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Why Omnichannel Isn’t Optional (and What PDQ Learned Along the Way)

Why Omnichannel Isn’t Optional (and What PDQ Learned Along the Way)

Why Omnichannel Isn’t Optional (and What PDQ Learned Along the Way)

Mark Evans, Senior Director of Brand and Content

Mark Evans, Senior Director of Brand and Content

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If your B2B SaaS company is still treating product-led, sales-led, and partner-led motions as separate worlds, it’s time to rethink your strategy.

 

In a recent webinar with Nue, Andrew Cowen, Director of Business Systems at PDQ, shed light on what it really takes to architect a scalable, flexible, and unified quote-to-cash engine in today’s omnichannel economy. 

 

Andrew made one thing clear: getting omnichannel right means designing for complexity early so teams aren’t constantly patching gaps later.  

 

Here are the key lessons from Andrew’s experience — and how you can apply them before it’s too late.

Omnichannel Is More Than Just a Buzzword

Buyers now move seamlessly between self-serve, sales-assisted, partner, and in-app channels, but most companies still operate in silos, with fragmented data and disconnected teams. That’s a recipe for cross-channel conflict.

 

“ Where I've seen people get caught up with omnichannel is more of the appearance of what omnichannel is. I've been at companies where they've touted an omnichannel type experience, but the reality is it's actually not quite that,” he said.

 

The solution? Centralize ownership of the quote-to-cash process. PDQ unified sales-led and self-serve experiences under one business systems team — a move that helped the company scale without tripping over internal complexity.

Centralization Is a Growth Enabler

Most companies resist centralization because it feels slow or too rigid. But PDQ found the opposite: centralizing the tech stack and data ownership actually accelerated their ability to iterate across channels.

 

“We've found centralizing your tech stack and the ownership around the technology and the process has been a really big catalyst for us for ensuring we can scale with the different needs of our go-to-market teams, our different products,” Andrew explained.

The Tech Stack Must Be Built for 10x, Not 2x

PDQ applies a “10x mentality” when evaluating systems. It’s not enough to ask if your billing engine or CRM can handle more customers. It should be able to handle ten times the number of SKUs, pricing permutations, packaging, and sales channels.

 

“Imagine your CEO committing to the board that you're going to be doing geo-based pricing starting in two months, and you have to do it on a subset of your customers.  How would you go about doing that?”

 

That question helped PDQ move away from systems like Chargebee and Stripe Billing in favor of Nue. Now, pricing changes, M&A integrations, and product launches happen without starting from scratch.

Provisioning Can’t Be an Afterthought

Provisioning — getting the product in the customer’s hands immediately after purchase — is often the invisible thread holding self-serve and sales-led flows together. And it gets messy quickly in multi-product, multi-system environments.

 

PDQ tackled this by designing a dynamic provisioning model: as soon as a purchase happens, the system identifies which product was bought and fires the correct API call to provision it, even if it belongs to an acquired company with its own infrastructure.

Build vs. Buy? Buy Smart and Build Light

PDQ once had eight engineers managing its billing portal. That model doesn’t scale, especially when agility and resource allocation are mission-critical. Instead of building everything custom, Andrew’s team prioritized platforms that balance flexibility, extensibility, and configurability.

 

“We ultimately decided that with the right technology, we can free up an entire engineering team to be repurposed towards our product,” Andrew said.

Don’t Wait Until It’s Broken

Andrew’s final piece of advice? Don’t suffer in silence.

 

“I wish we had done a better job at identifying and articulating the pain points early on,” he explained.

 

Many rev ops teams delay quote-to-cash overhauls because the problems creep in slowly. But by the time you’re drowning in reconciliation errors and manual workarounds, the damage is done.

Watch the Full Webinar

If you're navigating the chaos of multiple sales motions, evaluating your revenue stack, or preparing for M&A, you’ll want to hear how PDQ is building for the future, not just fixing the past. Watch the full recording here.

 

And don’t forget to check out our guide, Killing the Silo: The Omnichannel Revolution in B2B SaaS, for more insights on building a revenue engine that scales across any channel.