We’re excited to announce the launch of a buyer referral program, which will reward our provider community with cold, hard cash for referring new buyers to the OnForce marketplace.
To participate, providers just need to refer a buyer to OnForce, and instruct them to include their Tech ID as the “Referral Code” during the sign up process. OnForce will keep track of all buyers who sign up using a pro’s Tech ID. Then, anytime one of these buyers closes their first work order, the pro will receive $25 in your OnForce account.
The more active a referred buyers is, the more cash we’ll pay out:
• If that buyer closes 10+ more work orders within the next three months (after the month of their 1st work order), the pro earns an additional $100; OR
• If a buyer closes 100+ work orders within the next three months (after the month of their 1st work order), the pro earns an additional $1,000.
So each referred buyer can be worth $25, $125 or $1025, depending upon how active they are. There is no limit to the number of buyers a provider can refer, so the payouts are unlimited.
I’ve been meaning to post these pics for a while, but haven’t had a chance until now. As many members of our buyer and provider community noticed and pointed out, OnForce was a prominent sponsor during the NBA Eastern Conference Championship and the Finals. And while the on-court results weren’t what I wanted personally (go Pistons!), there were a lot of smilin’ faces around the halls of our Lexington, MA headquarters. Beyond that, we were extremely pleased with the exposure that the OnForce brand received.
In addition to the 10-15 minutes of LED advertising that we received each game, we were fortunate enough to have our LED ads make it into a two-page spread in Sports Illustrated (see pages 8-9 of the June 2nd issue), the Celtics home page, and some serious exposure during the ESPN / ABC primetime telecasts (see below).
This is the first time we’ve done awareness-oriented marketing on this type of stage, but I suspect that you’ll see more such placements in the future. Here were a few of our favs:
Kevin Garnett takes a break under the glow of the OnForce LED ad…
.
The C’s on their way to the title, and our ON button smiling down over the scene…
.
The main scoreboard at The Garden, lit up with our “Find Pros Here” ad…
To paraphrase Forrest Gump, “I am not a smart man…”
As a growth-oriented business, we break company records on a regular basis. But the really big, all-time records are always tougher to knock off. So when we recorded our highest-ever weekly volume a few weeks ago, it elicited some back-patting around the halls of OnForce. When we re-set the record the very next week, it was cause for some real celebration. And when I decided to throw down the gauntlet, stating in writing that I would shave my head if we broke our all-time volume record for a third week in a row… well, it just affirmed that Forrest was speaking for me too.
So what have I learned?
- First, the vp of marketing should never, ever make an offer like that in writing to a hungry, driven, talented (yet vindictive!) sales organization.
- Second, I never should have bet against the OnForce marketplace itself… there’s far too much momentum behind it. In the past six months, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in adoption by our buyers. I should’ve known better than to bet against that overwhelming trend and momentum.
- Third, B.A. Baracus would be proud (ok, so maybe I just hope that one’s true).
- Finally, I’d make the same trade any time… as soon as my hair grows back, that is.
Congrats to our sales, bizdev, market support, and all the other teams here at OnForce. And most importantly, sincere thanks to our community of IT service companies and professionals for helping us achieve back-to-back-to-back record volume weeks!
It’s been a busy 4th quarter within the halls of OnForce. In a matter of just a few months, we’ve opened our new corporate headquarters in Lexington, MA, transferred dozens of employees from New York City, and expanded the company with the hiring of 35 new employees. We also launched our Canadian marketplace, and announced expansion plans for the U.K. & Germany.
With all this change going on, we wanted to celebrate the opening of our new offices and meet members of the OnForce community. We could think of no better way than to host an event and extend some hospitality to our local buyers, providers, partners and media. So we bought some food and wine, tidied the place up a bit, dressed up in our GQ finest, and opened our doors for the first-ever OnForce Open House.
Hosting this event gave us an opportunity to mingle, enjoy some good food and drinks, and show off our new digs (also, to extend an air hockey challenge to anyone brave enough to step into our game room). Above all else, we wanted to rub elbows with local members of the OnForce community . We kicked off the festivities at 4pm that day with green and orange balloons marking the way to our door. Once inside, our guests got to observe us in our natural habitat and tour our new headquarters. Buyers mingled with providers, providers spent time with our exec team, journalists took time to chat us up about our current operations and our future expansion plans. With well over 100 people in attendance, it was an exciting evening!
It was especially gratifying to meet members of the buyer and provider community in person, and to listen as they discussed the challenges and opportunities in their businesses, the trends they’ve observed, and the war stories they swapped. We even got to meet The VAR Guy, although we never learned his true identity. All in all, it was a rousing success, and an excellent way to head into 2008. It definitely won’t be the last such event we put together.
And, even though it’s still a few days away, all of us at OnForce wish you and yours a safe and happy holiday season.
They say imitation is the most sincere form of flattery. Hopefully the folks at “Startupping”:1 will feel flattered as I pilfer their idea of posting popular forum topics in their blog. I hear too many providers (and other users of OnForce) say “Forums, what forums?” when we refer to them. Our forums serve a number of purposes: providers (primarily) share technology information with each other, promote best practices, provide tips & tricks on particular kinds of work orders, and sometimes just let off steam.
So here are some of the things providers are sharing this week:
* Dell’s announcement that all Linux-based PCs and laptops will be “loaded with Ubuntu”:5
* Protecting yourself “while surfing online”:3
* Ideas on starting an “iPod repair business”:2
* “Top technical blogs”:4 and an (understandable) acknowledgment that OnForce is not one of them. Yet.
Because so many of these were started by one provider in particular, I feel compelled to give a nod to his OnForce-focused podcast, “the Force Field”:13. I haven’t listened to it in a while, but Rick has done some very interesting things in engaging the community with this channel.
In the provider-only section (only those providers with forum accounts that clicked the provider-only forum access link in their Online Office will see these), there was a lot of discussion this week about Microsoft Vista:
* Which is better, “Vista or Mac OS X?”:6 and additional questions about “security for both systems”:8
* Issues with computers not having sufficient memory to install Vista and “what to do when it happens”:7
Unrelated to Vista…
* One of our users has done some very cool things with his video card (you can see the “forum post”:11 or the “YouTube video”:12)
Other topics included questions about the “best remote support”:9 providers and our highly-popular “”Just had to make another post”:10″ topic as providers continue the quest to have the most posts in the forums. I’m sure this is a badge of honor that I just don’t understand because we are up to page 1195 of this particular thread. With 15 posts per page, there are a lot of posts by providers trying to add to their post count. Far be it from me to question the passion… Post on, my friends…
Thanks to all who participate by posting, reading, and lurking - these forums are a tremendous source of information to the OnForce community and those who’ve not (yet) joined.
