Should Product Companies Charge the Customer for that Feature Request?

All money is good money, right? Right?

Anyone who has worked in a sales-driven B2B context is well aware of this scenario. The diligent product management team have pulled together a roadmap, based on a combination of “obvious” feature enhancements, stuff the sales team has surfaced in prospect discussions and maybe, just maybe, some initiatives of their own creation that have surfaced through direct customer contact and product discovery. However they got there, they have a roadmap.

But then, disaster! The sales team have a deal on the table with a prospect who wants something from the roadmap done sooner. It’s a huge deal so it gets escalated to the CEO, and now the team have to reshuffle the roadmap to accommodate the request. The product managers start complaining about feature factories again, muttering about “sales specials” and why we can’t “sell what we’ve got on the truck”.

But, the thing is, it’s not a “sales special” per se. It’s a good idea! It’s something you want to do anyway! You’re not building an integration to some special system that only one customer in the world cares about. It’s a widely applicable capability that will benefit a bunch of people… you just weren’t expecting it to benefit them yet.

So, if you’re going to do it, do you charge them for it?

I recently ran a poll on Twitter asking the same question and 62% of respondents said “Yes”. But wait, aren’t we a…