All good? All right, we're live. Okay, welcome everybody. This is our investor Q&A session at Outperform 2025. My name's Belinda Overdepot I'm the Head of Investor Relations for Pros. Thank you to everyone who made the trip out. Really appreciate you guys taking time to spend time with us and our customers and partners. Before I kick us off, I'm going to introduce our guests. I'm going to read our quick little forward-looking disclaimer. If you listen to our earnings calls, this might sound familiar. Please note some of the commentary today will include forward-looking statements, including without limitation, those about our strategy, future business prospects, and market opportunities, and our financial projections and guidance. Actual results can differ materially from such statements in our forecast. For more information, please refer to the risk factors described in our SEC filings.
PROS assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements to reflect future events or circumstances. As a reminder, during the session, we will discuss non-GAAP metrics, reconciliations between each non-GAAP measure, and the most directly comparable GAAP measure to the extent available without unreasonable effort are available in our earnings press releases. All right, I will get started. I do that pretty fast too. With me, I have the pleasure of having four of our executive management team. I have Andres Reiner, our President and CEO; Jeff Cotton, our incoming CEO; Stefan Schultz, our Chief Financial Officer; and Craig Zawada, our Chief Visionary Officer. I am going to kick us off with a couple of questions for each of these guys, and then I'll open it up to the room and to the audience.
If you are online, we do have Q&A available for online attendees, and we will check the queue every so often to ask the questions. All right, I will actually start with Jeff. I think many investors, I have talked to many of you over the last week or so, have asked, "Why Jeff?" I would like to ask Jeff, "Why PROS?
Oh, great question. It's an easy one. For those of you that are here this week attending this event, you can probably see it as well. Look, the first thing for me was the product, the platform. This is a true AI-native platform. I was very attracted to an opportunity where not only were they talking about AI, but it literally was embedded in the product and had been for many, many years. I had seen that in spades. With all the new agents that we're launching this week, for those of you, once again, who have seen those announcements, I mean, this is going to be truly game-changing technology. The second big reason for me truly was the culture of this organization. I'm a culture-first leader that's very customer-driven.
One of the things that has really also blown me away about this week, this organization truly lives and breathes customer. As I've sat in many, many customer meetings throughout the day yesterday, it was so impressive to hear a customer say, "Hey, we are co-developing this with you. This is the value that the product is now adding to our business." Or, "Hey, here's a new idea of something we want to go and co-develop." We've got literally product management in the room that's responding to that real time. The combination of those two things were really special to me and really set the company apart as I was considering various different opportunities. This really became the one.
We're very happy to have you. That's great to hear. Andres, I'll kick you a question now. Jeff talked about our agentic AI innovations. There's been a lot of talk about agents at Outperform. Can you give our guests who maybe didn't see some of the sessions yesterday an overview of what we've unveiled?
Yeah, so we're unveiling this year 50 new AI agents. To me, AI agents are really transformational. What we're trying to get our customers to think about the evolution of AI is how we're combining large language models with math models underneath to help the organization grow productivity and drive better business outcomes. To me, what's exciting is this notion that in the future, every person in the company will be a manager. We're not thinking anymore that you have an individual contributor because an individual contributor will have agents that work for that individual contributor helping them accomplish tasks. It's this notion of how do we get a person to go from 1x themselves to 10x to 100x. In these agents, they're not just driving automation. They can actually run autonomously. They can be always on when the person's not there.
Think, for example, we launched our Sales Agent. Think of the Sales Agent always listening to the deals that a particular account rep owns and being able to know when to create a renewal and what renewal terms it should be, volume, price on a particular customer, and now nudge the rep to begin the renewal process. Very different than having the rep figure out when they begin the journey and now create the new quote and begin the process. These are just examples of how you're embedding productivity improvement, better execution. The other part that's very key to our framework of agents is this goal-setting model. Then we can start to embed goals around this, like quote turnaround time, win rate, all these other metrics that the agent can start to track so that we can measure how that's driving better business outcomes.
We're really excited about this future of agentic AI on top of our platform and how it can help an end customer. We're also powering those same agents to help the customer experience. Those agents can actually support an end customer experience in a quoting process. Think about the future. Not just every employee will have agents that help support them. Every customer will have an agent. Fair Finder Genie is a perfect example of that for inspirational travel. Think about you having your own agent that helps you with either your business or your leisure travel experiences right there for you. To me, this is very transformative. The other important part, and Jeff talked about it, all of our innovation always comes by working with our customers.
I think the excitement that they see in this new technology, how they scale their organizations, is something that I'm very excited about.
I'm super excited as well. It's been great to see there's customers literally building their own agents in our innovation center right now, which has been a really cool part of Outperform as well. I'll go next to Craig. Craig, we've had a lot of conversations with investors over the last couple of weeks, and we talked about it on our earnings call about how market volatility and kind of the experiences that businesses are having today are really driving demand for PROS. We've actually seen it in the top of the funnel, and it's been part of a lot of conversations even happening here at Outperform. I would love you, as our resident expert, to give your perspective on why is market volatility something that causes businesses to look at a solution like PROS?
Yeah, thanks, Belinda. I think if you look at situations where PROS really shines, it's volatility and complexity. If any one of those exists, PROS technology is incredibly valuable. It's not just about tariffs. It could be inflation, downturn, any kind of events, pandemics. In those situations, our software, what it allows companies to do is to understand what to do and to do that to execute the strategy very quickly. Think of Outthink and Outpace. To give you an example, I'll give you two examples on Outpace. We have one ingredients company, and in one of their business units, they have Pro CPQ. When the tariffs were coming through, they figured out what prices they wanted to do. Within an hour, they had them in CPQ. Sales people were able to quote. They had another business unit.
It was a company that they recently acquired. They were using spreadsheets, and it took them two weeks to get those prices into their system. You can imagine when you have cost fluctuations, the value of being able to execute that very quickly. An Outthink example is we have a high-tech distributor that when they had a number of cost changes, tariff impact on their prices. They use the optimization to figure out, okay, where do we adjust prices? If it's 10%, maybe some customers, some segments, they're underperforming relative to their peers. We're going to raise those a little more. Some actually, we're not going to increase the price as much. They use the optimization in order to outthink their competitors in terms of how they pass that along. The PROS technology is really unique. We optimize the future, not the past.
Some technologies out there, they'll look at, they'll do a segmentation approach, and they're looking at the past behavior. That's not very, it doesn't adapt to the market. We have a forecasting element into our AI that looks forward. We're looking at trends and adjusting our optimization to those trends. Whenever you have that volatility and complexity, it's incredibly valuable because it's optimizing the future.
Thanks, Craig. Okay, Stefan, I can't go without asking you a question. We just had our earnings call about a week ago. Can you give investors just a little summary of Q1, how it went, and how you're kind of thinking about how we are thinking about 2025?
Yeah, certainly. You know, we were very happy with our first quarter performance, beat on all the metrics that we put out there. Also, for the first time in a very long time, had positive free cash flow in the first quarter, which I know if a lot of you follow PROS, you know Q1 is always a seasonally high cash spend for us. It is really encouraging to see the progress come all the way through and flip that from a burn to a cash flow generation quarter. You know, as it sets out for the year, we are very happy with how guidance sets us up for the year. We have talked about an accelerating second half. We are positioned to do that through our guidance and with the visibility we have seen with the bookings we have had both on subscription and services.
We really feel good about how the first quarter landed and then how that's setting us up for the second half of the year.
Awesome. All right, I will open it up to the room and also online. We do have somebody running mics just to see if there are any questions. If people are being shy, I definitely have more questions that I can ask, but.
Scott's not shy.
Thanks. Always lots of questions, I'm sure. We're supposed to be professionals at this, I guess.
Yeah.
I guess a couple of questions. Jeff, want to start with you? You're the guy in the room. You've been here about a month, not quite, kind of at least evaluating and checking out the business.
Yep.
What do you think you do differently when you come forward, if anything? Or is this managing a business that's already operating well?
First of all, it's absolutely already managing a business that's already operating well. The way I think about this is amplify. This is the word you'll probably hear me talk a lot about, and I'd love for that to get into your heads. This is one of the things that, once again, attracted me here. It's a very financially strong business. It's a business that's doing well. It is starting to accelerate. As you all know, the bookings are continuing to accelerate. This is about amplifying a lot of things that already exist. I love to tell a story, which is that in the last two companies I've been at, we've replaced the CPQ product in those organizations, and PROS was not even in the consideration set.
One of the things I'm really excited about here is what I think is a huge market opportunity and really starting to further raise our awareness and branding in the market so that we're getting more at-bats. This company wins a lot whenever it gets an at-bat. Obviously, one of the things we want to do is continue to increase the demand generation efforts. One of the ways I think we can do that is through further amplifying the work that Andres and the whole team have been doing around channel and partner ecosystem. I very much believe in the partner ecosystem. I think if you just look at the CRM vendors alone, we're not really in what I think of as their jet stream of deals.
That's not easy necessarily to do, but I think there are deals that they can't necessarily respond to very well, and we're better positioned. Craig just gave a really good example of where PROS wins more often than not. Frankly, a really good example of that is a deal that I know very closely before I joined the organization that ServiceNow was bidding after and lost to PROS. I think that's a really good example of where if we had been in maybe more closely with ServiceNow selling that deal together, and there's examples like that all across the CRM landscape. That's just an example of where I think we're going to continue to focus where we have already been focused, but apply more effort, do more, probably more strategically as well with some of these partners.
I think the partner ecosystem's got a really big opportunity.
I'll take one follow-up and pass it on. Andres, you and I chatted last night. I spent my entire day yesterday on the travel side of the business. I hadn't done that in a long time, mainly because one of the questions I get most frequently is, what's the growth like in travel? It's been a tough couple of years for the business, obviously. What does that outlook look like in the next couple of years, next decade, hopefully as those customers continue to heal off of obviously a difficult macro environment? The feedback I got was there's a real energy around interest in some of the technologies out there. I think for the first time in several years, whether it's they have budgets, they have processes, they're in market, there was just something different about it, which is good.
How do you think about your penetration rates across the industries today in kind of two buckets? The core revenue management bucket, which I think a lot of your investors understand, but then all the other ancillary items that you're doing today, which is actually probably fueling more of the growth in the RM side of the house. Help us understand what that penetration looks like and maybe some additional opportunities.
Yeah, no, that's a great question. I'm seeing right now a lot of airlines are really focused on the future of offer optimization. You probably see it's a lot around experience. Premium products are doing very, very well. You're probably seeing that all of them are working very much on how they're improving their experience pre-flight, in-flight, post-flight, and what that future is. What I would tell you is we're seeing quite a bit of demand, not just in the RM, which we're winning new RM deals, but everything from the offer marketing to the shopping to the merchandising, the full stack that provides offer optimization to dynamic pricing of ancillaries. They're leaning into there because that's how they get revenue growth and opportunities.
I will say the big shift for airlines is they went through pretty massive impact in COVID, and they lost a lot of people and a lot of talent. They first focused on the front office to get everyone needed out in the field and in front of customers to scale the airlines back up. The teams in the IT, in the RMs, those that were still building. What I would tell you now is they have the teams, and they're starting a lot of initiatives. We've seen it in Q3 improved, Q4 improved, Q1. I can tell you here at Outperform, they want to invest in the areas that we're innovating. I would say the agent technology is resonating really well because it's giving them ways to bring agents in to drive more scale with less people.
Those are areas that are very strategic for airlines, as well as improve the customer experience. These new areas that we've been innovating on across the board from corporate sales to dynamic pricing of ancillary to all of our real-time pricing capabilities are areas they're investing in. I see very good demand right now.
Maybe just some thoughts on how the agent strategy or the agent product will be priced, how it changes the revenue or economic model, if at all?
Yeah. Great question. The agents, we're trying to use more of a product-led growth strategy around the agents. Think about trials, POCs, where they can activate them. Depending on the component they're activated in, if they're activating with a component that's, for example, with a sales rep, think of an additional per user per month type model. If they're in a component that's based on transaction or revenue, an additional amount of revenue with a governor limit of volume. The one thing on the agents is we want to have X amount of volume that's included. Then you have another component that you pay if you're doing way more volume. Because with these agents now, as you start to activate, let's say, self-service capabilities within customers, the volume could increase. We want to be able to, as we're driving more value, be able to monetize that value.
Because we've set a goal framework around this, being able to measure productivity improvement as well as revenue margin improvement that's being driven by the agents, we want to be able to quantify the value that we're generating. To me, this is a unique capability that we can actually activate in a trial mode and use more of a product-led growth strategy on. Yeah.
Good morning, Devin now from KeyBank. Thanks for organizing this. I want to follow up on, I guess, travel. I think in the past, you've talked about, I think some of your customers, they've had maybe a slow to rehire some of the backend operational people, and that might have kind of delayed some of the implementation timelines. Maybe just from your recent conversations with them at the conference, but also just recently, how are you thinking about these personal constraints? Is that fully back and maybe kind of tie it back to the second half acceleration you expect?
Yeah, I would say it's fully back. What's resonating has been interesting. I've also been out on the road talking to a lot of the executives in our customer base. The agent technology is really resonating because they can see, for example, for the RM system, they have flight and demand analysts. As they're scaling, and some of our customers are scaling their go-to-market, adding new routes, by having agents, they don't have to necessarily hire larger teams. I would say the areas that help them drive efficiency are areas they're leaning in. Two big areas that I see them investing more are areas that can either drive efficiency for the airline that they can see scaling their business without necessarily hiring a lot of additional headcount or areas that are going to improve their revenue mix.
Think of all of the offer optimization capabilities or bring demand like our offer marketing. In terms of teams, they have the teams now to begin initiatives. I'm not seeing right now where they say, "Hey, we really want to do this. We have the budgets, but we don't have the teams." That's not an issue. In some of these, like our new agents, they really don't need big teams to deploy. We can activate it in the cloud environment. I think that some of these new solutions also make it easier for them to start trialing them to see the benefit and then be able to expand on them.
Got it. That's good to hear. Sorry, one quick follow-up. I know also in the past you've talked about kind of unifying or trying to unify the sales team between B2B and travel. Maybe speak to how is that going and if you've seen any sort of efficiency or productivity gains from that progress.
Yeah, so I would tell you we're largely a unified go-to-market team. It has been several quarters where we focus on unified from marketing to sales to PS to customer success in a regional focus. What that's brought us is much closer to our customers. We have, as you can tell from being in Outperform, very close relationships, but now in every region, we have a lot more touchpoints with the customers. So far, that's working well. Clearly, it shows up in our results in how we're executing from a go-to-market. I would say our go-to-market execution all the way to our customer success continues to improve. In the metrics, when you look at sales cycle times improved by more than 10% this year. Think of the macro effect. Companies are talking about deal delays, and we're executing well. Also, linearity on bookings.
We talked about month one, two, and three. That continues to improve. To me, those are good data points that not just the new alignment, but the new alignment is actually driving positive outcomes.
It's funny. We also see from a market standpoint. I know when I first joined 14-plus years ago, if you talk to a B2B customer of ours, they say, "Well, we're not like airlines. Airlines are totally different." Now they're saying, "Well, we kind of want to be like airlines with this volatility." Similarly, airlines, they're doing things with the corporate and, "Hey, there's some B2B elements to it." From a market standpoint as well, the solutions are really meant to be together because they learn from each other and the capabilities are quite universal.
Jeff, you talked about the partner ecosystem and building that up.
Any thoughts or numbers you can give around currently how many, the percentage of bookings driven by partners, and what you think that should be in an ideal environment, and how you kind of build that up, what you need to do to get it to where you want it to be? Sorry, you're asking about current numbers for PROS?
Yes. Yeah, I can answer.
Yeah, I'll jump in. Yeah, right now it's about a third from a partner contribution perspective. I don't know that we've put goals around what we—Jeff currently is not our CEO yet, but he'll be here on June 2nd. I'll let you kind of comment more qualitatively if you want on just how you're thinking about the challenge.
Perfect. Yeah. I don't have the numbers yet, as Belinda just said. I think if you just think about, once again, deal flows, right? I mean, we've got to name a few different targets here. Obviously, one of the things I've got to do is spend time with a couple of these big players and sort of see where we have the fastest uptake and where we can drive the most traction. Yeah, look, bottom line is I've got to get in and really kind of understand where we're at today, where the opportunity is going to be, how quickly we can drive some traction. Don't really have any kind of a model yet in my head. It's more sort of, here's where I know the big players are and where the big deal flows are, and we'll go target there and start to develop.
I have a lot more, but I was trying not to hog the mic. I'll do two more before passing on. First of all is this AI theme that's really kind of exploded over the last two years. I guess, why is that not the catalyst to driving better growth for PROS going forward? Because you guys have been an AI company for not just years, but decades. This should be like a sweet spot for you all here.
Yeah, I do believe this is a sweet spot for us, and I believe it is. AI, and I talked about it in my keynote yesterday, there is a lot of people that fear AI. The natural tendency initially is it's going to reduce jobs, it's going to impact me, and can I trust it? We've always focused on this responsible AI approach in getting trust and getting people to really embrace AI, not as a tool to replace them, but a tool to augment them. I do believe right now the interest in driving wider adoption has increased quite a bit. You're seeing it in Q3, Q4, Q1.
Where before in B2B, especially travel, has believed in AI for a long time, but in B2B, a lot of companies would say, "I don't know that I'm ready for AI yet," because they've been thinking about B2B largely has been a rule-based, cost-plus, formula-based pricing model that's in their head. They've been doing that for 80 years. How did they move to trusting that an algorithm is managing that in real time and more self-serve? I think two things that are driving that acceleration is one, the volatility has increased to a point that rules just can't work. Two, B2B is leaning very hard into self-service. I think those two areas together with AI adoption becoming now almost a must-have. Boards are saying, "Hey, what are we doing around AI? What are we doing to drive efficiencies?" I think will drive an acceleration.
The trust in PROS and our responsible AI approach helps companies have confidence that we're the right solution to drive success. I do believe that the opportunity to accelerate is there.
Craig, I actually asked you this similar question the other day, so I would like you to expand too because you've looked at B2B pricing for a long time from a maturity perspective.
Yeah. When 10 years ago, a lot of our work with prospects, it was kind of missionary explaining what pricing software is, for example. I would say every deal we go into now, companies, they understand what pricing software is. They're trying to figure out, okay, how to get it started, how to deploy it. I think the trust element as well that Andres mentioned, there's an increased element of trust. If you were here last year, HP talked about how when they started with us, they had 90% of their deals had a manual review. Someone reviewed it through a deal desk. Now 90% is no touch, the optimization. They want to take that further to 95%. Companies increasingly are having trust in the AI, seeing companies like HP deploy the technology and are getting it.
I think there are a lot of tailwinds that are leading to the acceleration.
Second one for me is on your 2027 converts, Stefan. You got to have one question at least as the CFO, right? I've been feeling this more over the last probably quarter or so is if I look back to 2023, you had some three-year goals around the financial framework of the business with some of the challenges in travel last year, kind of bump that to 2027 a little bit to your row 40 goal. How do you think about cash flows kind of within that framework and your ability to pay off your 2027 converts and what that timing or maybe capital structure looks like at that point in time?
Yeah. As we look forward, we feel good about how we're positioned today and what our cash flow generation capability will look like getting to the 2027 convert due date, which is September of 2027. To the conversation we've been having, one of the reasons I have confidence in our ability to generate free cash flow is our own internal use of AI. It is a key pillar of our strategy. As excited as people are here about how agentic AI is going to help their business, that conversation has been happening quite a bit inside the four walls of PROS, which is really awesome to see. It gives me good confidence to know that there's still scalability. That said, I do feel like we'll be looking at the capital structure over the course of the next several months and quarters.
There may be an opportunity for us to look at how we might restructure that or set it up a little to where it's a little longer term in duration. We'll be looking at that mainly to give us optionality. That will be something that we look at just given what's going on in the market in terms of pricing and in terms of stock price and all those factors that we typically take into consideration.
I'll do a quick follow-up for Stefan here too. It seems like Jeff is looking to kind of bring in more initiatives and amplifying brand and such. Maybe question here is, is there flexibility in the guidance and the margin guidance for him to kind of explore these initiatives and backend? Just kind of speak to that, Stefan, if you can.
Yeah, no, absolutely. I think there's one of the things that we've been really working hard towards is building scale and efficiency in the business. AI is a central theme to that. I think more than anything, it's been the attitude that our leadership and our employees have embraced. If you go back and look over time, and I just did this not too long ago, I went back and looked at what our expenses have done. I went back and looked at what we spent in Q1 of 2020 and what we spent in Q1 of 2025. It's actually right at the exact same amount of money, both on a cost side and on an OpEx side. That actually surprised me at how efficient our organization has been. That doesn't come from me or just AI.
That comes from an attitude inside the organization to build something that's scalable that helps us achieve that expansion of profitability and margin on the free cash flow side. I can tell you, there's still more to come. Jeff and I have had a couple of preliminary conversations about that. I know he's very excited about AI and how we can leverage that. I feel very good about our ability to continue on the track that we've been on over the last five years.
If I can actually expand on that, because I actually think that this is a really important point and some examples to maybe make this clear, right? I mean, once again, you got to give this guy huge credit. I mean, his push to get every single employee in our company figuring out how to use AI in their daily jobs. I mean, his admin is now using AI to go to travel, right, so that she can become more efficient. I have to tell you, I'm really impressed with how she's able to make impact across the business to help him do more strategic activities. That is just one tiny little example.
If you think about customer service and customer support, the world I just came out of, I mean, the opportunity there to go and now train an AI agent across all of our support collateral material and start doing more self-service support for our customers is going to allow us to scale that service and support organization as our revenue grows. That's not a statement to say we're looking to reduce people because that's not at all what it's about, but it is about continuing to do what the company has been doing, which is scaling the cost structure as the revenue is growing without having to add a lot of cost. You can do that in our sales organization, right? We're talking a lot. I get a lot of questions already about travel versus B2B.
I want you all to start thinking about this as a pan-industry sort of company where we're not sort of overemphasizing airline all the time. Airline's very important. I love the airline business. We're going to continue to leverage our strengths there, but we are very serious about every industry in B2B. The example there is salespeople using the agents now that we're launching are themselves not going to have to spend as much time quoting and figuring out pricing that we have to do internally as well, right? It will allow them to go start focusing more on what is the close plan, who do I need to know inside of an organization that I don't that's going to block a deal or that I've got to get to sign off on a deal, and start scaling that sales organization.
The last point is that I really think there's an opportunity as well on the go-to-market side to continue for us to add more industry expertise. I think this is one of the biggest challenges that software organizations have today is customers are looking for us to advise them, consult with them, help them understand how to use the software, not just exactly what it is, how much is it going to cost me. As we take away a lot of those admin activities from the Salesforce, they're now going to be able to go focus, get more industry expertise, or allow us to bring in some industry expertise because I'm able to scale the sales function in a different way through using AI internally.
Yeah, the only thing I would add is the amount of AI adoption inside of PROS is very, very large. It's every organization. We have a whole agent framework that crosses every team. Think of the future of scaling businesses as not headcount-based. The future of scaling businesses is enabling more agents. Think SDR agent. Think of those concepts of how you're embedding that not only is helping you scale more efficiently, but you're being more prescriptive in your engagement. You're ensuring that you're nudging the rep. As we're thinking of our technology for customers, we're also embedding our technology inside of PROS. Think of the operational and the goal-setting measurements inside that are tied to the agents inside of PROS. Every leader is looking at what does the organization of the future look like. We're also leveraging technology to do code generation using AI-based.
Our new capabilities we're building much faster. Our requirements are being powered by AI, our code's powered by AI, our testing is powered by AI, our security is powered by AI, our support. Every organization is thinking, what does it mean? What is the next generation UX person, the next generation PM person? How are we elevating roles? I think the whole leadership team is behind this mindset. If you look at our headcount, our headcount hasn't moved as we've grown. It's because of this mindset of how are we prepping our team for the future and how we're embedding AI deeply inside of PROS. If we're an AI person, we've always had AI at the core of our product, and now AI is thriving. How do we function as an AI-native business? That's how we're going to scale.
Obviously, we built room for program spend on areas around go-to-market as we scale, but we also have efficiencies as we're layering more AI in our implementations. As we're layering more AI into every part of our process, then we don't need to scale people as much.
Yeah, a couple of points to really emphasize on what Jeff and Adam just said. The benefits of the AI that we've already put in place, you haven't really felt yet because you'll feel it by the fact that we're not adding people as we grow our business. The benefit of what we're doing is not only helping us today, but it's yet to come, okay? The second thing is, as much as we've adopted AI inside the organization, I can tell you there's much more to come. Especially as people start to see it more and more, it's kind of an exponential impact because once somebody sees it, then ideas start entering their head about what's the next thing, what's the next thing, what's the next thing.
There is still a lot of ideas that have not been deployed yet that will be deployed that will provide even more scale and efficiency.
Think about by role in organization, what % of it is being processed by AI? Over time, how you bring those percentages and maybe 10% to 20-30-40 in every organization starting to measure their own productivity of how they're driving scale. It's a different mindset from to me. We had a keynote speaker yesterday from Forrester that talked about this, but it is the future of business has to be powered by AI as we scale. The ways that businesses are going to scale and the organizations are going to be built is different than what it's been in the past. I think the whole leadership team is aligned behind this vision, which as we accelerate our sales, it means that we won't have to scale from a people perspective in normal patterns.
I've got one, Stefan, just that I've been clarifying quite a bit since we released earnings. While we have the opportunity here, let's go ahead and talk about it as a group. One of the questions we've been getting from investors is just I want to remind them about how our pricing model works and whether or not we're tied from a transactional level to very closely to passenger volumes and airlines because I think there's maybe a misunderstanding that, okay, Pros travel business is getting better, but we've been hearing airlines talk about weakening demand in the industry. Reconcile that for me. Could you give our investors just kind of an overview of how they should think about passenger volumes with respect to our solutions and our revenue?
Yeah, you know I think even if you go back to COVID and you look at what happened in that era, especially to the airline industry, you saw a significant drop in their revenue and their cash flow. We did not necessarily feel it directly because the way our business is modeled is we have a while we do have a pricing point on volume, it is based on tiers. As long as the tiers are in place, we do not really see a revenue impact. We ultimately did provide some relief. That was a conscious decision that we did because of the unprecedented impact that our airlines had faced. From our standpoint, only about 1% of our revenue base is impacted by volume. When you think about the stability of our business, it is very, very stable.
Even if you see a slight movement up or down on the passenger boarded metric that all airlines talk about, you're not going to see that big of an impact on our business because we don't have a lot of variability in our pricing and in our contracts.
Can you maybe talk about the competitive environment for the CPQ product? It's obviously a little bit more crowded than I guess what you would do in the airline business. How you think about that, who you need to pay attention to, and how you think that evolves over the next several years?
Yeah, no, that's a great question. Look, I would say our competitive environment has only improved. I would say now that we have leadership position, we're the only CPQ vendor that has leadership position across Gartner, Forrester, IDC. We had the biggest leap in the Gartner and Q. I think the big difference in our CPQ was always that we are the only CPQ that was designed for every channel. All CPQs were designed really as a very tightly coupled to CRM. As companies are starting to think about the future and thinking about self-serve and thinking about marketplaces in a B2B world, they can't be with a boat anchor to CRM because they don't want to necessarily have everything go through CRM and CRM isn't designed as a high availability, high throughput solution.
Ours was designed first as a headless commerce, next generation CPQ with AI at the core. I would say if anything, our leadership position has just extended. I will say with Salesforce no longer selling their Steelbrick, I think it creates a unique opportunity. They're now pushing the Revenue Cloud, but now once again, every customer has to re-implement with a new solution. I think we've seen a pretty big uptick in demand on our side, just customers wanting to think about the future, also thinking about what CRM means in the future and how they move as they're thinking of more customer self-serve motions. I think we're uniquely positioned because we have a microservice, high availability architecture around configuration, around quote, around real-time pricing and offers. I think it creates a really unique position to accelerate.
For me, and Jeff and I have talked a lot about this, right now it's about activating the channel and continuing to improve our brand awareness in the market. I believe we have a very, very strong solution. You can see by being here at the brands of companies that have adopted PROS, we have some of the most well-known brands in the world at very large scale. It's now how do we continue to amplify our brand awareness and really start to activate the channel. We really have a channel-ready solution. This is an area that we've started, but now it's time to really amplify that. I would say, look, Q1, we had some really good results with the channel. I will say Q1, we had a very, very strong CPQ.
I talked about it in the earnings call, but we are seeing the momentum pick up in CPQ. It is about executing.
I think one thing that Andre, you talked about how our product is channel agnostic. In other words, it can work with any CRM. You would not be able to tell that if you actually saw the demo of the product. For those of you that see the demo of the product, it fits very nicely. You do not even know when you left Salesforce and PROS or vice versa with Dynamics.
The beauty of our CPQ is we can run a single instance of PROS with multi-CRM, multi-ecommerce. The reality is how many companies have one ERP, one CRM? They're not that many because they're acquiring companies and they have multiple systems. With PROS, you can actually have single instance. We have customers right now live that have multi-CRM, Salesforce and Dynamics, and one instance of PROS. I can look at quotes on either system because of how we architect it.
That's true in CPQ and pricing.
Yeah, same thing with pricing. I can have multiple ERPs on the back end. Really what we're giving customers is this notion that even if they acquire businesses on the old systems, they would have a quote that goes to this same customer for the products that are on this CPQ, this CRM, another quote that goes to this same customer for the products that are on this other BU. For us, we can unify it and they can have one quote, one customer experience, and then we actually populate both CRM and ERPs underneath. That is something that's very unique to the PROS platform beyond the AI. I think from a competitive, we're in a very strong position. It's like Jeff talked about, it's really amplifying our brand awareness and our partner channel. How do we light up our partner channel to accelerate our growth?
Any other questions? All right. We'll wrap here. All right. Thank you, everybody, for attending and making time. We appreciate it. I'm sure we'll talk to more of you later. If there's anything we didn't get to or any questions online, please reach out at ir@pros.com.
Thank you.
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