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Your Go-to-Market, Run Through Our Frameworks
We publish two frameworks that HR practitioners use to buy technology and to plan for AI agents. Your buyers are already looking at you through them. This is what happens when you look at yourself the same way.
The two frameworks, briefly
B.R.I.D.G.E.
Six gates every HR technology purchase passes through: Business problem, Requirements, Internal alignment, Decision criteria, Guided vendor review, Execution readiness. Skip one and the purchase goes wrong in a predictable way.
The Five Workforces
Five stages of how organizations absorb AI agents, from the ungoverned Free-for-All through the Augmented, Delegators, Orchestrated, and Autonomous. Most organizations are far earlier than their vendors assume.
Buying → Becoming. Every tool a team buys lands them in a workforce. Every workforce they want drives new buying.
Both are published in full and free to read. Nothing on this page depends on you not having seen them — the value is not the model, it is applying it to your specific go-to-market with the buyer data underneath it.
How buyers move through the six gates
Every HR technology purchase passes through the same six gates. Each one is a place you can be more useful to a buyer, and each asks something a little different of you.
Business problem
Where the buyer is: still putting words to something they feel but have not yet defined.
How to meet them: Lead with the problem in their language rather than the capability in yours. Vendors who do this get found by buyers who did not yet know what to search for.
Requirements
Where the buyer is: turning a felt problem into a written list, often borrowing category language from whoever they read first.
How to meet them: Make sure the words you use are the words they will write down. This is where clear category positioning pays for itself.
Internal alignment
Where the buyer is: trying to bring finance, IT, and leadership along with them.
How to meet them: Give your champion an argument they can carry into a room you are not in. The business case travels; the feature tour does not.
Decision criteria
Where the buyer is: building a scorecard, often early and often from one vendor’s framing.
How to meet them: Help them weight criteria around the outcome they actually want. Buyers welcome this when it is genuinely useful to them.
Guided vendor review
Where the buyer is: asking people they trust who belongs on the shortlist.
How to meet them: Be known and understood by those sources. That is exactly what analyst relations is for, and it is the gate where it does the most good.
Execution readiness
Where the buyer is: close to signing, and rarely asked whether they are set up to adopt.
How to meet them: Raise it yourself. Vendors who qualify for readiness see better adoption, stronger references, and renewals that take care of themselves.
Are you selling to the workforce your buyers actually have?
Meeting buyers where they actually are is the difference between a demo that impresses and a decision that happens.
Most HR technology marketing right now is written for the Orchestrated workforce — governed, integrated, humans and agents in one system. Most buyers are somewhere between the Free-for-All and the Augmented, where people are using unsanctioned tools and nobody has governance at all.
That gap is worth closing. Showing a buyer the step in front of them — and the path beyond it — tends to land better than describing a destination they cannot picture yet.
What we assess
- Which workforce stage your product genuinely serves today, as opposed to the one on your homepage
- Which stage your actual buyers are in, from our buyer research rather than your pipeline
- The size of the gap, and whether the answer is to change the messaging or change the roadmap
- Where the market is moving, so you are not repositioning into a stage that arrives in four years
How this gets delivered
Buying-journey gap analysis
Your go-to-market mapped against the six gates, with the highest-leverage opportunities named and prioritized.
Workforce-stage positioning
Where your product sits, where your buyers sit, and what to do about the distance between them.
Enablement on the gates
Your reps trained on the framework their buyers are using, so they can diagnose a deal instead of guessing at it.
Sessions, not a PDF
Preliminary findings and a delivery session with the people who own the decisions.
This work is usually scoped as a market or product alignment, or delivered as an onsite day. It can also run as an advisory retainer theme across a year rather than a single project.
Why this is not just a consulting framework
These two models are published, used by practitioners in free self-assessments, and taught to HR buyers directly. We are not applying a private methodology to you — we are showing you the same lens your buyers are being handed.
It also means the diagnosis stays private. Framework work is advisory: it never becomes published research about you, and where you land does not affect how you are treated in a category guide. Full policy.
Questions about the frameworks
Can we not just read the frameworks and do this ourselves?
You can, and you should read them — both are published in full and free. What you cannot do from inside the building is see where your buyers actually are, because your only sample is people who already agreed to talk to you. That is the part we bring.
How do you know where our buyers are in the frameworks?
From Insights@Work, our ongoing buyer-behavior research, and from the practitioners taking the self-assessments. Not from your CRM, which we neither need nor want access to.
Is this the same as a positioning exercise?
It overlaps, but it is diagnostic rather than generative. A positioning exercise asks what you want to say. This asks where in a six-gate journey you are actually losing, and which of five workforce stages your buyer is genuinely in. The messaging work follows from the answer.
What if we come out looking bad?
Then you found out from us, privately, rather than from a quarter of missed number. Nothing from this work is published, and it does not affect your standing in our research either way.
Do our sales reps get trained on this?
If you scope enablement in, yes. Reps who can name which gate a deal is stuck at run better deals than reps working from a stage name in the CRM.
Does this work if we are not an AI product?
Yes. B.R.I.D.G.E. is about how HR technology gets bought, full stop. The Five Workforces matters to you even if you sell nothing AI-related, because your buyers are making agent decisions that reshape what they need from every other tool.
Can we license the frameworks for our own materials?
Talk to us. The models are free to read and cite with attribution. Building them into your own sales collateral is a licensing conversation, and the answer is usually yes with terms.
See your go-to-market through your buyers’ eyes
Bring your recent wins and losses. We will show you what the buying journey looked like from the other side of it.
Book a fit call →
Read the frameworks first: B.R.I.D.G.E. and the Five Workforces.
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