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Most people learn about cash flow from a CFO. Allison Sutera learned it the hard way—as the person responsible for running the business.

After leading P&Ls at PepsiCo, Aramark, and SIG North America, she discovered that improving cash flow isn't about collecting invoices faster. It's about fixing the way the business operates.

In this conversation, she shares the lessons every operator, consultant, and business leader should know.

Sales teams are usually measured on revenue, not cash. Why don't sellers naturally think about cash flow, and why does that become a problem?

Allison: The lens I've always had—like most sales leaders—is that your job is to get the deal done. Your job is to bring in the customer, negotiate the commercial terms, and close the business. It's somebody else's job to collect the cash.

Sales teams feel responsible for pricing, volume, delivery schedules, and maintaining the customer relationship. They rarely think about what happens after the invoice goes out or when the cash actually arrives. Once the deal is signed, it moves to other things to make the product and finance to collect payment. That's simply how most organizations are designed.

The only time cash really becomes a sales problem is when something has already gone wrong.

Finance can't resolve a payment issue, so they come back to the salesperson because they own the customer relationship. The salesperson is willing to help, but they're also not sure what to do. They often don't know who to contact or fully understand the issue, and the customer contact they're calling usually isn't the right person either.

By that point, it becomes an uncomfortable conversation. Salespeople are trying to build relationships, so collecting unpaid balances at the wrong time puts them in a difficult position.

The bigger issue is that companies intentionally protect sellers from everything except revenue generation. That's done with good intentions, but over time it creates a culture where people think, I'm not supposed to know about cash, so I'm not even going to ask.

From everything we've seen working with companies, what actually causes poor cash conversion?

Allison: What surprised me most is that these are usually business process problems.

Every company has good people trying to do the right thing, but they've inherited processes that don't work together. One example is that the entire process might depend on one person clicking "send" at the right time.

We saw the same thing across other functions. Someone in the warehouse makes the right decision to partially ship an order, so the customer isn't delayed. The salesperson approves it. Everyone thinks they've solved the customer's problem.

But nobody updates the invoice, finance doesn't know the shipment changed, and suddenly you've created a payment dispute that nobody understands.

Or take customer service. They genuinely want to help, but nobody has connected them with the people who can actually solve the underlying problem. They carry the weight of customer frustration without having visibility into what's happening elsewhere in the business.

None of these people are doing anything wrong. They're solving problems the best way they know how. The issue is that the business has created disconnected processes that rely on individual people instead of repeatable systems. Those small breakdowns eventually show up as cash problems, even though the real issue started much earlier.

If cash conversion is really an operating issue, what has to change for companies to improve it?

Allison: Leadership has to create what we've been calling a culture of cash.

Everyone in the business impacts cash flow in some way, whether they're in sales, operations, customer service, legal, or finance. But people first have to understand why it matters and what role they play. Once they understand that, they're usually eager to help.

The other lesson is not to make this feel overwhelming. Companies often think they need massive ERP implementations or years-long transformation programs, but that's not what we've seen. If you break the problem into manageable pieces, create transparency, and fix a few high-impact issues first, you can make meaningful progress very quickly.

What We Can Learn from Allison Sutera:

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