All this and more in this weekâs edition of The Hypha Wire, from Hypha HubSpot Development.
Happy Friday! Welcome back to The Hypha Wire.
Every week thereâs another take on whatâs working in SEO and content marketing. Tactics shift and platforms evolve, but a few principles keep proving themselves.
Content works because it meets people where theyâre already looking. Sixty-seven percent of B2B buyers read at least five pieces of content before they talk to sales. Theyâre doing real homework, and if youâre not supplying the answers, someone else will.
The long-term value is what makes content worth the effort. Paid ads stop when the budget does. A solid post or case study keeps earning traffic and trust for months or years. Itâs cost-efficient because it compounds.
AI has changed how people find information. With AI overviews showing up in more than 13% of Google searches, your content has to be clear, direct, and backed by specifics. Thatâs less about chasing trends and more about tightening the fundamentals.
The real work isnât uncovering a secret formula. Itâs staying close to what your audience needs, publishing useful resources, and doing it consistently. Traditional advertising interrupts. Content earns attention by providing value first.
Thereâs a steady stream of people with questions. Your job is to be the one with the clearest answer!
-Sage Levene, VP of Marketing, Hypha HubSpot Development
P.S. We wrote a blog covering this topic in greater detail. Check it out here.
Open Mic
Commission-Driven
By Jon Sasala, President, Hypha HubSpot Development
Sales carries a stereotype: pushy, transactional, urgent, scheming, or even manipulative. These arenât desirable traits, but when your livelihood rests entirely on individual performance, they become a natural response.
Commission can be cruel. It isolates people and uses survival as motivation. Itâs the Glengarry Glen Ross model: urgency, desperation, and the belief that youâre only as good as your last deal.
People want to do good work. Every other role in a company is paid to do good workâso why is sales paid to close? When income depends on a signature, the mission shifts from helping the client to getting the deal, and the guardrails disappear:
You compromise on rate.
You overpromise what can be delivered.
You let the implementation team take the hit later.
You say yes to everything.
You say yes to anything.
Does that close more deals? Sure. It absolutely does not build a healthy company, howeverâinstead, spawning:
Deals you shouldnât have taken on.
Eroded profitability.
Delivery teams set up to fail.
Misalignment and resentment.
Unhappy customers.
Unhappy employees.
Iâll say it again: People want to do good work, and take pride in doing their jobs well. Paying someone fairly to do their jobâincluding salesâremoves the distortion. It restores accountability. It puts integrity back at the center.
I learned this when I took on sales at Hypha. My background wasnât in closing tactics. I came up through design, strategy, and solution architecture. When I stepped into the sales role, I sold the way I built: by matching needs with solutions, by designing a plan the team could deliver and the client could trust. No panic discounts. No false promises. Just alignment.
Thatâs what makes someone effective in this role.
Yes, the fundamentals matter: active listening, clear next steps, moving deals forward with intention. The real engine of healthy sales, however, is understanding the work well enough to scope it honestly and shape engagements that actually succeed.
Which brings me to our new sales lead, Sara Gilstrap.
When we decided to expand our sales operation, we knew exactly what we were looking for. Sara is not a closer; sheâs a builder. Sheâs spent years implementing HubSpot for customers, building an agency, navigating business requirements, and solving complex problems for clients. She knows how to scope good work because she knows how to deliver good work.
Thatâs the sales function we want at Hypha: expert advising, honest scoping, and work weâre proud to deliver.
Please join me in welcoming Sara Gilstrap, our Director of Sales.
Google released its third core update this year. It may take ~three weeks to complete, so keep an eye on your rankings heading into the new year.
âIf you notice ranking fluctuations over the coming weeks, this update is likely a major factor.
âCore updates can shift rankings for pages that werenât doing anything wrong. Google has consistently stated that pages losing visibility after a core update donât necessarily have problems to fix. The systems are reassessing content relative to what else is available.â
The Time Person of the Year is often controversial (see: 1938), so this choice doesnât at all surprise me, and to a degree makes sense. It certainly has people talking, one way or the other.
âPerson of the Year is a powerful way to focus the worldâs attention on the people that shape our lives. And this year, no one had a greater impact than the individuals who imagined, designed, and built AI. Humanity will determine AIâs path forward, and each of us can play a role in determining AIâs structure and future. Our work has trained it and sustained it, and now we find ourselves moving through a world increasingly defined by it. Even as the growth of these models relies on neural pathways that appear to copy our ownâthey learn, speak, argue, cajole, and, yes, their ability to do these things can be as frightening as it is astonishingâwe know that there is a difference between us and our creation.â
Hypha Highlights
Most companies treat HubSpot like the center of their tech universe. Then reality hits: The ERP speaks a different language, Salesforce wonât sync cleanly, and marketing automation runs on data thatâs three weeks out of date. The problem isnât HubSpotâitâs trying to run a revenue operation on systems that donât really talk to each other.
Hereâs what most people gloss over: Clicking âinstallâ in the App Marketplace is the easy part. The hard part is making sure data actually flows correctly between systems, without creating duplicates or breaking as your business logic gets more complex. Most integration strategies donât fail loudlyâthey degrade over time. Duplicate records pile up, data drifts out of sync, and nobody notices until quarterly reports show different numbers in each system.
If youâre a VP of Revenue Operations trying to get accurate pipeline reports, a HubSpot Administrator tired of manually fixing sync errors, or an IT Director deciding whether to build custom integrationsâthis is what you need to know.
Getting a lot of spam form submissions lately, even with CAPTCHAs turned on? Try turning on the beta: AI-powered Gibberish detection for form submissions.
âAI-powered gibberish detection now identifies incoming form submissions with gibberish data across all text fields, not just first name, last name, and message properties. This ensures a more comprehensive spam filtering process.â
â To enable this beta, log into your HubSpot account, click your profile picture in the top right-hand corner, and navigate to âProduct Updates.â If you run into any trouble, just give your friends at Hypha a call!
AI in Action
News, updates and tools from the AI industry.
Letâs peek into the industry this week:
OpenAI released GPT-5.2, which the company calls its âbest model yet,â with improved performance in writing, coding, and reasoning tasks, according to WIRED. The launch comes as OpenAI navigates what CEO Sam Altman called a âcode redâ situation due to competitive pressure from Googleâs Gemini 3.
Disney and OpenAI announced a three-year licensing agreement allowing OpenAIâs Sora video platform and ChatGPT Images to generate short-form content featuring more than 200 Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars characters, according to a Disney press release. The deal includes Disney making a $1 billion equity investment in OpenAI, becoming a major customer of OpenAIâs APIs for building new Disney+ products, and making curated Sora-generated fan videos available to stream on Disney+, with the companies emphasizing their shared commitment to responsible AI use and creator rights protection.
Google Labs launched Disco, a new experimental browser featuring GenTabs, which the company says uses Gemini 3 to understand usersâ complex tasks through their open tabs and chat history to create interactive web applications without coding. According to Google, GenTabs can generate custom apps for tasks like meal planning or trip research by simply describing whatâs needed in natural language.
The Linux Foundation announced the formation of the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) with founding contributions from Anthropicâs Model Context Protocol (MCP), Blockâs goose framework, and OpenAIâs AGENTS.md standard. According to the Linux Foundation, the AAIF aims to provide neutral governance for open-source agentic AI development, with platinum members including Amazon Web Services, Anthropic, Block, Bloomberg, Cloudflare, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI. MCP has already been adopted by more than 10,000 published servers and platforms including Claude, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Gemini.
OpenAI disabled promotional app messages in ChatGPT after users complained about seeing what appeared to be ads, including some paid Pro and Plus subscribers. According to The Verge, OpenAIâs chief research officer Mark Chen acknowledged the company âfell shortâ in handling the promotions for companies like Peloton and Target, stating: âAnything that feels like an ad needs to be handled with care.â The company is working on better controls to allow users to turn off such suggestions.
âGenius Makers dramatically presents the fierce conflict between national interests, shareholder value, the pursuit of scientific knowledge, and the very human concerns about privacy, security, bias, and prejudice. Like a great Victorian novel, this world of eccentric, brilliant, often unimaginably yet suddenly wealthy characters draws you into the most profound moral questions we can ask. And like a great mystery, it presents the story and facts that lead to a core, vital question: How far will we let it go?â
How can we help you?
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