Innovative Group × Zip
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Innovative Group + Zip
Working portal · July 2026
Private working portal · For the Zip team

Named-account ABX, built for how retail buying committees really decide.

A private space to get to know Innovative Group: who we are, how we see Zip's moment, the strategy we'd run, the team you'd actually work with, and a real portfolio of the work.

One belief runs through all of it: we only win when you win.

Built for you, Chris Salazar & the Innovative Group team
Where we are · updated July 31, 2026

A quick running log.

Jul 16
Intro session. Met Kathryn, Alyson, Vaneet, and Russell with our team (Chris, Michael, Steve, Chris Kidd, Rita). Aligned on the move to named-account ABX, a focused 10-account pilot growing toward 50, and pipeline influence over lead volume.
Jul 16
Internal debrief. Went deeper on account selection (proven categories plus processor fit), the two tactic groups (ABX and experiential/field), the sports partnerships as an untapped B2B layer, and measurement.
Jul 16, later
We couldn't stop. The sports angle got us fired up, so we started building a playbook that same night: From Fan Affinity to Funnel → Consider it a preview of how we move.
Wk of Jul 20
A tailored plan. We come back with a recommended pilot shortlist, the success definition to lock together, and a good/better scope. This portal updates as we go so nothing gets lost between meetings.
Jul 24
The brief landed. Alyson sent through the Enterprise ABM Pilot Brief: 10 strategic accounts, the agency questions, and the optional Target exercise. The brief says to treat it as a chance to show how we think. We took that literally.
Jul 25–27
Heads down. Every question answered, the Target account built out properly (committee map, messaging by role, 90-day sequence, fiscal calendar), and a control-cohort design so you can measure what the pilot actually caused.
Jul 28
First cut ready. The response went in front of our own senior team and 2 outside specialists for a hostile read before you ever saw it.
Jul 29–30
Sharpened. Working sessions across our team tightened the strategy: the 2-motion program design, the channel architecture, account-level measurement, and a differentiator we think nobody else will bring.
Jul 31
Submitted. Our formal response, delivered on deadline. Open the response → The full written version is inside it, with a PDF for anyone who prefers paper.
New · Our response to the brief

44 people decide the deal. Your sellers reach 3.

That gap is the whole pitch. We built our response as something you scroll rather than something you skim: the coverage problem in one picture, the four principles we would run, one Target decision-maker’s week, and the Target teardown itself.

The full written response, the sports playbook, and the portfolio all sit one click inside it.

Open the response Passphrase protected · sent with the email

Best on a laptop. About six minutes at a scroll, longer if you open the detail panels.

01 · About Innovative Group

Brand to revenue. Strategists and operators, not order-takers.

Innovative Group is an operating company built around one idea: creative and brand only matter if they move the number. Six specialty teams run under one P&L across growth, digital marketing and tech, AI solutions, products, enablement, and funding. We think like a brand team and we are measured like a demand team.

200+
Companies served
25+
Countries
2M+
Leads generated
100M+
Verified B2B professionals in our network

The people you met in the room are the people who run the work. No bait and switch to a junior team after signing.

02 · How we see Zip

You made a sharp, deliberate pivot. Let's prove it.

You moved from broad prospecting to a precise, named-account motion, and narrowed to two tactic groups. We think that's exactly right. Here's how we read the opportunity and where we'd add horsepower.

Named-account ABX

Start focused: a small set of named accounts where the whole buying committee, not one form-fill, gets a coordinated, multi-touch experience. We start where you already win (signed footwear like GOAT, DSW, Cato, and JD Sports) and where the processor fit lets a merchant switch Zip on at checkout with almost no integration. If a target already runs Adyen, Stripe, or Checkout.com, the commercial friction nearly disappears, the way Rally House went live on Adyen. Early wins come fast and prove the model.

Experiential & field

Your regional events in the retail-HQ metros (Minneapolis, Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, LA, New York) are the other half. We make the ABX program and the field program point at the same accounts and the same people, so a targeted CXO dinner and a digital touch reinforce each other instead of running in parallel.

The sports partnerships, switched on

Phillies, Flyers, Sixers, Saints. The other sponsors of those teams are the exact retail and footwear brands you want as merchants. "You sponsor the team, so do your targets, and we bring you customers who can finally transact" is a ready-made way in, for both your merchant funnel and your D2C funnel.

The part that matters most to us

We only win when you win.

We're not here to sell you a campaign or hand you a pile of leads. We're the hands-on team behind the scenes. You keep the creative. You keep the relationships and the credit. We make your team the ones who proved ABX works at Zip, and the internal case to scale is yours to own.

That's why we think in years, not campaigns. A force multiplier that becomes a real asset for Zip, not a project that ends.

03 · How we build the strategy

Grounded in a process, not a guess.

Every program we run is built the same repeatable way, so it scales cleanly from the pilot to the full account list.

You

Your position, strengths, and where you already win.

Your world

The competitive context and how retail buyers actually decide.

Journey map

Your ICP and named accounts, mapped across the full funnel and committee.

Maturity index

All of it combined to inform where budget works hardest.

The one thing we lock together first: what success means

The fastest way for a program like this to fail is to hit metrics the business never wanted. So before we spend a dollar, we define success with you and your RevOps team. Marketing-influenced pipeline gets you visible wins fast; marketing-generated pipeline is harder and closer to what a sales-minded leader ultimately wants. We will bring both, spell out the trade-off, and pick the right blend together, then hold ourselves to it in real time.

Why a focused 10-account pilot, not the whole list

Your sellers carry 75 to 100 accounts each on billion-dollar retailers and can reach only a few people per committee. A tight pilot lets us cover the full committee on the accounts that matter, prove the motion, and then scale the proven playbook rather than starting over.

04 · The team behind you

Big firepower, scaled to your scope.

Think of us as an extension of Alyson's team, the humble, hands-on engine behind the scenes. The example below is a full pod we fielded for an enterprise ABM engagement, shown so you can see the range of roles we can bring: strategy, paid media and programmatic, ABM, content and creative, data, and a lead-scoring and CRM consultant to help define the funnel with your RevOps team.

For the Zip pilot, we scope the right subset to match the work and the budget, then add roles as the program proves out. We come prepared with this bench, and we flex, pivot, and bring in specialists where the work calls for it. You stay in front; we do the work that makes you look good.

Example IG account pod
Example pod (enterprise ABM engagement). The range of roles we can field, from strategy to paid media, ABM, content, data, and CRM. Your team is scoped to the pilot and grows as it proves out, not a fixed roster. Click to enlarge
05 · Your sports partnerships, activated

Turn the Phillies, Flyers, Sixers, and Saints into pipeline.

This is the part we got most fired up about. It's a space we know cold, so we couldn't help ourselves and started building you a playbook.

Here is the industry truth most agencies won't tell you: sponsors rarely cash in. Across the market, brands spend only about 80 cents activating every dollar of sponsorship rights, and just 18% spend enough to make the sponsorship pay off. You've already bought the audience. The gap, and the opportunity, is turning it into merchant pipeline. That's the layer we run.

You just signed Rally House (June 2026): flexible payments for sports fans, in-store and online. That's the whole model in one deal, a sports-retail partner that is both a merchant proof point and a direct line to fans. Here is how we'd extend it across the teams.

1 · Map the co-sponsors to your list

The other brands sponsoring your teams are public record. We cross-reference those rosters against your named-account list; the overlaps become priority pilot targets you already share a room with.

2 · Open on shared ground, close on processor fit

Lead with the affiliation ("we both back the Phillies"), a warmer opener to a 40-to-50-person buying committee than any cold ad. It works because the close is real: if a target runs Adyen, Stripe, or Checkout.com, you can flip Zip on at checkout fast, so the shared-team conversation has a near-frictionless path behind it.

3 · Activate live, where deals actually move

Host target-account execs in a suite or a hospitality moment at a game. In B2B, one 45-minute suite conversation is worth more than ten booth chats, and sponsorship-sourced pipeline typically returns two to five times over six months. This is where your ABX program and your field pillar become one motion.

4 · Reach the fan, feed both funnels

Layer the payment-integrated audiences around the teams (Fevo, StubHub, Fanatics, and Rally House) to reach and retarget fans, building merchant pipeline and your D2C funnel at once, meeting the fan exactly where Zip already meets them.

5 · Measure it

Meetings and pipeline sourced specifically from sports-affiliated accounts, tracked from day one, so the sponsorship finally shows up as revenue, not just a logo on the boards.

We have run this exact model, SprintRay with the LA Kings, turning a consumer sports moment into real B2B pipeline. The full portfolio has the receipts.

See our sports playbook: From Fan Affinity to Funnel → We got excited and started building it

06 · The proof

Real programs, real numbers.

Five things you won't find together at any other agency, and the results to back them.

Brand to revenue

Creative measured by pipeline, not impressions.

Owned data network

100M+ verified B2B professionals, our own, not rented.

One full pod

Strategy to execution on a single team, an extension of yours.

Live activation

Sports and experiential turned into real B2B pipeline.

Attribution in

Real-time measurement built from day one, not bolted on.

+250%
MQL-to-SQL conversion lift
11x
ROAS on paid media
+120%
CTR over the prior agency (Google AI)
$2.4M
Influenced revenue, one program

See the full portfolio → Seequent (won), Voltage Park, Close the Gap, SprintRay 360

07 · Measurement & how we obsess

Attribution isn't a report you get. It's how we run every day.

You told us attribution is the number-one problem: leads that never became meetings, and a weekly spreadsheet that reached sellers two weeks too late. We flip that. Signal wires into Salesforce in real time, and we obsess over a defined set of KPIs across the whole funnel, daily, not at the quarterly review.

The KPIs we watch daily, across the funnel

Paid media

  • Spend & pacing
  • CPM / CPC / CTR
  • Cost per qualified lead
  • ROAS & blended CAC
  • Reach on the target list

Organic & SEO

  • Non-brand impressions & clicks
  • Keyword & page rankings
  • Share of voice on target terms
  • Assisted pipeline from organic

Website & conversion

  • Target-account visits
  • Conversion rate by page
  • Demo & contact requests
  • Engaged sessions & return visits

Sales & pipeline

  • Meetings booked
  • Account penetration (toward 70-80%)
  • Influenced & generated pipeline
  • SQL to closed-won rate
  • Sales-cycle length

Lifecycle & retention

  • Revenue per send
  • Nurture engagement
  • Net revenue retention
  • LTV & repeat volume

Social & brand

  • Engagement & audience growth
  • Share of conversation
  • Sports-sourced pipeline
  • Branded-search lift

The stack we run it on

We build your reporting in Adriel or AgencyAnalytics, whichever fits your setup, white-labeled into one live dashboard rather than a static deck. And we work natively in the tools your team already lives in, so we plug in instead of adding overhead.

AdrielAgencyAnalyticsSalesforceTableauPower BIMonday.comJiraConfluence

What you actually get: the story, not just the dashboard

Numbers don't move decisions, stories do. Here is the kind of read we deliver, built on Next Best Action, our own product: not just what happened, but why, and what to do next.

Example · built on Next Best Action
Named-account ABM is converting at 4.1% on the target list, well above the 1.8% benchmark. Recommend expanding the list.
Attributable revenue
$240,300
↑ +38% vs prior
Blended ROAS
4.1x
↑ +22% vs prior
Meetings booked
147
↑ +22% vs prior
Last 6 months · weekly attributable revenue
The lift came from two places: the lifecycle rebuild is producing double the revenue per send, and named-account ABM is converting well above benchmark. One channel is dragging the average down, so we'd shift budget toward what is working, and you would see that flagged here the day it happens, not a month later.
Salesforce · closed-wonGA4 · attributionAd platforms · spendWebsite · engagement
More reads Next Best Action generates
Meta's "Lookalike, Founders" set is 2.3x more expensive in 14 days. Recommend pausing.
CPM (14d)
$58
↑ +128%
CTR (14d)
0.42%
↓ 61%
Spend (14d)
$2,840
↑ +18%
Meta Ads · 14dGA4 · paid social
Q2 at a glance: $684K attributable revenue on $174K of spend.
Attributable rev
$684K
↑ +31% vs Q1
Blended ROAS
3.9x
↑ +0.7x
SQLs in Q2
147
↑ +22%
SQL to won
19%
↑ +4 pts
HubSpot · Q2GA4 · attribution
SaaS-segment LTV is up 23% over six months, driven by retention, not pricing.
LTV
$4,820
↑ +23%
12-mo retention
74%
↑ +11 pts
Avg ARPU
$118
↑ +4%
HubSpot deals · 180dGA4 · cohort
New lifecycle flow produces $4.20 per send vs $2.10. Conversion is the lift.
Revenue / send
$4.20
↑ +100%
Click-to-buy
7.8%
↑ +44%
Unsubscribe
0.18%
↓ 12%
HubSpot · emailStripe · revenue

And we weave in with what you already have: your internal channel managers, your RevOps team (Misha included), and the outside SDR program, so nobody double-spends and every touch is coordinated.

What's next

Let's define success, then go win.

Our next step is a tailored plan: a recommended pilot shortlist built on proven categories and processor fit, the success definition we lock together, and a good/better scope that fits where Zip is today and grows as it works.

You're a small team with a big mandate. We're the firepower behind you, the ones doing the hands-on work so your team gets the wins and the credit. This isn't about winning an account. It's a multi-year partnership and a force multiplier that becomes a real asset for Zip, proving ABX works and converts for the long run.

We only win when you win. Chris Salazar & the IG team