“Historically, we flew customers to Grand Rapids to tour our factories and see how well we make office furniture,” he says. “But in the last four or five years, that’s changed dra-matically. We are now bringing folks up to see new products, sure, but most importantly we show them how we – Steelcase – are using our space to achieve our business results.
“The other big reason for coming to Grand Rapids is to meet our experts in design, ergonomics, what’s going on with ‘The Office of the Future,’ those kinds of things.”
Their products are there, their people are there and their facilities are there to show how things work in practice, since the company serves as its own guinea pig. Consequently, Steelcase is in a constant state of visi-ble evolution, not just in their product lines, but also in their application.
The emphasis has changed as well. “When I started 17 years ago, our tag line was ‘Quality Office Furniture,’ which is what Steelcase is all about. But, today, our aspiration is to trans-form how people work. We first need to understand what their business needs are, whether they are trying to improve their speed to market, innovation, col-laboration, throughput, whatever.”
That emphasis has changed how Steelcase sells. “Each customer visit is unique. We do not have a standard tour,” Yeates says. “It’s customized based upon what the customer needs and what we want to show them. Usually it starts off with a welcome by a Steelcase corporate officer, thanking the customer for their time and also trying to gauge what their issues are. And then usually we spend upfront time really honing in on what their objectives are. And then, based upon that, they can go to various settings, see how our people work in them – the different alternatives, in our living laboratory.
“But it’s more than that,” says Yeates. “When you spend a day or two with people, through all kinds of set-tings, breakfast, having dinner, study-ing office space, flying back on the plane together, you’re cementing rela-tionships, and relationships are at the core of what we do. It’s what’s impor-tant. They get a chance to know you better, understand your company, and understand what you’re trying to accomplish – and we get to under-stand them.”
Afterwards, customers often request that their higher-ups reprise the expe-rience. “They’ll say, ‘Our executives need to see this first hand.’ We had one customer that came back four times in four weeks with four different levels of executives, all on our planes.”
Their success rate – the number of tour-takers who eventually buy – is about three in four.
Little of this would happen without Steelcase’s flight department, says Yeates. “There is no doubt that we would not be able to get the number and quality of people to come to Grand Rapids without our aircraft. In the last year alone, we’ve been able to get 75 CEOs to Grand Rapids. That’s because we usually can pick people up early in the morning, spend the day in Grand Rapids, and get them home in time for dinner. Otherwise, they have to connect through Detroit or Chicago, and they’re not going to do it.
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