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.
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.
Best on a laptop. About six minutes at a scroll, longer if you open the detail panels.
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.
The people you met in the room are the people who run the work. No bait and switch to a junior team after signing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Every program we run is built the same repeatable way, so it scales cleanly from the pilot to the full account list.
Your position, strengths, and where you already win.
The competitive context and how retail buyers actually decide.
Your ICP and named accounts, mapped across the full funnel and committee.
All of it combined to inform where budget works hardest.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Five things you won't find together at any other agency, and the results to back them.
Creative measured by pipeline, not impressions.
100M+ verified B2B professionals, our own, not rented.
Strategy to execution on a single team, an extension of yours.
Sports and experiential turned into real B2B pipeline.
Real-time measurement built from day one, not bolted on.
See the full portfolio → Seequent (won), Voltage Park, Close the Gap, SprintRay 360
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.
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.
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.
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.
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