The SMART Spark
You Can Skip the Ad. You Can’t Tell if You’re Talking to a Bot.
You Can't Advertise "At" People Anymore Your phone rings. You answer. There's a brief pause — natural enough to feel human — and then a voice. Warm, measured, maybe even your name. It's not a person. It's software. And whoever set it up is calling it a marketing...
Why Your Emails Are Going to Spam (And How to Actually Fix It)
I've had the same conversation at least four times in the last two weeks. Different companies. Different industries. Different HubSpot setups. Same panic: emails going to spam, clients not getting booking confirmations, sequences landing nowhere, and a sales team...
“No Way to Qualify Your Visitors” — I Wrote That in 2007. Here’s What’s Different Now.
Back in February 2007, I published a post called "Revolutionize Your Internet Prospecting with Personalization and Targeted Messaging." The opening line: "There is no way to qualify your visitors… or is there?" I was asking a genuine question. The challenge at the...
One Year at Gold — And Platinum Is Getting Closer
A year ago, I hit Gold Solutions Partner status with HubSpot. Here's what the last twelve months actually looked like. There's a funny thing that happens when you hit a milestone, you spend about five minutes celebrating and then immediately start looking at what's...
Website Lead Generation Then and Now
I Called It Bottom-Up. HubSpot Built a Feature Around It. I pulled this post from the archives. April 2007. It was titled something like "Reverse Engineering Your Website." The core idea: stop building your website from the top down. Design isn't the first step. Your...
4 Rules I Follow for Every HubSpot CRM Architecture Decision
I completed another HubSpot audit over the weekend . . . And once again, there it was. Triplicate properties. Workflows contradicting each other. A calculated property set up on a contact record trying to deduce a deal amount — which doesn't work, and wouldn't work...
SEO Then and Now: What Actually Moves the Needle in 2026
Why is our website traffic down? I've been getting the same question from clients a lot lately. "Why is our traffic down?" Sometimes it's framed differently. "We haven't changed anything — why are our rankings dropping?" Or: "We've been doing SEO for years and...
I Ran HubSpot’s AEO Grader on My Own Site. Here’s the Honest Result.
HubSpot's new AEO Grader checks how ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini currently represent your brand across five scored dimensions: Sentiment, Presence Quality, Brand Recognition, Share of Voice, and Market Position. I ran it on my site and scored zero out of seven...
HubSpot Agency or Freelance Consultant. Which One Do You Actually Need?
If your process is solid and you need someone to run it, hire for execution. When you want help with your architecture, automation or strategy, should you contact an agency or find a solutions partner? A prospect asked me this question last week. My honest answer: it...
