Marketing Strategy Launch — April 2026

Overview

Asymmetric aligned on and launched a new multi-channel marketing engine in this session. Mark walked the team through a fully rebuilt HubSpot database and a tiered outreach architecture, then the group selected the first two industry campaign targets: Food & Beverage and Energy & Environment (regulated waste). The stated goal is 1–2 new clients per month — a target Mark framed as both achievable and sufficient to stabilize revenue after recent client losses (e.g., Machine Resource).

Attendees: Mark Hope, Karly Oykhman, Isalia Ramirez, Avokerie Onorimuo, Melissa Cusumano

Key Decisions

The Marketing Architecture

Database State

• ~37,000 contacts cleaned, validated, and enriched with industry data
• Consumers and contacts without email addresses removed
• Segmented by:
• Lead Quality: Tier 1 / Tier 2 / Tier 3 (scored by data completeness, engagement history)
• Industry: Construction, Technology, Healthcare, Food & Beverage, Financial Services, Energy & Environment, and others
• ICP: Mid-market B2B, $10–50M revenue, known decision-maker in a target industry

Outreach Channels

HubSpot (source of truth)
├── SES — General nurture sequences (~35k contacts)
├── Orbit — ABM campaigns (named accounts)
└── HubSpot direct — Industry campaigns (≤2k contacts per campaign)

Nurture Funnel (SES)

Contacts not in an industry campaign, ABM, active deal, or marked as current customer enter a three-stage sequence:

1. Awareness (10 weeks) — 1 email/week; introduce Asymmetric, low-pressure, helpful tone
2. Consideration (10 weeks) — 1 email/week; stronger CTAs, offers, engagement triggers
3. Long-Term Nurture (ongoing) — 1 email/month; stay-in-touch for non-responsive leads; re-engagement trigger fires if contact starts clicking

Contacts who engage during Consideration are converted to Deals in HubSpot and enter Mark's personal outreach rotation (email + LinkedIn).

Exclusion Logic

The following contact groups are excluded from general nurture:
- Contacts flagged ABM
- Contacts with an active Deal
- Contacts in the Food & Beverage or Energy & Environment industry campaigns
- Contacts with lifecycle stage = Customer

Initial Campaign Focus

Food & Beverage

• Target: Small and mid-size food and beverage companies
• Core problem: Competing against large, well-funded brands for shelf space and market share; high barrier to retail distribution
• Asymmetric angle: How does a small organic food brand win against a category giant with 100x the marketing budget?
• Contact pool: ~788 contacts in HubSpot (within the 2k HubSpot send limit)

Energy & Environment (Regulated Waste)

• Target: Remediation, hazardous waste handling, hazardous materials transport, compliance/training, and storage companies
• Core problem: Highly regulated industry with very low marketing sophistication — most companies wait for the phone to ring
• Asymmetric angle: Government regulation creates a durable moat, but the companies inside it still compete; better marketing wins
• Mark's credential: Built and sold two E&E companies (PegX, Victory Environmental); served as EVP Sales & Marketing at Safety-Kleen ($1B revenue); helped launch Clean Management
• Contact pool: Included in the ~1,300 combined contacts for both initial campaigns

Note from Mark: "Nobody at a Wisconsin MBA program says 'I'm going to start a hazardous waste company.' That's the moat. But the companies inside it are still competing with each other, and the guy with the best marketing is more likely to win."

Core Messaging Framework

All content — blogs, social posts, ads, email sequences — must reinforce exactly two themes:

Theme 1: Asymmetric Competition ("David vs. Goliath")

• Business is inherently unfair and biased toward larger, better-resourced competitors
• Smaller businesses need specific strategies, tools, and tactics to compete — not just harder work
• Asymmetric provides those strategies
• Illustrative metaphors approved for use: boxing weight classes, Polish cavalry vs. German tanks, Coke vs. Pepsi (symmetric at the top, asymmetric at the bottom)

Theme 2: Stagnating Sales

• Growth plateaus are a strategy failure, not a people or agency failure
• Companies that plateau typically blame salespeople or their marketing agency and cycle through replacements without fixing the underlying methodology
• Asymmetric provides the methodology to break through plateaus
• CTA: invite the reader to a conversation (DM, meeting link, contact form)

Mark's framing: "If we get two new clients a month, it's more than we can handle. We don't need to hit it out of the park — we just need two."

Operational Logistics

Tools & Access

• Melissa now has a dedicated HubSpot seat (Chris Ostergaard's former seat reassigned)
• Raphael confirmed to have his own HubSpot super-admin seat
• HubSpot API being used by Mark for bulk operations (segmentation, enrichment, sequence setup) — avoids slow UI workflows

UTM Standardization

Mark's proposed UTM structure for sequences:

utm_source=hubspot
utm_medium=sequence
utm_campaign=[awareness|consideration|re-engagement|abm|food-bev|energy-env]
utm_content=email-[1-10]

All links — email buttons, social posts, QR codes, documents — should carry UTM parameters. A shared reference doc will be the single source of truth before any new UTM is created.

ZoomInfo Credits

• 3,000 credits/month currently going unused
• Proposed split: ~2,000 for client contact enrichment, ~1,000 for Asymmetric prospecting
• Karly to set a recurring reminder to ensure credits are consumed monthly

iStock Credits

• Team is currently out of credits
• Process to reinstate: all purchased images stored in client-specific Google Drive folders, tagged for reuse
• Prevents repurchasing images already in the library

Pima Leads

• Mark receiving ~2–3 calls/week via Pima (paid lead gen, ~$500/call)
• Workflow: Claude generates a pre-call prep doc → call → Claude processes transcript + prep doc → simple proposal or follow-up → Deal created in HubSpot

Action Items

Related

• ^[1] — Asymmetric client overview
• ^[2] — HubSpot as single source of truth pattern
• ^[3] — UTM governance best practices
• ^[4] — When to use ABM vs. nurture sequences