Episode 2: The Death of the Gatekeeper

Mike Downer: Here we go. It’s episode two. I am Mike Downer, the Chief Storytelling Strategist for Jar Consulting. With me once again is my boss, my mentor, my hero, the owner, president, CEO, and chief maintenance officer of Jar Consulting, Kevin Wosmansky.

Kevin Wosmansky: How are we doing today, Michael?

Mike Downer: Doing great. Today, Kevin, I think we got into a lot of good stuff last time about how AI is affecting the future of business development. Because, Kevin, I know you very well, and of all the business owners I know, you’ve suffered a lot of BD. I think the time when you suffered the most is when I was your business developer.

Kevin Wosmansky: Probably true.

Mike Downer: So, from experience, I know Kevin suffers from BD—or used to.

Kevin Wosmansky: Yes, Mike. I have had many bouts that I have suffered—some pretty hard cases. As a business owner, business development is always a challenge in all industries. So, yeah, one of my biggest challenges when I was out in the field—and this is really who this is geared toward—is anybody who’s in sales, or if you have salespeople under you who are suffering from this, this is something you need to listen to. And it’s gatekeepers. I hate them.

Kevin Wosmansky: Hey, Mike, don’t you wish there was a pill you could take that could cure all your BD problems? If I could just take a pill and business development was simple, wouldn’t that be great?

Mike Downer: That would be great. Is it kind of like, you know, the red pill, the blue pill?

Kevin Wosmansky: Anyway, with the gatekeeper, there is no one pill that any business owner is going to take that’s going to fix business development. I can tell you that.

Mike Downer: Yeah, no, I definitely understand that. So the gatekeepers have always been a problem. Talk to me a little bit about gatekeepers and the death of the gatekeeper. I’d like to hear your answer on how you’re helping address that problem.

Kevin Wosmansky: Mike, let’s title this one “The Death of the Gatekeeper.” I like it.

Mike Downer: “The Death of the Gatekeeper.” All right. Explain that to us.

Kevin Wosmansky: So, we’re going to hopefully put something of value out to the world here today for about 15 minutes. Let’s talk specifically to business development. Let’s talk to salespeople and business owners. Obviously, the foundation of any business is client acquisition, right? That’s just what it is—Fortune 500, Fortune 100, or the mom-and-pop shop right down the street.

Kevin Wosmansky: I’d say “The Death of the Gatekeeper” is about how all of this relates in the era of AI and the future of business development. But to your point, in sales and businesses, there’s always the gatekeeper. The gatekeeper could be the secretary, could be the person when you walk in the door, could be the person who greets you. It could be whoever. In today’s world, it’s so many different positions.

Kevin Wosmansky: But the reason why we’re calling this “The Death of the Gatekeeper” specifically is because, in traditional business-to-business lead generation systems, your gatekeepers are your SDRs or your assistants—your first point of entry that someone is going to speak to. That person is making a decision right then and there: Am I going to let you go in and talk to the manager, or the owner, or whoever you’re trying to reach—the decision-maker?

Mike Downer: Yeah, 100%. And getting past that person, I know traditionally for me, it can be a challenge. It definitely can be a challenge. Even back in 1993, when I moved from Rochester, New York, back here, the hostess—when all I wanted to do was go talk to the manager of a restaurant—was trying to block me from talking to him. I ended up marrying her, but I really did. It’s as simple as that. Just at a restaurant, and then on up the chain, it just gets worse.

The Traditional Gatekeeper

Kevin Wosmansky: Yeah. Well, Mike, here’s why I think the traditional B2B gatekeeper has died. But real quickly, let me ask you this. You’ve got an extensive career in sales. You’ve been in radio, the automotive industry—give me an experience. I mean, that’s interesting. I didn’t know you ended up marrying the very first gatekeeper. But in your experience through a few decades of sales, what has the traditional gatekeeper looked like as a sales guy?

Mike Downer: Traditionally—and this is not being sexist—99 times out of 100, there’s a lady sitting at the front of a business, and her job is not to answer the phones. It’s not to send out the boss’s emails. That’s what you think it is. Their job is to stop you, 1,000%.

Mike Downer: I mean, I tell you, the process—it’s almost like dating. When I was in radio, especially in the early 2000s, I literally got to the point where I knew whether they liked white chocolate, dark chocolate, flowers. I mean, I would literally have to—like I said—it was almost like dating them. I had to get to know them just to be able to talk to a guy, and who knows what he was going to say. So anyway, you try to get on their positive side and get in there with a positive reflection when they introduce you.

The Rise of Neural Gatekeepers

Kevin Wosmansky: So, Mike, how could you find what type of chocolate a gatekeeper likes? Let me ask you.

Mike Downer: I had to ask questions. I had to talk to them.

Kevin Wosmansky: Right. Therein lies the issue. If you are involved in any type of sales, business development, or lead generation, understand that the gatekeeper has been replaced by neural gatekeepers. AI models now vet your brand before you even get a chance to pitch the very first person in the process.

Mike Downer: Really? See, I didn’t even know that.

Kevin Wosmansky: Yes. So as we talk about the evolution of business development—and this is really geared toward business owners—you need to start adapting and learning about AI and how it’s going to impact, affect, and change how you generate and acquire customers.

Mike Downer: So you’re talking about basically the transition—how to transition from one to the other?

Kevin Wosmansky: Well, I’m talking about the consumer right now.

Mike Downer: Okay. Consumer. So there are two parts to this—the business and the consumer.

Kevin Wosmansky: Right. So there are two parts in this evolution. Specifically, how does that consumer look for you? We’re talking about this whole vetting process—where the gatekeeper is. Really, the key takeaway here is this: traditionally, in pretty much all B2B sales models, Mike, you as a sales guy are going to go out and try to get to know whoever the first link in the chain is. It could be phone calls. It could be knocking on doors. It could be sending emails.

Kevin Wosmansky: As consumers start to evolve and learn how to use AI, how they search for things is going to change on the business end. What’s going to happen is people are going to be less inclined to want to go to your gatekeeper. My AI model is already screening it for me. So you’ve got to look at this as the business trying to acquire customers and be found, while consumers are skipping all kinds of places in the line.

The Changing Sales Journey

Mike Downer: Well, where does that leave the salesperson? Where does that leave the BDR, the business development rep?

Kevin Wosmansky: It leaves them in a whole different world. Traditionally, if they were going to knock on the door and go in—that’s all gone. Because you’ve got to see that the consumer’s journey to find a new product or service has all changed.

Kevin Wosmansky: So if you’re a salesperson and you’re used to the traditional, “I’m going to bang out 100 phone calls today. I’m going to be ruthless and consistent,” which is what business owners want, by the way—we want our sales reps, our business development reps, to get told no 100 times because at 101, there’s your sale. There’s your opportunity. You just got to the decision-maker.

Mike Downer: Like what you traditionally called the “spray and pray” method when I was working for you.

Kevin Wosmansky: Yeah, yeah, yeah. “Spray and pray.” Cold outreach. Good one, right? It’s not dead yet, but I believe it’s heading toward life support. And I say that because, guess what? It’s not going to be humans checking inboxes. We’re not there today, but I can tell you this: as a business development leader, as an operations manager, as a business owner, there’s one thing I hate. I hate checking my inbox.

Kevin Wosmansky: I can spend eight hours in a day just doing emails, and it drives me nuts. Well, guess what? I don’t have to do that anymore. I’m in the process of training agents on exactly what I want—what my priorities are, what my tone of voice is, who I want to talk to, and who I want to respond to. So the traditional cold email outreach—trying to send emails to get in front of the right decision-maker—that’s being replaced because I’m going to have agents, employees basically, that I will train to do it for me. So you have to get through my email agent to get to me. Your traditional gatekeeper is becoming agentic. That’s why I said they’re neural gatekeepers.

Transitioning to AI-Powered Discovery

Mike Downer: So how do you transition from what you called “spray and pray” to AI-powered? How do other business owners achieve what you’ve achieved? Give us an overview. How do you get there?

Kevin Wosmansky: Let’s say this. I want to hit machine evolution, right? Human evolution, machine evolution—as machine learning continues to evolve, I don’t want to spend eight hours a day on emails. I really do not.

Mike Downer: Right.

Kevin Wosmansky: Well, Mike, you’ve seen enough of my emails to know that if it wasn’t for spell-check and grammar-check, it would not be pretty, right? Because I get going so fast, I don’t have time. But if I can go from eight hours to one hour, that’s a big deal. How am I going to do that? I’m going to hire an employee that’s going to do that for me, and that employee is going to be an agent.

Kevin Wosmansky: As the machine’s learning evolves on what I want, and more importantly, what I don’t want—okay, we don’t talk enough about that—who I don’t want to talk to, what kind of emails I don’t want, what’s going to happen is this: salespeople, sales reps, business development reps, they’re going to have to evolve and understand that now they’re not talking to a human. They’re talking to an agent to get through to me.

Kevin Wosmansky: Does that make sense, Mike? And that’s just email. That’s not even phone calls. That’s not even real-world applications, right? So we’re just talking email right now. If you’re a salesperson and you want to drop me a quick email because I’m a great prospect, I’m a good buyer, and you want to set a coffee meeting—let’s get together and have coffee—just something as simple as LinkedIn, right? People love LinkedIn for business development, and it’s a great place. It’s a social platform that everyone on LinkedIn knows is for business. I’m not annoyed if you drop me a message and say, “Let’s grab coffee.” But you’ve got to think about how that’s going to change because now you’ve got to get through my agents in LinkedIn to get to me.

Consumer Adoption and Vetting

Mike Downer: Also, the other thing I wanted to ask you about today, so that we don’t get into too many topics at once, is the vetting phase for consumers. How are consumers—the customer side of it—using the LLMs, the large language models, to search for you? Can you get into that a little bit as well? And how can you help businesses win that battle?

Kevin Wosmansky: So, Mike, have you ever heard that 96% of all statistics are made up on the spot?

Mike Downer: Something like that.

Kevin Wosmansky: Ninety-eight percent. Okay. I’ve also heard that 50% of all statistics are made up 98% of the time. Have you heard that one?

Mike Downer: I have. And I also heard that 100% of business owners have suffered from BD at some point.

Kevin Wosmansky: Yes, that is true. Actually, business development—if you’re a business owner or you’re in sales, I guarantee you, if you ever come across this, you’re going to say, “Yeah, I’ve suffered from BD.”

Kevin Wosmansky: So, Mike, great question. The reason I bring that up and joke about the statistics is because you can go on Google right now, or you can go to Gemini or any AI, and you’re going to get lots of statistics. But the simple truth is this: we’re in an unknown phase. But we know there’s a seismic shift happening before our eyes.

Kevin Wosmansky: So I believe what I see and who I talk to. I was at lunch yesterday with a client—very successful. They own an insurance and a financial planning agency. Two different agencies, two different owners, same parent. We’re at lunch, and we’re talking about everything we’re going over right now.

Kevin Wosmansky: The vetting process—more importantly, how consumers vet. And I said to them, in my experience, if I go and ask 10 people the simple question, “Are you using paid AI right now?” nine out of ten will tell me, “No, I use the free ChatGPT. I use the free version of this.”

Kevin Wosmansky: Then I said to my clients, “Hey, watch this.” Our waitress comes over—a really nice, really sharp gal. I said, “I’ve got a question. Do you use AI?” And she’s like, “What do you mean? Like what? Like that chat thing, GPT?” And I’m like, “Yeah.” She looked like she was in her mid-20s, and I said, “Do you use that?” She said, “No, I don’t. I think one of the other gals, the hostess, uses it. She tells us about it sometimes.”

Kevin Wosmansky: So just that one example right there—it is a vetting or learning phase right now as people gradually dip their toes in the water, then their ankles, their feet, and then maybe they decide to get in up to their knees. It’s going to be a little bit before I think they’re fully swimming in that pool.

Mike Downer: But consumer-wise, in your opinion—I know you don’t know for sure—how long do you think it’s going to be before it’s a lot more common?

Kevin Wosmansky: Great question. This is purely my opinion based on being deeply involved in a lot of this. I genuinely believe there’s about a 6- to 24-month adoption period where consumers will have paid AI. They will train their AI on what they want.

Kevin Wosmansky: And then, if you ask 10 people that use AI—use paid AI—this is the next big one. A lot of my clients’ businesses are being hit with AI from every single thing under the sun now. Everything has AI baked into it. It’s almost like there’s so much being thrown at people that it becomes background noise. But when I talk to 10 people who use paid AI, I ask them this question: “Do you train your AI like you train an employee to help you?” And 9.9 out of 10 are going to tell me no. “What do you mean? How do you do that?”

Kevin Wosmansky: I was at a national convention out in Vegas two weeks ago, and I got to take a class. I was listening to somebody talk about how you can train AI in this specific industry. I’m like, “I’m going to sign up for that class. I want to learn about this.” The gentleman spoke, and essentially it was, “Hey, if you’re not using ChatGPT, here’s how you create a custom GPT.” There were probably 200 people in the room, and the guy asked, “How many people in here are currently using custom GPTs?” Three hands went up. I was one-third of the hands.

Building Authority in AI Models

Kevin Wosmansky: So when we talk about how consumers are going to start using large language models to help them find products or services, it really goes back to what the consumer is doing right now. Are they using AI? How are they using AI? That was a long walk around a short pond to answer your question, Mike, but I will say this: the vetting phase that I’ve experienced with a lot of clients we’ve worked with—we’ve helped their businesses and their employees implement AI. Right now, our big push is: how do we get AI to start recognizing you and your company as an authority, as a brand? That is what we’re implementing for our clients right now. What we see is this: consumers are using large language models at a very surface level. They haven’t even started cracking that subsurface level.

Mike Downer: So to wrap this up, I think the point you’re trying to get across—or at least what I’m getting from it, and I know if I owned a business, this is what I would get out of this—is: okay, it’s coming. With consumers, it’s better to get ahead of it now so that in, like you said, 6 to 24 months—who knows—you’re already ahead of it, and you’ll win out of the gate rather than trying to catch up later.

Kevin Wosmansky: I would say, yeah. I would definitely say—and I’m going to go back to the death of the gatekeeper here—if you’re watching this and you’re involved in sales, business development, or if you have any part in the process of trying to help your business grow, scale, or bring on new clients, my biggest single piece of advice is this: the traditional gatekeeper in all B2B business acquisition models is gone. They’re still there, but they’re going away. They’re going to be replaced. So how do you counter that, and how do you get ahead of this entire change? The way you get ahead of that is you change, and you start using these agentic models to your benefit, not to your detriment.

Closing Remarks

Mike Downer: Perfect. A lot of information today. So really what we’re trying to do is cure your BD. My initials are MD, so, you know—doctor. I’m just kidding.

Kevin Wosmansky: You are MD. Dr. Mike. Let’s go.

Mike Downer: I didn’t know that our Chief Storytelling Strategist had an MD and BD.

Kevin Wosmansky: We’re going to have to remember that one. Oh my goodness.

Mike Downer: Relax. It’s business development. Relax. We’re talking business development. It’s PG-13, folks. Hey, Kevin, you know what? It’s that time of the afternoon that I think I’m going to tell you to wind it up, Charles Dickens. I know you love the sound of your own voice, and I love it too. It must be Friday.

Kevin Wosmansky: It’s two o’clock, so Mike’s got an appointment at his favorite pub, I’m guessing.

Mike Downer: It is 3:53, and I’m already an hour late. So, you’ve got to love it. So, Kevin, until next time, we’ll solve more of the world’s AI problems, talk BD, and get a cure for it. Thanks for joining me today, Kevin. It was massively informative.

Kevin Wosmansky: Have a great weekend, buddy. We’ll see you next week.

Mike Downer: Hey, thanks. You too, Kev.