How PROS and Microsoft are redefining CPQ and B2B sales

June 30, 2025

In B2B sales, precision and personalization are critical for success. For PROS—a global leader in pricing optimization and Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) solutions—precision and personalization are what they do best. And they’ve earned every bit of their expertise, building the foundation of their success on a customer-first approach to innovation—and a strong partnership with Microsoft.

PROS’ story began 40 years ago with an ambitious idea: to harness AI for smarter revenue management. Starting with a leading airline, the company pioneered a system capable of predicting future demand, ultimately creating a new software category and laying the groundwork for PROS. “We had built a very strong arsenal of AI capabilities, everything from how you predict demand—what products and services are top of mind, and how businesses can balance that demand with their ability to fulfill it—all the way down to an individual customer’s price elasticity for that seat,” explained John Bruno, VP of Strategy at PROS.

With their proven successes in the airline industry, PROS realized the sky was truly the limit for their potential to expand into other industries. “We found ourselves at an inflection point a couple of decades ago, asking the question: What other industries could benefit from our know-how around things like forecasting and setting optimal prices?” Bruno recalled. The answer, they quickly discovered, was almost every B2B industry imaginable.

Innovating CPQ for the B2B space

Historically, B2B sales have been defined by opacity in pricing. “You don’t just see a price on the website and pay that price,” Bruno said. “There's a lot of negotiation because the commercial relationships are a bit different and more long-standing. You might be buying different volumes at different points of time. There are different factors that go into the equation.”

Understanding these complexities, PROS built their first B2B-focused solutions based on their success in AI-powered revenue management. “They’re what we call ‘Smart Price Optimization & Management.’ They’re tools to help pricing and revenue management teams identify opportunities in their business. What does demand look like? How am I going to define my commercial strategy and prices?” Bruno explained. “Then the optimization side comes into it, where we’re leveraging our AI to help B2B businesses arrive at a fair and optimized price point, as well as streamline back-and-forth negotiations.”

A partnership born in the cloud and built to scale

With the rise of software and cloud solutions, the 40-year-old company had to navigate the digital revolution in real time. That’s when they made a strategic decision to prioritize partnership. “What cloud platform and hyperscaler do we want to partner with to build our solutions?” said Bruno. “Given the transactional nature of our solutions, we needed a trusted partner who could help us scale and meet the performance obligations that our customers expect. And we needed a company that wasn't afraid to co-innovate and push the boundaries of AI.”

For PROS, Microsoft checked all the boxes and then some. “With the complementary nature of what we do in pricing and CPQ and where Microsoft already plays in the customer relationship management (CRM) space—it was like bread and butter,” said Bruno.

With Microsoft as their partner and Microsoft Azure as their cloud platform, PROS could confidently build and deliver secure and scalable solutions. Plus, PROS has been able to accelerate deals by co-selling on the Microsoft marketplace, tapping into Marketplace Rewards and customers’ Azure cloud consumption commitments.

Beyond that, they’ve also gotten technical support from Microsoft to ensure their solutions are built to succeed. “Microsoft leans in and provides its engineering resources,” added Bruno. “It's in everyone's best interest to make sure we’re delivering not just functional software that works, but functional software that scales and performs.”

PROS and Microsoft: A dynamic duo

The combination of PROS Smart CPQ and Microsoft Dynamics 365 has created a powerhouse of efficiency and automation. Sales teams can generate quotes with unprecedented speed, backed by AI-driven price optimization and synchronization capabilities—right within their CRM. The resulting quote is a personalized proposal based on a combination of data from PROS Smart CPQ and Dynamics 365, delivered in either a static document or a dynamic microsite that’s accessible from any web browser—so “the negotiation can happen in a truly collaborative way,” Bruno added.

For sales teams, Bruno notes the CRM can often be the biggest pain point of their job—leading to low adoption rates, incomplete or incorrect data entry, and inaccurate forecasting. With PROS Smart CPQ, he believes that can change. “PROS Smart CPQ is a tool that’s geared 100% towards the salesperson, that’s going to help you be more effective, put the right quotes in front of people at the right price, and convert more business,” he said. “All the while, the data from your quotes is automatically being fed right back to the opportunity level, so your forecasts are more accurate. It's really a win for everyone.”

From handling large-scale quotes with over 35,000 line items to providing dynamic pricing for complex B2B environments, PROS Smart CPQ has drastically changed the game for sales teams across industries: according to PROS, their customers experience an average of 8% revenue uplift and a 67% improvement in efficiency across pricing and selling processes.

The future of CPQ is bright—and optimized by agents

Looking ahead, PROS is investing heavily in AI agents to streamline the quoting process even further. These intelligent agents simplify complex product catalogs, guiding sales teams to optimal solutions. “We’re investing in a whole host of agents, through the lens of giving people time back in the day to really focus on what makes them special,” Bruno shared. As a sales rep, that means “the more time I can save through automation—largely at the hands of agents—the more attentive I can be to the needs of my customers.”

With a commitment to delivering over 50 AI-driven use cases by year-end, PROS is poised to redefine CPQ and pricing solutions. And together with Microsoft, they’ll continue to tackle the challenges of B2B sales with cutting-edge technologies and the spirit of co-innovation.

“We've been building AI solutions with AI at their core since the beginning, and there's probably no better company than Microsoft to help flex that muscle and co-innovate with an AI lens,” Bruno said. “You can trust that in addition to the partnership being really tight, you’re also just getting really good software on both sides.”