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SPT: BTIG'S TRAINWRECK REBUTTAL

SPT: BTIG'S TRAINWRECK REBUTTAL

Ok, I can't but not shred this rebuttal to pieces.

First, little time in the report is spent trying to devalue the Salesforce partnership. The report simply states the obvious, Salesforce is sunsetting something they spent $1b+ which has 125-150ml in revenue. There is no financial relationship here and the reps can't retire quota recommending Sprout. There are reasons this decision was made which they should look into. There also some strategic reasons Sprout got this preferred partnership over Sprinklr.

Second, I never said its not positive to Sprout, in fact I commended them.

I said there is more too it with respect to how salesforce views the SMM market which is worth considering for a company whose management says is gonna grow 30% for infinity.

Nowhere in the report is the word "artificial" used. I said this growth should be viewed as "inorganic" in nature because this is a migrating customer base that is very mature. And I never said winning outside of the partnership is "not the normal way" of growth. I said it needs to be quantified based on research indicating it exists to assess the remaining size of the inorganic opportunity.

The notable Social Studio customers who moved to Sprinklr are again relevant to the quantifying the inorganic opportunity. Fortune 100 customers are the highest ACV customers in Social Studio, so the more of them that go to Sprinklr the less revenue pie is available in the remaining longer tail of Social Studio customers. These customers were also interesting because they all ran robust RFP processes which revealed a lot of interesting things about how Sprout is evalauted by the most upmarket buyers.

The report doesn't ignore the "deep integrations with service cloud" as common sense tells you that 100k Salesforce customers could have bought social studio, sprinklr, or sprout if they needed SMM. Integrating deeper with SC is helpful to existing overlapping customers, it's not a reason to suddenly buy SMM software after you had no reason to do it during COVID. Where was the big post dreamforce uplift on this anyway??

The report doesn't argue that pricing being raised is the "key reason growth will slow, which ignores the key success in the first four months". They are again putting words in my mouth. I argue that the pricing changes made sense ahead of Social Studio q4 invoicing cycle (maybe they actually didn't long-term if from a ROI standpoint they are not capable of offering these customers what will be needed for retention vs prospective competitors who might respond), but that in so implementing these very significant price increases Sprout entered into a range at which Sprinklr ROI now dwarves them. Sprinklr's strategic response signals this, and is a serious risk going forward. And the risk is existential if you were aware at how far apart pricing was just a few months ago as Sprout management has regularly been touting they were $50k cheaper than Sprinklr which is no longer remotely the case.

I did not say the higher ACV customers "should not be valued" by investors. This is again just an absurd distortion. I point out that it is impossible to ignore just how inorganic in nature this ACV shift is and that when its over there is a massive cliff. They also say I point to the 132 customers as an attempt to discredit high acv adds, when in fact I point to it to show the sharp slowdown in organic growth is easily quantifiable. What's not coming from Social Studio? Why did that drop off a cliff? Covid hangover maybe? And again its a mature client base which is getting a organic growth multiple, and this rebuttal literally just pretends that concept doesn't exist while they make shit up that I didn't say.

I have seen annoying sell-side defenses before, but this is TOTAL TRASH. BTIG SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF THEMSELVES.