Steelcase, Inc.

Business Challenge

Increased competition and changes in the way organizations think about their facilities has dramatically impacted the contract office furniture industry in recent years. Anticipating customers’ needs can help guide Steelcase through challenges that have disrupted the industry and the way the company does business around the globe.

Analytics Solution

To optimize allocation of sales resources and create a sustainable sales pipeline, Steelcase developed an analytical capability that understands an organization’s patterns and intent, much like it would an individual consumer. The capability develops personas and profiles to predict when and why an organization might be ready to purchase furniture again.

Steelcase’s Predictive Leads Program provides embedded analytics to guide its sales leadership in managing its existing installed base, capturing competitive accounts, and identifying new customers.

The company developed a closed-loop machine learning approach to learn from historical patterns across the industry and predict purchasing behaviors. This multidimensional view of the customer is built from internal and external data sources and delivered to Steelcase sales teams through CRM technologies.

Impact

The first wave of leads, released to Steelcase sales teams in January 2018, identified a combined market potential of more than $1.5 billion in sales. Over the last year, the Predictive Leads Program has added more than $150 million in incremental projects to the company’s pipeline, which has led to more than $15 million in incremental closed sales. This quantifiable value created is further compounded by the intangible gains through successful use of predictive analytics at Steelcase. The solution has been further extended into other regional and departmental analytic initiatives and has created executive and board-level champions for further analytic investments.