#133 Ben Goodman: Securing the World Safely & Securely Through Partnerships & Scale

For over 12 years, ForgeRock has been a top identity and access management company. Safe and secure access to resources is important in the Tech landscape.

Through its software and digital solutions, ForgeRock aims to provide people with safe access to resources vital for carrying out critical business processes.

In this episode of Ecosystem Aces, Chip Rodgers is joined by Ben Goodman, Senior Vice President, Global Business & Corporate Development at ForgeRock. Ben talks about his role in business development and handling ForgeRock’s Technology Ecosystem, also known as the Trust Network.

Ben discusses:

• How ForgeRock focuses partnerships on differentiated technology integration
• Screening process to onboard new partners
• Tracking and analysis to measure partnership success and finding new partners

ForgeRock offers all resources to partners and helps with differentiated integration

Ben is responsible for over 130 partnerships and noteworthy integrations to ForgeRock’s platform, focusing on meaningful differentiated technology integration.

ForgeRock’s sales team wants partners that help close better deals, reduce cycle sales, and collaborate on solutions that differentiate their products for good.

So, the company provides many resources to their partners to achieve success. Each partner is given access to ForgeRock’s pre-sales engineering team, with ample expertise and knowledge of technology integration. These engineers watch a demo of the partner’s solutions or integrations to get an idea of their capability and how they can develop joint differentiated integrations.

• This helps the partner know deeply about ForgeRock and its platform.
• Partners can build an interactive demo that showcases how they are different from other partner competitors.
• Partners will know everything about ForgeRock’s software and understand how their differentiation can help with specific customer issues and needs, not just a standard approach.

This also ensures that end customers have proper documentation and code to run the differentiated integration properly, which reduces risk and additional costs.

Screening process to choose worthy Partnerships

There are thousands of potential partners out there, and ForgeRock uses a pipeline approach to choose theirs. A screening process is carried out to check if a partner’s technology is worth the investment and time and if it will be possible to develop effective differentiated integrations with them.

Once a partner signs an agreement and enters the Partner Program, they can access a Backstage portal with sample code, repositories, and examples of ForgeRock’s software. Next, the partner is paired with an engineer buddy who helps them with integrations. Next comes the GTM strategy, which includes briefing and planning about joint collateral, marketing and co-selling activities.

Metrics and analysis to measure partnership success

The final piece of this puzzle involves analytics and metrics to see how a partnership is working for both partners. For this, ForgeRock has a CRM to keep track of partner engagement and provide the necessary data to the sales team.

First of all, instead of dealing with thousands of partners, Ben looks at areas of need and curates a list of 4 to 5 partners. This helps reduce the amount of data and focus on what’s important.

A metrics-based orchestration engine helps out with analysis and tracks ForgeRock’s identity workflow. This helps in the following way:

• Did the partner source a deal?
• A successful deal involves many things, and the system tracks what part of the partnerships helped close the deal.
• Decide which partnerships to double down on, build deeper integrations with and expand marketing, co-selling activities.
• Check out which partners are naturally engaging with ForgeRock’s platform and sales.

Ben focuses on profitable long-term partnerships like the one with Google Cloud. ForgeRock and Google do joint marketing, sales, and product development. For this, the partner needs to have a depth of resources. Through tracking and metrics analysis, Ben tries to find such high-standard partners.

Summing Up

Being a tech company, ForgeRock focuses on providing the best possible solutions to customers. Building partnerships should not be just for the sake of a partnership and instead focus on joint collaboration, and differentiated integration and a whole solution to bring to customers.

Investment, data tracking and analysis, and providing ideal resources to the partners for success are a must.

To connect more with Ben Goodman and stay updated about his work, you can follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Links & Resources

• Learn more about how WorkSpan helps customers accelerate their ecosystem flywheel through Co-selling, Co-innovating, Co-investing, and Co-marketing.
• Join the WorkSpan Community to engage with other partner ecosystem leaders on best practices, news, events, jobs, and other tips to advance your career in partnering.
• Find insightful articles on how to lead and get the most out of your partner ecosystem on the WorkSpan blog.
• Download the Best Practices Guide for Ecosystem Business Management
• Download the Ultimate Guide for Partner Incentives and Market Development Funds
• To contact the host, Chip Rodgers, with topic ideas, suggest a guest, or join the conversation about modern partnering, he can be reached on Twitter, LinkedIn, or send Chip an email at: chip@workspan.com

‍