.
Most tellingly, when asked to define a “strong relationship” with a vendor, customers emphasized value delivery over personal rapport. Speed and reliability mattered more than familiarity. Solving their problems efficiently was more important than having coffee together.
The CX team’s customer definition was equally clear: businesses that prioritize efficiency, transparency, and control over their purchasing process.
Two Teams, Two Customers, One Company
Here’s what made this situation so dangerous: both teams were right about their customers.
The sales team wasn’t wrong about relationship importance. The CX team wasn’t wrong about efficiency demands. But they were serving fundamentally different customer segments with completely incompatible service models.
The sales team was serving traditional B2B buyers who expected consultative relationships and were willing to trade efficiency for expertise. These customers did value the personal touch, did appreciate having a dedicated contact, and did define strong relationships through trust and accessibility.
The CX team was discovering a growing segment of customers who had been shaped by consumer digital experiences. These buyers expected B2B interactions to be as smooth and self-directed as their personal purchasing. They defined strong relationships through consistent value delivery, not personal connection.
The problem wasn’t that either team misunderstood their customers. The problem was that the company was trying to serve both customer types with the same business model.
When Customer Definitions Collide
The collision between these customer realities created chaos throughout the organization.
Product development couldn’t decide which customer to design for. Should the new ordering system prioritize relationship tools for sales engagement, or efficiency tools for customer self-service?
Marketing couldn’t craft coherent messaging. Should they emphasize personal service and relationship depth, or speed and digital convenience?
Operations couldn’t optimize processes. Should they design workflows around sales team involvement, or around customer independence?
Most destructively, the sales team began to feel threatened by the CX team’s customer insights. If customers really wanted self-service options, what did that say about the value of the sales relationship? If efficiency mattered more than rapport, were their core skills becoming obsolete?
The sales team’s response was predictable: they questioned the research methodology, doubted the customer feedback, and defended their customer definition with increasing intensity.
“Those aren’t our real customers,” became the rallying cry. “Our customers understand value. They appreciate relationships. This data must be skewed toward price shoppers who don’t represent our core market.”
The Fatal Assumption
But the deepest problem wasn’t the conflicting customer definitions. It was the assumption that they had to choose between them.
The sales team assumed that embracing digital efficiency meant abandoning relationship value. The CX team assumed that improving self-service meant eliminating sales involvement. Leadership assumed they had to pick one customer reality and abandon the other.
This binary thinking killed any possibility of strategic coherence.
Instead of designing a system that could serve both customer types effectively, they designed a system where one had to win and the other had to lose. Instead of creating customer choice between high-touch and low-touch experiences, they created internal warfare over which experience should exist.
The Strategic Tests for Customer Reality
Looking back, there were clear warning signs that customer reality was fracturing. Here are the tests every leadership team should run:
The Definition Test: Can every team leader describe your ideal customer in the same way? If your sales team, marketing team, and product team are describing different people, you don't have customer clarity - you have customer chaos.
The Segment Test: Are you trying to serve customer segments with fundamentally different expectations using the same business model? Sometimes the answer is yes, and that's okay - but only if you design for that intentionally.
The Evidence Test: Are customer insights driving decisions, or justifying predetermined choices? When research conflicts with assumptions, which wins? How you handle contradictory customer data reveals whether you're truly customer-focused or just customer-informed.
The Conflict Resolution Test: When different parts of your organization disagree about customer needs, how do you resolve it? Do you have a systematic way to investigate conflicts, or do politics and seniority decide?
Moving Beyond Customer Wars
The distribution company never solved their customer reality problem. Instead, they chose sides. They decided the sales team’s customer was the “real” customer and dismissed the CX team’s research as flawed or irrelevant.
But the market didn’t care about their internal politics. Competitors who embraced both customer realities - offering high-touch service for complex needs and self-service efficiency for routine transactions - began capturing market share from both segments.
The lesson here isn’t that one customer definition was right and the other wrong. The lesson is that customer reality must be faced honestly, even when it’s uncomfortable.
Sometimes that means acknowledging you’re serving multiple customer types and designing different experiences for each. Sometimes it means recognizing that your traditional customer base is evolving and you need to evolve with them. Sometimes it means admitting that what got you here won’t get you there.
But it always means choosing truth over comfort.
Photo by Rosie Steggles on <href=“https://unsplash.com/photos/a-road-sign-pointing-in-opposite-directions-in-the-desert-h1OhvEIIcxs?utm_content=creditCopyText&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=unsplash">Unsplash
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