PROS Holdings at Oppenheimer Conference: AI as a Defensive Moat

On Tuesday, 12 August 2025, PROS Holdings (NYSE:PRO) presented at the Oppenheimer 28th Annual Technology, Internet & Communications Conference. The company showcased its strategic initiatives, emphasizing its AI capabilities as a key differentiator while acknowledging challenges in market awareness. The leadership team, including CEO Jeff Cotton and CFO Stefan Schultz, outlined plans for growth and profitability.

Key Takeaways

• PROS Holdings is leveraging AI for pricing optimization, aiming to strengthen its competitive position.
• The company reported strong first-half performance, particularly in B2B and travel sectors.
• Strategic partnerships, including a new alliance with Commerce, are central to expanding market reach.
• The company is targeting a 16% to 21% revenue growth rate and a 19% to 24% free cash flow margin by 2027.
• PROS is exploring outcome-based pricing models for its AI-driven services.

Financial Results

PROS Holdings reported robust performance in the first half of 2025, driven by improvements in both the B2B and travel sectors:

• Sales cycle times improved by 10% in Q2, maintaining a positive trend throughout the first half of the year.
• Competitive win rates showed consistent improvement, contributing to increased guidance for subscription ARR and revenue.
• The company is focused on achieving a revenue growth rate of 16% to 21% and a free cash flow margin of 19% to 24% by 2027.

Operational Updates

Key operational developments include:

• Strengthening AI capabilities as a core differentiator and defensive moat, especially in pricing optimization.
• Enhancing market awareness in the B2B sector through strategic partnerships and industry-specific marketing campaigns.
• Partnership with Commerce (formerly BigCommerce) to expand reach and engage with larger global system integrators.

Future Outlook

Looking ahead, PROS Holdings plans to:

• Capitalize on the trend towards comprehensive travel experiences with its offer management capabilities.
• Focus on growth initiatives related to channel partnerships, with expectations for higher bookings in the second half of the year due to seasonality.
• Explore consumption-based pricing models for AI-driven services, such as "charge by answer."

Q&A Highlights

During the Q&A session, the following points were discussed:

• PROS’ competitive landscape, including traditional methods like Excel spreadsheets and competitors such as Pricefx, ServiceNow, and Salesforce.
• The potential monetization path for AI, with a focus on outcome-based pricing models.
• The company’s perspective on the impact of generative AI, emphasizing the reliability of deterministic algorithms for pricing accuracy.
• Clarification on the go-to-market strategy, including industry-specific messaging and partner initiatives.
• Details on the 2027 financial targets and strategies to achieve them.

For more detailed insights, please refer to the full transcript provided below.

Full transcript - Oppenheimer 28th Annual Technology, Internet & Communications Conference:

Brian: Welcome, and thank everyone who’s joined us today for our session with PROS Holding. I’m very happy we have the leadership team with us today. We’ve got the CEO, Jeff Cotton. We’ve got the CFO, Stefan Schultz. And, Jeff, why don’t you, if you can, for some of the new listeners within the audience that may not be as familiar with PROS Holding, Just to level set the discussion and and share with us from a 20,000 feet view your role at the company and the problems PROS Holding is solving for your customers.

Jeff Cotton, CEO, PROS Holding: Yeah. Thank you, Brian, and we really appreciate everybody joining us this afternoon or perhaps morning evening, depending on where you are. So I just joined the company two and a half months ago. We’re a SaaS company in sort of the broad revenue management and pricing optimization space, about $360,000,000 in total revenue. Company’s been around for many decades, actually goes back to 1985, and we like to say that we started doing AI before AI was cool, with many decades of building machine learning algorithms specifically for dynamic pricing where we started in the airline space actually and have grown out of that now to take a lot of those algorithms and price optimization capabilities into the broader b to b space with now sophisticated smart CPQ products and and and price optimization management capabilities.

So it’s a little bit about the the company high level and and sort of where our products are focused. As I said, I joined two and a half months ago. Most recently came out of the contact center as a service space or CCaaS space where we integrated very heavily with the CRM and ERP providers. And so I knew a lot about this particular space and and very eager to continue to dive in here at PROS.

Brian: Thank you, Jeff, for for the opening. Maybe I could just tap into some of the reasons, you know, why you chose PROS, you know, now that you’ve got two and a half months with the business, can you share with us maybe some of the strengths of the business that you may have underappreciated prior to joining Pros that you’ve seen since you’ve joined the company?

Jeff Cotton, CEO, PROS Holding: Yeah. Great question. You look, there were three primary things that really got me excited to join the company, and I’d say I’ve certainly validated all three of those and and been really, pleased by the opportunity here. The first is, you know, look, as I’ve mentioned in my, opening remark there, the AI capabilities of this company are extremely strong, and it is a true defensive moat, which I know is a question on sort of everybody’s minds. You know, in in the era of AI, you know, what is the defensive moat for a lot of SaaS companies?

And given how sophisticated our algorithms are on being able to do deterministic pricing is, you know, developed in many decades and certainly what I’ve heard from all of our customers is the significant value. And not only the value, but also the ability to be able to deal with the volatility of today’s world and be able to incorporate raw, you know, commodity cost changes now and push those out via price changes, you know, effective within minutes in many cases. So the the the power of our product and AI has certainly proven out, and what I’ve seen so far and, you know, only excites me further, in terms of the opportunity. The second piece is, you know, I came in with a bit of a a thesis and and listening to a lot of folks in the market about pros and this sort of broader order to cash space. And the company is generally known for those that know it as having, you know, market leading products.

But frankly, you know, I don’t think that we have the awareness, especially on the b two b side. On the travel side, we’re very well known and, you know, most world airlines. But on the b two b side, I think there’s a huge opportunity to to get more of that effectively. And that has certainly borne, itself out in in my two and a half months now. You know, I I thought there was a big opportunity from a a partner perspective.

And, you know, not only is that true, we’ve already shown that that’s true and and getting our first sort of new type of partner active and out in the market with the launch of our big commerce or now known as commerce partnership that was announced in our earnings just a little over a week ago. And so that has also been very gratifying to sort of prove out that that is true. And, you know, that’s the first of many new types of partnerships where, you know, we’re going be doing reselling with partners for the very first time in Pro’s history. Very exciting to help us get that awareness, get more, you know, feet on the street by leveraging sales teams from other organizations. And the final thing that got me excited here that also has proved out is the culture.

Know, this company is very proud of its culture, and that was certainly one of the things that attracted me to this company. The fact that the board put so much emphasis on the fact we’re proud of our culture, we wanna maintain that, but also continue to evolve, the culture, obviously, over time. I’m a high culture leader. I believe, you know, culture can either tear tear companies down or or truly make a company. And, you know, that that’s been really exciting to, you know, really get in with our employees, understand, you know, what their motivators are, and and and continue to lead and inspire by building, you know, on our culture.

Brian: Let me bring Stefan into the discussion here. Can talk a little bit about, the business highlights in in the first half. You know, you reported a a good quarter a couple weeks ago with your two q. You exceeded your guidance. So tell us what’s working well for the business in 2025.

Stefan Schultz, CFO, PROS Holding: Yeah. You know, we were very happy with our first half results to your point, Brian. You know, and and I think it starts with the fact that we performed well across both our b two b and travel areas of the business. You know, last year, we didn’t have that benefit, especially in the first half of the year where, you know, the the travel and b two b were all hitting on all cylinders. Travel, obviously, was a little off at the first half of last year.

So very happy to see both parts of the business performing well. And and I would tell you that, you know, a trend that we’ve been seeing is sales cycle times have continued to improve. They improved another 10% in in the in in the second quarter and actually for the first half because we saw the same thing in the first quarter. And our competitive win rates continue to improve. So all in all, you know, just from a from a booking standpoint, we’re very happy with how things have progressed in the in the 2025.

And to your point, because of that, it positioned us well to increase our guidance on our subscription ARR and subscription revenue for the full year. And, you know, not to leave out our our profit profitability initiatives, there are some things that, you know, we we wanted to execute on in the second or sorry, in the first half of the year, which we did. So I feel very good about, you know, how we’re delivering, you know, better performance on the top line while also expanding profitability, through our EBITDA and free cash flow margins.

Brian: Thank you. Let’s shift over to the moat, you know, jump off for either of you. Share with us why you win in the market. You know? What gives pros the right to win?

You know, how are you differentiated? And, you know, how deep is the moat in the market?

Jeff Cotton, CEO, PROS Holding: Yeah. I’ll start off, and certainly, Stefan, with his years experience down here can certainly add in. You know, look, first of all, you know, I’ll take that a little bit, you know, sort of talk first on the b two b side and then on the travel side because obviously there are some differences and and distinctions there. You know, look on the b two b side, one of the things that I found, really exciting actually is that we play really well when the customer has a really complex selling environment, and and configure and and proposal, and quoting, need. So, you know, manufacturing is an example where we play extremely well and differentiate from a lot of the competition out there where we can handle, you know, thousands, tens of thousands of SKUs on a single quote and produce those quotes very quickly.

Where most of, the CPQ market, you know, really kind of struggles with, you know, the the complexity of that type of an environment. That’s certainly one different share. The second thing is on the sophistication of our algorithms. Right? Our sophisticated price optimization and price recommendation capabilities, you know, once again, haven’t just been developed for our b to b business.

It infuses decades of experience on the airline side as well that have been infused into, that b to b side. And and we look out, you know, like, let’s take the CRMs as an example. A lot of them have c, CPQ capabilities, most of which can satisfy, you know, smaller, more simpler types of configurations, but very few of them have any type of pricing intelligence and price optimization algorithms. And so that’s certainly another big differentiator for us on the b two b side. On the travel side, a little bit different.

Right? You know, our roots are more in revenue management. And obviously, we’ve evolved those to add more capabilities around continuous pricing, dynamic pricing, digital offer marketing capabilities. And so as airlines are starting to make the shift to wanna own more of the full travel experience, we’re really well positioned, as as they start to evaluate what’s now called offer marketing, or and and offer services. And, you know, we’re having very strategic conversations with a lot of the big global carriers right now about how they can think about utilizing our offer management capability to handle that full travel experience.

So we’re we’re really, you know, excited about the differentiation really on both sides of our business.

Stefan Schultz, CFO, PROS Holding: Yeah. I think the only thing I would add to that is, you know, our ability to deliver accuracy in, you know, in in the speed of of light, basically. So we do all the things that Jeff just highlighted, but we do it with tremendous accuracy and with tremendous speed. And so, you know, that’s an extremely important component when companies are evaluating how they wanna go to market and what tools they wanna use to help them, you know, optimize their their win percentage and their ability to to attract customers to their business. And, you know, they cannot afford to have a mistake.

They can’t afford to have delays. And what we’ve been able to, you know, assure over many years of of performance is that we can deliver this type of, you know, this type of accuracy and that type of speed unlike really anybody else in the marketplace. And I think that’s probably one of the, you know, the biggest reasons why we win and why we have a pretty good moat to our business.

Brian: And in terms of competition, who are you competing against most often? You know, is this still mostly an Excel market? You know, we’ve heard Service Now has been talking up about entering the market. So who do you see most often on your shortlist?

Jeff Cotton, CEO, PROS Holding: Yeah. You nailed it, Brian. Look, the number one competitor we have is sort of, you know, in house DIY or or or Excel spreadsheets for sure. Most of our new logo acquisition is customers are coming off of something like their own spreadsheets, etcetera. You know, obviously, there are competitors in this space.

You know, price effects is one that has a great relationship with SAP that, you know, we ultimately would love to get more engaged directly with SAP that that we do see in the market. As you mentioned, you know, ServiceNow and Salesforce both have CPQ capabilities. They don’t really have so much on the price optimization as I said. But actually, we’ve had a competitive win this year against ServiceNow CPQ, which we’re very proud of. And once again, was a sophisticated healthcare customer that had, you know, this very complex configure and quote situation that plays very much to our strength.

So so we like our our positioning. On the on the travel side, you know, obviously, different set of competitors. Most notably, it’s Amadeus and and and Sabre, you know, who have big broad businesses. Right? They’ve got, you know, holistic platforms that, you know, encompass, you know, flight crew management, you know, passenger shared services, PSS.

They do have some of their own revenue management capabilities, etcetera. But they also have GDS businesses, right, which are very subject to volatility in the airline space because they’re directly tied to passenger bookings and passenger boardings. And so that’s one thing that we don’t have that, know, thank goodness we’re sort of shielded from a lot of that, you know, very specific volatility. But those are the two biggest competitors that we see on the travel side.

Brian: Maybe sticking with the the travel business, it seems to gather a lot of attention with your comp company. You know, that that that that category certainly got hit really hard in the beginning part of the of the decade. Your performance has certainly improved that business segment over the last four quarters here. Can you shed light on what’s happening with demand in that business segment? And maybe does your guidance imply an improvement in the outlook of that end market?

What are you seeing within the travel segment these days?

Jeff Cotton, CEO, PROS Holding: Yeah. Let me start maybe with some of the trends, Steph can talk a little bit more from a guidance perspective. You know, look, one of the things, as I sort of briefly mentioned a few minutes ago, is there’s certainly a shift in the c suite of almost every airline to understand, you know, as they become very successful at marketing a lot of different services, you know, ancillary services and how to charge for those things. What they’re finding is is now they wanna further expand that and get more into owning the end to end traveler experience from, you know, being able to market, you know, a bundle of hotels, transportation, you know, ground transportation, etcetera, their tech platform is not going to, satisfy that shift. You know, they they’ve been able to sort of leverage things like, you know, EMDs, if you’re familiar with the the space to be able to do some of this ancillary pricing, but that’s now not going to, you know, a shift towards a total travel experience.

There’s also now nuances and things that we’ve been doing for the airlines for a long time, but new ways to think about seats as an example, right, for ever, you know, sort of the middle seat in the back was sort of viewed as not probably the most favorable seat on the plane. But as you think about now, trying to market market a whole package to a family going on a vacation, now that middle seat becomes very valuable so that you can keep the whole family together. Being able to think about how to now price for that, is something we’re gonna help them do as they make this shift. And so that trend that we’re seeing, has really put us now at the at the top of being able to have that strategy conversation because all of that requires, this full offer management capability. And so we’re really excited about, you know, our services there.

Now that, you know, we’ve added in this digital offer marketing capability, that is critical for, you know, this whole offer management capability. And so today, where, you know, you may search on Google for flights to Miami and they can, you know, launch in a specific offer leveraging our digital offer marketing platform. Now that we’re adding agents on top of that, you know, we’ve got an airline today who’s, got a a customer success story out for us where they’re already leveraging and that FareFinder agent now allows them to change the conversation with the consumer so the consumer can search for beach vacations and they can market all sorts of different destinations, maybe one that’s lower cost because there’s a lot of seat availability, etcetera. And so that’s really changing the the dynamic there. And so those are some of the trends that we’ve been seeing that creates opportunity for us in the airline business.

Anything you wanna add around guidance? Just just to your point there,

Stefan Schultz, CFO, PROS Holding: you know, airlines are are looking to to, you know, optimize so many different offerings for, passengers so they can win more more customers to their to their service. And, you know, we’ve been delivering on a lot of those capabilities, a lot of additional capabilities that help address that need. And that’s what’s built into, you know, some of the opportunities we see as we go forward into the second half of the year and even into 2026. And so it’s typical as as you know that we see higher bookings in the second second half. And in this year, we don’t feel it can be any different from a seasonality perspective.

Brian: Jeff, you brought up the, the AI discussion. I I was gonna go there next, and and you kinda helped me. You gave some use cases already of your AgenTik platform. Maybe you can share with us the how we should think about the monetization path for AI? The company was an early evangelist with AI, and now we’re here today in the AI era.

You know, how do how does the monetization path play out for for pros over, you know, the a multiyear period?

Jeff Cotton, CEO, PROS Holding: Yeah. It’s a great question. So, you know, to your point, you know, we’ve got a a really proven model and pricing our historical machine learning and and and data science models that, you know, yield these prices. An example, on our b to b side of the house, our price optimization capability and services priced on a revenue under management, right? So it’s sort of tied to the amount of revenue that a customer is pushing through and generating prices for.

But it’s gonna be totally different when you think about agents specifically. Right? So as a as a customer now, let’s say on the b two b side starts consuming our CPQ product via, you know, an agent where they’re able to chat and say, hey, you know, I need to configure a quote for, you know, let’s say, an HVAC scenario, and I’ve got a building that’s 20,000 square feet and, you know, a Luno construction, you know, give me a quote. You know, to your point, the way in which we’re gonna price that is actually something we’re still exploring with our customers who are piloting and testing our offers right now. We expect it to be some sort of an outcome based pricing model, and likely will be, you know, something sort of consumption based, right?

One of the we’re considering is sort of, you know, you charge by answer could be something that makes sense. That way, you know, a customer can very much understand, you know, the the the the the usage metric there. But nothing that we’ve sort of finalized yet. Still something we’re exploring.

Brian: Jeff, I wanted to ask you the topical debate that we have today with software and and generative AI. It seems to swing back back and forth, you know. We’re so early in evolution. You know? At some point, you know, generative AI is the next great growth lever.

You know? Now it’s like, oh, it’s the end of software because of generative AI that you know, specifically for your business, that generative AI is gonna be so good. It’s gonna be the end of pricing analysts. So we’re not gonna need these type of workers anymore. The software will just do everything.

To me, it seems far fetched, but but curious to get your views and maybe thinking about it on the other side. It does create category growth, not category compression. So it’s a very high level question, but it’s a topical debate, and, you know, we’d love to get your perspective.

Jeff Cotton, CEO, PROS Holding: Yeah. You know, look, this is the question desure. Right? And and it it is kinda funny how sort of out you know, the the the sort of belief is almost outpacing the reality. I remember, when Mark Benioff declared that software was dead.

Right? And and we all know that that wasn’t necessarily true, but certainly consume software now and a very different model with SaaS. I think you’re gonna see something similar here. You know, look, as an example, I do expect that UI is gonna change very significantly. And we’re, you know, almost all going to be consuming, software through, you know, a natural language agent, type of an experience.

Right? I mean, the scenario I just gave where now you could configure a quote with a very natural interaction of, you know, answering questions and prompting is a lot easier than having to learn, you know, a company’s proprietary layout of the screens and where the data elements are entered and configured, etcetera. So, you know, look, we’re already seeing that shift happening, and I expect that to be, very rapid. But this idea that, you know, SaaS companies and the value that they provide, but, you know, very specific service or use case, you know, is a little bit farfetched to me. And one of the reasons why, is that if you look at our algorithms, you know, pricing is mission critical to a business.

You can’t get that wrong. I mean, you know, if you go and and offer, you know, an 80% discount by accident because you’re, you know, an LLM were to produce it and and would and produce it sort of with a hallucination, you set a new marker in the market that, know, you may or may not be able tolerate, like, it’s you just can’t let it happen. And so one of the things I think people don’t quite understand is that these LLMs are, nondeterministic in in their sort of core algorithm, and they have to be. Right? Because that’s what makes them generative.

If it was deterministic, it would lose, the concept of being a generative. When you look at our algorithms that we’ve developed specifically for pricing and revenue management, and smart configurations, they’re deterministic and they have to be. And so we have trained them with algorithms that are deterministic in nature so that we can ensure that we are offering a price that has been determined via an algorithm. But it’s not something where it can have, you know, an outcome that would be outside, you know, the the bounds of what you would wanna produce from a specific price. So that that’s one very specific difference, at least in our case, where, you know, an LLM is is gonna find it really difficult to go and and replicate or or produce what we do from a pricing perspective.

Brian: Thank you for that. Jeff, why don’t you shift over to, the go to market? You know, before you joined over the last twelve months, there there was an initiative that the company to unify the go to market across the business segments. Obviously, you’re gonna wanna put your stamp on on the business as the new leader. So maybe the question is what type of new initiatives are you looking to bring into the company to further optimize the go to market of the business?

Jeff Cotton, CEO, PROS Holding: Yeah. It’s a great question. You know, look, so I’m gonna break it sort of into two buckets. There’s gonna be a lot we’re gonna do in the demand generation bucket that’s very different than what we’ve done in the past. You know, we’re gonna dial in our marketing campaigns as I sort of alluded earlier.

You know, there’s so much more industry specific messaging that I think will be much more effective in the market than broad, let’s say, CPQ or price optimization or airline, you know, revenue management, types of of positioning that we’ve largely had, from the past. You know, think about if we can dial in, you know, the specific use case where we’ve got an aircraft manufacturer who we took their, average days to produce a quote from forty five days down to two hours. That’s very compelling. And being able to now market that to other, manufacturers or specifically an aircraft manufacturers to me is much more compelling. And then pairing that with a seller who has a target of aircraft manufacturers to take that message, you know, is one of the ways in which we’re gonna evolve to go to to the go to market.

And the second thing is this, you know, partner motion that I keep referring to. And, you know, we’re gonna zoom in specifically on SIs, both GSIs and more boutique specialist SIs and sort of the order to cash space. And then these platform alliances with the ERP, ecommerce, and, CRM guys, which will be a big sort of new source of demand for us. And then when it comes to, like, specific changes in the sales organization, you know, look, I believe that, you know, if you try to do big bang change, especially on the front lines of your sales team, you cause so much disruption. And so we wanna minimize that as best we can.

So we will continue to drive some evolutionary change. You know, we did not lose all of our specialty, as we went to more of a regional model, this year. And and I think that specialty is gonna be important for us moving forward, you know, to sell effectively in the airline space, an example, you’ve got to understand all the acronyms. You’ve got to understand the the depths of what revenue management systems do. And that’s a whole different motion than, you know, understanding a CPQ in a more generalized b to b industry, scenario.

So, you know, we we will maintain some of that, specialization that I think is gonna be important, but but it’s gonna be more important to make sure that we’re starting to zero in the the targets of those sellers and pairing those with the campaigns that we’re gonna dial in as well.

Brian: While we bring Stefan in, for a question here, I wanted to ask you just about your medium term financial goals, you know, specifically the 2027 financial targets. So, you know, to achieve those targets, they they both imply acceleration to both the top line as well as your as well as the margins. Does one seem an easier path for the business accelerating the top line versus the margin and and the cash generation of the business?

Stefan Schultz, CFO, PROS Holding: Yeah. I mean, you know, I think it probably goes without saying that, you know, managing margins is always gonna be easier. We have far more direct control over that, but that’s not always the right answer. Right? Because even though it’s maybe the easiest path, that’s not the right answer.

I think the right answer is is to focus on accelerating that top line growth. You know, we called out, you know, delivering a 16 to 21% growth rate in in a in a range for 2027 and a free cash flow margin of 19 to 24% as our target for 2027. I would tell you that, you know, at this point in time, while we’re seeing acceleration in our our revenue growth line in in 2025, and we anticipate, you know, continuing that into 2026, I think it’s fair to say we’ll probably be on the lower end of our estimate, of what we were thinking. And I think we can certainly deliver that and at the same time, getting our free cash flow margins into the upper end of that range. There’s still more work that can be done on the on the leverage side in terms of, you know, utilizing AI ourselves to to make ourselves even more efficient, taking advantage of the growth to to to, you know, to lever up an increase in our free cash flow margin.

So I feel like, all of the the ingredients are in position for us to execute to and to be successful with. And like I said, even though, you know, getting to a free cash flow margin in the range, would be an easier answer, I just don’t feel like and I don’t think, any of us feel like that’s the right answer. So we’re gonna really pursue the growth. And, fortunately, we have tools such as AI, that can help us be more efficient and not necessarily have to make that traditional trade off of, well, in order to grow, you’ve gotta invest. We don’t necessarily have to invest more.

Now we probably will shift some dollars to where we have some important initiatives that we wanna do, but the where we’re shifting dollars away from, we’re not gonna expect less out of those other teams. We’re gonna expect the same amount of work, if not more. We just expect more efficiency.

Brian: Jeff, I wanna bring us back to the channel. You know, that that that’s clearly been an exciting topic for the business since you joined. Maybe two questions. The first is, can you talk about the new partnership with Commerce? Mhmm.

You know, that seems to be a different partnership than we’ve seen before from the business. And then the second, you talked about increasing trying trying to get more attention from the large global SIs, you know, for for bigger enterprise deals. You know, how do you do that when when these larger global SIs do have large practices already with your competitors? So kinda two different questions there, but both relating to Yeah. The channel ecosystem.

Jeff Cotton, CEO, PROS Holding: Yeah. So on the the the commerce side, formerly known as BigCommerce, you know, there there’s a couple things about that partnership that are different. First and foremost, you know, Travis, the CEO there, he and I have aligned very strategically at the top on the way we want that product or that partnership to work, the use cases that we wanna solve there, so that we can then drive alignment down the organization for effective, execution. So that’s one big, thing that I call out that that’s different than sort of way the way in which we’ve approached a lot of partnerships in the past. The second then is that this partnership is starting as a referral partnership.

We’re already generating, some joint activity, but it is intended to become a full reseller. In other words, we will be able to leverage the sales force of commerce to be able to sell, pros product on the b to b side. And we love about it from a commerce perspective is that they’re gonna be able to expand their TAM by being able to partner, with, pros and and and embedding our products. And it also potentially opens up an opportunity for us to get access to the ecommerce market where we have historically not focused on by, you know, infusing our price optimization and pricing intelligence into a commerce engine, which is certainly one of the opportunities that that exists with this relationship that we’ve established with them. So some pretty unique things, you know, once we get that reseller in market, it’ll be the very first time PROS has engaged with a a reseller type of a partnership.

And and and and once again, you know, the first of what we hope is is many to come. As it relates to SIs and the second part of your discussion, you know, what I know in working through the SIs for many, many years is that, you know, really get their attention. They’ve gotta believe they can build a $100,000,000 service practice around your software. And, you know, whether they could do that or not is, you know, they’re the ones ultimately that will make that determination. And and I would make the argument that the better approach for us is to actually help them understand, where by attaching our product into broader service practices that they have in either ERP or order to cash, that’s where the real opportunity lies, both for us and for us to help them strengthen the value that they bring to their customer.

And so we do have one large GSI that we’re very deep in their order to cash right now where they’re absolutely seeing that opportunity and the ability to bundle in our CPQ and our price optimization capabilities. And so that’s opened up the the conversation and and the door there in sort of a a new and unique way versus how we’ve approached it in the past.

Brian: Maybe for the last question, just to kinda bring it all together in terms of clearly, growth is is the focus for for the business. And you talked about a lot of different growth initiatives that you have have going on. So maybe just bringing it all together, you know, which of the growth initiatives are you most excited about these days for for pros?

Jeff Cotton, CEO, PROS Holding: Yeah. You you know, I they’re like children. I don’t know that I can pick a favorite one because I they’re they’re all fun, and and I think they all can have a a really big impact. But I am gonna go back to the channel one. And and the reason why is it’s a little bit different than what we’ve talked about.

You know, one of the things I’ve seen in the marketplace is that we do have some friends and we’ve got some influencers out there that have helped us certainly in deals. But but largely, we’re kinda going it alone. And and a lot of our competitors have very strong partnerships that very heavily advocate for their products and and solutions over ours. And it and it it it it feels, you know, a little more lonely than it does, you know, sort of having a big family around us. And I know the power of when you get more people in the market, number one, talking about us because that will raise that visibility so that we get more of those, at bats.

That’s really, really critical. And then, you know, when they actually get in the seat with us and they’re actually you know, we’re co driving deals together, you know, that that’ll only accelerate the amount of demand that we have walking in the front door. So that that, by far, is the one that, you know, I’m most excited about.

Brian: Can I just ask you one follow-up on that? Do you need to bring in new leadership, or do you need to, you know, augment the, the organ as the go to market organ station to really, target what, what is an initiative that sounds very exciting for the business?

Jeff Cotton, CEO, PROS Holding: Yeah. We will. Actually so we actually just hired, you know, a new partner leader, a few months ago, which I don’t think that role existed at least in the in the near recent future. It may have further back inside the company and his name is Chris Nepper. Chris has been really rebuilding a lot of that partner capability.

And so, we will need to continue to rebuild it. Things like enablement will be a big thing that we need to get built out so that we can train, provide content and playbooks to the partners and their sales organizations. And then actually, we’ve got someone new starting in in actually, it’s the end of this week, isn’t it? Who’s gonna really help us on this platform alliance side and take, you know, a handful of those and and really drive the the strategic relationship to make sure that we have that top to top alignment, and then we’re driving, you know, a reseller motion specifically. And so, yeah, we will be adding some more capability both from a a team perspective as well as a leadership perspective.

Brian: Terrific. Well, we’re out of time here, we gotta make sure to keep, pros holding me on time because they’ve got a full day of, investor meetings. I wanna thank Stephan. I wanna thank Jeff very much for your time and insights into PROS Holdings.

Stefan Schultz, CFO, PROS Holding: Thank you. Thanks, Brian. Thanks for having us. Good day.

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