We only win if you win. Hold that thought. It comes back at the end.
This document is the argument. Every retailer on your list gets researched, not templated, and the response to your brief should work the same way.
Which meant reading the brief closely enough to answer it, and listening closely enough on July 16:
"We don't even have an MQL or SQL definition. Any lead that we get is a lead."
Alyson · intro call · July 16"We've really struggled in the attribution space… being able to tie our marketing to moving pipeline through the pipeline stages."
Alyson · intro call · July 16"We need to punch above our weight class."
Kathryn · intro call · July 16You know these. This is just how we use them here.
ABM · account-based marketing: aiming the program at named companies instead of anonymous leads
ABX · account-based experience: the same idea carried through every touch
ABM 1:1 · one program built for one named account
ABM 1:few · one program shared by a small cluster of similar accounts
ABM 1:many · programmatic coverage across a wide list
This response runs 1:1 on 10 accounts with a 1:few engine underneath.
Every question answered in order, in writing. No storyline, no scroll tricks: the full detail, built for the record and for the readers who skip straight to substance.
Read it as one thing: an operating growth strategy for the pivot, with ABM at its center, rather than a media plan with an ABM label.
Timelines, budgets, committee maps, dashboards, contact strategy. Table stakes, done at a level you can audit, and available as a PDF whenever you want one.
Leads sit on shelves when they aren't hot enough; the heat of a lead decides its shelf life. This plan exists to create the other kind: leads that beg to be closed. That's a different process than identify-and-contact, and it's ours.
A payment button is a commodity. A company with a purpose isn't. Section 05 is the play that makes retailers want to say Zip's name out loud, and it's the part of this response no competitor will have.
One retailer on your list publicly lists Zip as a way to pay, and Google will show you 3 ways to do it. We can find no integration or revenue share behind it, which reads as headroom rather than a problem: volume nobody has claimed yet. Which account, the receipts, and the plan for it: Section 06.
We found no public evidence that Klarna, Affirm or Afterpay operate a named-account program. Their enterprise wins are business-development led. That makes this a category-first move for Zip rather than a catch-up move.
Both run partner co-marketing funds that reimburse partner-led campaigns on shared merchants. Real money against your program spend on any processor-fit account, and it doesn't reduce our fee.
Generated versus influenced is a false choice, and both carry a trap. The third option, and our recommendation, is in Principle 03.
Watch the rings. That is what the pilot buys.
"They may be engaged with one person, maybe two or three, but they don't have the web of relationships across the entire buying committee."
Vaneet · intro call · July 16Every dot is a person on one account's buying committee. Red marks who your seller can reach today. Each amber dot is a specific person reached by a specific touch. The pilot's only job is to light the rings, from the center out.
One more thing: the committee you plan for runs about 20. Our research maps 44 once merchandising, IT, risk, finance and legal weigh in. Nobody sees those extra names early; they surface once a deal is deep. Reaching them first is the whole advantage.
This is also the answer to "why 10 accounts and not 50." 50 accounts on a 10-account budget reproduces the condition you described on July 16: plenty of leads, zero meetings. 10 is the largest number we can credibly take coverage from 7% to 70%.
ABM 1:1 is a different machine from demand gen. Here is how we run it, principle first. Open any of them to see the actual operating detail.
Your 50, filtered 4 ways: proven category (footwear and apparel where Zip already converts), processor fit (Stripe, Adyen or Checkout, where going live is a configuration change), under-served accounts your sellers aren't reaching, and fan overlap with the team partnerships. The 10 fall out of the filters.
Then the part nobody else will offer: a matched control cohort. We run 10 and hold 10, matched on category, GMV band, processor and pipeline stage. At day 45 and day 90 we compare coverage, meeting rate and opportunity progression across the two cohorts. A holdout is the only clean answer to "would this have happened anyway," and it turns the scale-to-25 decision into an evidence question instead of a political one. The honest tradeoff: 10 good accounts go untouched for a quarter. If Sales objects to one, we swap it.
Your own data is the unlock. Zip's transaction data proves where your consumer already shops; your Fevo, StubHub and Fanatics relationships map fan affinity by geography and spend; the processor install base (Stripe, Adyen, Checkout.com, WorldPay coming) tells us which accounts can switch on with near-zero integration. First-touch assets built from that are unanswerable, because no competitor can copy your data.
Tactics get set account by account. Where that committee actually lives (LinkedIn-heavy, event-first, or brokered through a team's sponsorship office) gets decided in each account plan, from seller interviews plus our research. That's the difference between ABM and lead gen wearing ABM's jacket.
And every touch lives in their brand, never ours. Each thing a committee member sees is built in their company's world, about their problem, in their visual language. The whole experience lives in your customer's brand. That is the point of ABM 1:1, and you'll see it plotted on a real account in Section 06.
The channel architecture, and an honest word about media at 10 accounts. Paid media cannot function as a demand engine against 10 logos. There isn't enough audience for any platform to optimize against, and any agency that tells you otherwise is selling impressions. On Tier 1 media plays a supporting role: retargeting and staying visible with committee members who already engaged. The engine runs on Tier 2 (below), where there's enough scale for the platforms to learn. Each channel gets one job:
| Channel | Its one job | What runs |
|---|---|---|
| Reach the committee by name, function and seniority | Sponsored content, thought-leader ads, conversation ads, video, retargeting | |
| Google Search | Catch intent the moment it turns commercial | Competitor terms (Adyen vs Zip, Stripe alternatives), category terms (payment orchestration, BNPL for retailers), problem queries (checkout conversion, decline rates), Customer Match off the account list |
| YouTube | Hold confidence through a 9–18 month evaluation | 60–90 second customer stories, category commentary, demos, aimed at people who already engaged |
| Programmatic | Be visibly present wherever the committee reads | CRM onboarding, account-based DSP, intent data, retail and payments publications |
| Meta | Carry the sports story, and nothing more | Partnership creative, customer stories, retargeting. It will not generate enterprise payments demand, and we won't pretend otherwise |
One sequence, not 5 parallel buys: LinkedIn introduces, Search catches, YouTube convinces, Programmatic keeps you present, Meta tells the human story. Every engagement signal routes back to the seller the same day.
Enterprise retail cycles run 9–18 months. A 90-day pilot cannot produce closed revenue, and any agency promising it is setting you up. It can produce a covered committee, real meetings, and a number your CEO can't argue with.
Alongside: Phase 0 foundations (MQL/SQL, scoring, Salesforce structure: lightweight, gates nothing) and written SDR deconfliction: they own broad outreach across the 1,400, we own committee coverage on the 10.
After: a separately scoped sports & experiential phase. The other sponsors of your teams are your target accounts.
If we start in the autumn, day 90 lands inside retail's peak-trading window. That is deliberate. October through January is when a retail committee is heads-down on trade, which makes it the right time to build: committee mapped, creative approved through your brand team, sequences loaded, intent monitoring live, relationships warmed digitally while nobody is asking them to make a decision.
So day 45 and day 90 are judged on coverage, engaged stakeholders and meetings booked, because those genuinely move during a freeze. The conversion asks are loaded into February, when their fiscal year opens and their own calendar finally says yes. If you'd rather judge this on commercial outcomes than on coverage, we'd propose the same 90 days plus a February gate, and we'd put that in the contract.
Vaneet deferred this to us. We won't take the deferral quietly, because the failure mode your own team named is crushing a metric you didn't actually want. Three options, traps visible:
A · Marketing-generated pipeline. Cleanest story, but sourced attribution realistically runs 5–20% on named accounts, so the pilot will look worse than it performed.
B · Marketing-influenced. Easiest to claim, weakest as proof. Influenced numbers are what made the last program look better on paper than it felt in the room.
C · Shared account-level movement. Our recommendation. Stop splitting credit. Account-level pipeline movement as a jointly-owned revenue-team metric, measured against the control cohort. Teams reporting sourced-only undervalue marketing by 35–55%. The only wrong answer is an unstated one. Unstated is what kills pilots.
And the definitions you told us you're missing. You said there's no MQL or SQL definition today, so any lead counts as a lead. On named accounts the unit was never the lead anyway; it's the account. We'd write these 4 in the first 30 days, with Misha and RevOps in the room:
| Stage | What triggers it | Who owns it |
|---|---|---|
| Account Engagement | One or more committee members start interacting: ad engagement, site visits, content downloads, video watched, webinar attendance, repeat visits. Weighted by how many people, how senior, how recent | Marketing |
| MQA | Marketing Qualified Account. Engagement crosses the agreed threshold across multiple stakeholders in the same retailer, which means the committee is widening rather than one person clicking twice | Marketing, handed over |
| SQA | Sales Qualified Account. A seller validates real intent: discovery call taken, live conversation, a named initiative, or confirmation they're evaluating payment providers | Sales, accepted |
| Pipeline influence | Opportunity created and opportunity progressed across the committee, measured against the control cohort | Jointly owned |
Reach 4 stakeholders across Finance, IT and Procurement inside one retailer and that account is materially more valuable than a single form fill from one contact. Today both look identical in your reporting. That is the entire problem, in one sentence.
It also gives Marketing and Sales a cleaner handoff than any MQL model, because both teams are looking at the progress of the account rather than arguing about the quality of a contact. And it's what makes a 90-day pilot fair to judge: measured on leads, a program that moved 10 committees will still look underwhelming. Measured on account progression, you can see whether the strategy is working long before the revenue arrives.
Your weekly spreadsheet took 2 weeks to reach a seller, which is functionally never. The heat of a lead decides its shelf life, so the first thing we build is the alert that fires the same day, into Salesforce and Slack, with the suggested next action and the draft message already written.
Judged on: committee coverage per account, net-new engaged stakeholders, committee-level meetings created, opportunity progression vs. control.
Explicitly not judged on: impressions, CPM, CTR, MQL volume, lead counts. We report them as diagnostics only.
The complete measurement design, KPI by KPI with the day-45 and day-90 tables: in the long form →
The MQA and SQA definitions Vince built with us, what triggers each stage and who owns the handoff: the account-stage framework →
And the design choice that matters most: the engagement score is calculated per account, not per contact. On a 44-person committee, intensity from 1 person is how you lose slowly.
Cadence: daily automated signals to sellers · weekly 30-min working stand-up with Sales · monthly 60-min leadership review · formal day-45 and day-90 readouts with the control comparison front and center.
On the sample report: yours will be a white-labeled export of the live dashboards we already run for clients. A real operating report beats a pretty fiction.
The always-on layer, built on Adriel, the AdOps platform we run reporting on: white-labeled in Zip's mark, refreshed continuously, with alert thresholds wired to Slack and Salesforce. SOC 2 Type 2, trusted by 6,300+ teams. The monthly report is its human-readable summary.
People: Alyson as day-to-day lead; Vaneet's 8 sellers for one interview each; Misha and RevOps in the room from day one on definitions; Kathryn at the monthly review; the sports/entertainment lead as Phase 2 scopes; your creative team as brief recipients, not order-takers.
Access: Salesforce (read plus campaign objects), the 50-account list to filter down to 10, your ZoomInfo seat data while we migrate reporting onto our licenses, brand standards, and the sponsorship hospitality inventory: the suites and moments you actually control.
Creative split, per your preference: your team owns content and asset development. With brand standards as tight as yours, that is the right call. We bring the research, message architecture, creative briefs, orchestration, media buying, landing experiences and measurement. We write the briefs; your team does the craft.
Collaboration level: an extension of your team. You'll see what ran yesterday, what runs today, what ships this week. We join your RevOps and sales conversations when it helps move things, because context makes campaigns better.
Principle 03 in full: what success means, picked in writing inside the first 30 days · the success metric →
01 · Seequent: a full named-account ABM program, won and run. +250% MQL-to-SQL conversion, 11× ROAS on paid, $2.4M influenced revenue with 22+ tracked touchpoints per conversion. The closest analog to what Zip is building.
02 · SprintRay × LA Kings: the "Close the Gap" campaign, a sponsorship turned into a B2B story that produced traceable pipeline.
Both in full, with the method behind them: the portfolio →
Through the Flyers, Phillies and Minnesota United, Zip has bought attention and earned trust with 3 of the most loyal fan bases in American sports, and those fans look remarkably like Zip's core customer.
Zip's own sponsorship footprint. Team marks shown for reference inside this private response only.
Rally House is the model in motion: a licensed-merch retailer inside Zip's sponsorship footprint, signed in June, with the processor relationship doing the heavy lifting on go-live. The playbook repeats up 3 tiers: licensed team merch (Fanatics, Lids), the Philadelphia hometown play (URBN, Five Below, QVC, Boscov's), the Minnesota play built around the club Target already sponsors, then national footwear volume.
Per account: how Flyers, Phillies and Loons fans map against that retailer's customers by geography, income and behavior. That's the hook that gets us on the decision-maker's radar.
A suite at a Flyers game or a matchday at Allianz Field converts a payments decision-maker far better than a cold email ever will. And the Minnesota matchday comes with a detail nobody else can offer: the name on the front of the shirt is Target's.
Every meeting opens with a "Gear Up, Pay Later" activation mocked up in that retailer's own brand, tangible before a contract exists.
Those 3 moves are the IG playbook: ours, proven, and ready to run in Zip's colors. We wrote it turning SprintRay × LA Kings' "Close the Gap" from a logo on the ice into a story fans and prospects actually engaged with, and it converts because the sequence does the selling. The full playbook →
Every payments meeting covers the same ground: conversion lift, checkout placement, rates. All real, all table stakes. The wide-open prize is the story a retailer would be proud to tell about their installment partner. That story is sitting right above the checkout button, and Zip is the brand positioned to tell it first.
In the cart, Zip helps her buy the thing today. As a company, Zip can exist to get her to where she doesn't need to split the payment next year. Say the second part out loud, and the whole conversation changes.
That is the difference between a payment method and a company with a mission. Retailers are in a permanent race to be seen as the better citizen, and the first BNPL brand to hand them that story wins a seat no rival can take. This is a movement waiting for its leader, and every piece of it is already inside Zip's reach: the customers, the sponsorships, the story.
Operation HOPE runs Financial Literacy for All, a 10-year national initiative to reach millions of working adults. Look at who signed on as founding organizations: Walmart, Bank of America, Disney, Delta, the NFL, PayPal, the NBA, Walgreens. The member roster adds Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Synchrony, JPMorgan Chase, FICO, Nike, MLB and MLS.
1 · Target is absent. Neither list includes Target as published today. Their closest rival has a seat at the table on the one topic Target's own brand cares most about, and Target has nothing to point to. Zip can walk in carrying that.
2 · Payments is already here, and BNPL is not. PayPal is a founding organization. Visa, Mastercard, Amex and Synchrony are members. No buy-now-pay-later brand appears on either list. Klarna's published CSR runs to climate targets and workplace culture, with goals last dated to 2021. The category has left this wide open.
3 · Zip's sponsorships are the on-ramp. MLB and MLS are members of the initiative, and Zip already writes checks to the Phillies, the Flyers and Minnesota United. The introduction Zip needs is one phone call inside relationships Zip is already paying for, and the Minnesota one comes with Target's name on the shirt.
Read those 3 again. Helping working families build credit and breathing room is category-defining ground, it is sitting in plain sight, and Zip can put its name on it first.
The written version of this argument, with the roster and the sourcing: the bigger play, in the long form →
The brands people trust most are the ones willing to help you need them less.
In the cart, Zip helps her buy what she needs today. The movement helps her afford more tomorrow, on her own strength. That is something every person at Zip gets to be proud of, and it lines up with the values already on your wall. A snack brand that funds gyms. A card issuer that teaches saving. The trust compounds when the money is real and the outcome is measured. Here's the build.
A public, dated commitment of a defined share of profit to financial literacy, credit building and savings for working families. A number Zip's board signs, not a values page. Everything else hangs off this.
Operation HOPE is the obvious first call, alongside the National Foundation for Credit Counseling. Their credit coaching and free FICO delivery is exactly the outcome Zip's guest needs, and membership puts Zip in a room with Walmart, PayPal and the NFL.
A Philadelphia or Minneapolis bank matches the commitment in-market, tied to a matchday. Hometown money, hometown press, and a co-branded moment every retailer in that region wants a piece of. In Minnesota, the retailer in that region is Target.
Each named account gets a co-owned local edition. Target does not sponsor Zip's program; Target and Zip run one together, in Target's brand, in Target's markets. That is the sentence their brand team has been waiting for.
Credit scores moved, savings balances opened, people coached. Reported the same way we report coverage, so nobody has to take the story on faith.
If a competitor is paying for placement, Zip cannot win that fight on price today. So change who is in the room. A purpose platform recruits the CSR and community-impact leaders onto the committee, and they arrive with a story the board wants to tell. That is committee penetration through a door nobody else knocks on.
Stand up at NRF and ask the room: "How many of you are focused on the long-term financial health of your shoppers? You are focused on being good corporate citizens, and that's real. Take it a level further. Invest in the people who are struggling to afford your goods and who you still want as customers. Give them another way to pay, and give them the tools to need it less."
No BNPL brand can follow that speech. That is the point.
Done cheaply, this reads as window dressing and does more harm than nothing at all. It only works if the commitment is a real number, the partner is credible, the outcomes are published, and Zip is willing to be held to it for years. We'd rather flag that now than let anyone discover it in market. Roster details above are from Operation HOPE's published pages, retrieved July 29, 2026, and worth reconfirming before anything goes external.
Deliver the value first and the interest follows. Keep this in mind through the next section, because account #1 is where it gets specific.
Hitting the Target takes the right aim.
Ask Google "Can I pay with Zip at Target?" The answer is yes. 3 different ways.
Select Zip at checkout on Target.com. Generate a digital card in the Zip app and tap your wallet in store. Or create a single-use virtual card. Target's own payment-options page lists Zip alongside Affirm, Sezzle, Afterpay, Klarna and PayPal, and Zip's own site features Target as a shop-now destination. The brief says there's no commercial relationship, and that's exactly what makes this interesting: the door already appears to be open. Nobody has walked through it deliberately.
Zip holds a 4.5 across 38,377 Trustpilot reviews. Search those reviews for "Target" and shoppers name the store themselves, unprompted, going back years.
"I've used this app in store at Target & Tj maxx! It was a lifesaver at Christmas time. Easy to use. A+"
Brandie · verified · Dec 2022"I've used it at big retailers like Amazon, Target, and Walmart. ZIP has helped me get what I needed to get through to the next paycheck."
Crystal · verified · Jan 2023"Zip has always been my go to when I need to get gifts. The variety of stores is awesome!! Target, Bath and Body Works, Best Buy and even Instacart!"
Tonya Hocker · verified · Jan 2023"Is very convenience when I need cash flow, I often use in Target and BJ's."
Harold · verified · Jan 2023 · quoted exactly as written"The app and the convenience of it is top-notch, however, I've only been able to use it once at Target and it never worked again after that... it has not worked as a 'tap' payment again."
C. Rashard Alexander · verified · Aug 2022 · the one that matters mostThat last one is the whole argument in a single review. A guest tried to tap Zip at a Target register, it worked once, and then it didn't. Demand is showing up at the checkout without anyone at either company designing for it. Every one of those moments is a basket that either converts or walks.
Quotes verbatim from public Trustpilot reviews of zip.co/us, retrieved July 29, 2026. Light trims marked, no wording changed. These are illustrative of a much larger set; a full pull of guest voice by retailer is a week-one deliverable.
Every other response will treat Target as a blank slate. The first sentence out of Target's VP of Payments will be "we already have this." A pitch that has no plan for that sentence is over in the first meeting. Handled right, it becomes the wedge.
The question was never whether Target needs another payment option. The question is what would make Target prioritize Zip over Affirm and Sezzle, and how we get them there. The numbers hand us the answer: Zip converts a guest the rest of the stack declines. That's worth prioritizing.
And the category proves retailers think in tiers, not slots. Big-box tender stacks run a house card for loyalty and interchange, plus multiple installment providers, because each converts a different guest. Walmart consolidated to Klarna through OnePay in 2025, and Affirm kept much of its Walmart volume anyway, through its own card at the point of sale. That card mechanism is the same one almost certainly carrying Zip volume through Target's checkout today. The pitch is never "add a sixth button." It is "here is the tier your current stack declines, already shopping with you."
Parents with young children are the heaviest BNPL users in America, at 46.7%, ahead of even paycheck-to-paycheck consumers at 42.7% (PYMNTS). Millennials and Gen Z make up roughly 65% of all BNPL users, and per-user spend passed $1,000 in 2024 on its way to a forecast $1,542 by 2028 (EMARKETER). Young families building a household are the exact guest Target's entire brand is built around.
The category's economics run on exactly this. Retailers pay BNPL providers 2–8% of each sale for bringing the customer and closing it (EMARKETER, 2026). A BNPL earns its place at the checkout by delivering shoppers, which is why everything in this program is aimed at one provable sentence: Zip delivers a guest the rest of the stack declines.
Zip sponsors Minnesota United. The name on the front of the shirt is Target.
Same club, same stadium, same fan base, in Target's home market. Every co-sponsor dinner, matchday suite and community event at Allianz Field is a room where Zip and Target already stand together. The warm introduction to account #1 runs through a partnership Zip is already paying for, and no competing agency can say that about their plan because no competing provider can say it about their sponsorships.
"Every guest Affirm declines walks out of your cart. We're the tier underneath, and your turnaround is being underwritten by exactly that guest."
The sale runs B2B, but the value is B2C: incremental guests, incremental baskets, incremental top line. Fan-affinity data from the team partnerships is how we prove the audience overlap account by account. And the ask of Target is the friendliest one in enterprise sales: we're not asking them to integrate anything. We're asking how we do more business together.
Everything above comes from public sources, screenshotted today and unedited apart from the amber highlight. Guest reviews describing tap-to-pay at a Target register point to the virtual card, which is corroboration rather than confirmation. We have not confirmed the mechanism with your team. If it's the virtual card, the opening above is the strongest line available on any account in this pilot. If it's something else, the argument changes and we'd rewrite it before it ever reached Target.
Everything above already exists for Target one click deeper: the named committee, messaging by role, channel and budget splits, the 90-day sequence, the sample report. The same engine then runs on every account that clears the filters, feeding Salesforce and Slack in real time. If all this bought you was one retailer, it wouldn't be worth your money. The value is a repeatable process your team owns, account after account, in perpetuity.
Your fifty, filtered. We built the selection model as a live tool: toggle proven category, processor fit, coverage gaps, fan overlap and incumbent BNPL, and watch the list collapse to the ten with a composite fit score behind each one. DSW scores 100. It's your own thesis, made operational, and it's the fastest way to argue about which accounts are actually right.
The full Target teardown (ICP, committee map, messaging by role, channel plan, 90-day sequence, sample dashboard) sits one click deeper: everything in the video, in full →
Their world, their brand, plotted on a real account. Three committee members, four phases, opening in the February FY27 window their own calendar dictates. Touches on one lane deliberately set up touches on another.
Dates and windows are real, from Target's published fiscal calendar. The touches stay claim-free by design: nothing in this plan depends on the unverified findings.
Fiscal year ends the Saturday nearest 31 January, IT protects peak trading, and earnings, conferences and planning cycles set the rhythm for everything else. We mapped all 12 months so every touch lands when it can actually move.
Anyone can send a sequence. The strategy that drives outcomes is the creative bet that earns a reaction: deliver the value first, and the interest follows. 3 bets, built in Target's world rather than Zip's. Our creative director drew these this week, before a contract exists, because that's the fastest way to show you how we think.
The platform underneath all 3: you are the target, so we came with arrows. Aim, timing, hitting the mark. It's the one metaphor that belongs to this account and no other.
Concepts for discussion, drawn this week. Names, figures and copy inside the comps are placeholders pending your data and sign-off. Nothing here claims the unverified findings as fact.
Win the Quarter is priced to your number: $475K, all-in, as a project. Scoped on outcomes with the 90-day plan below as our operating pace and a genuine break point at its end, rather than a meter running by the month.
Mapped to your FY27, which started July 1. The pilot carries the break point; the run-rate starts only on proof. Brands at your stage typically put $40–50K per month behind media alone, and the run-rate range covers services, program and that media together. Line-item pricing, assumptions and every deliverable, in writing: the long form →
You asked why ABM pilots fail and what we'd worry about for Zip specifically. We answered it honestly, in writing: risks & watchouts →
We only win if you win, and this is the team making sure of it: your extended bench of strategists and doers, named, and staffed so nothing about this pilot ever waits on a person.
| Who | Role | Commitment |
|---|---|---|
| Chris Salazar | Founder & executive sponsor · escalation, QBRs, skin in the game | Hands-on, weekly |
| Rita Matuzic | Account director · relationship, strategy, owns the monthly review | Core team |
| Vince Nocerino | Paid performance director · channel architecture, Tier 1 and Tier 2 media, MQA/SQA discipline, with his strategy and programmatic pod | Dedicated pod |
| David Garcia | Digital experience director · landing experiences, conversion paths, the journey between touches | Core team |
| Mark Willson | Growth strategist · CRM architecture, lead scoring, Salesforce, Phase 0 | Core team |
| Michael Sykora | Marketing strategist · measurement design, engagement scoring, control-cohort analysis | Core team |
| Andy Seo | Marketing specialist · day-to-day execution and weekly optimization against coverage | Core team |
| Ashlesha Khond | Project manager · cadence and delivery, so nothing waits on a status meeting | Core team |
| Grace Xu | Content manager · message architecture, seller sequences in the seller's voice | Core team |
| George Chiu | Production manager · asset delivery, working with Zip's creative team rather than around it | Core team |
| Steve Wymer | ABM communications & narrative · Phase 2, co-sponsor mapping | Executive partner |
| Chris Kidd | ABM & performance marketing advisor | Advisor |
The break clause. 12-month term with the 90-day pilot inside it, and a genuine break at day 90 if we haven't hit the agreed success measures. We want that clause in the contract.
Processor money. Stripe and Adyen partner co-marketing funds offset your program spend; they do not reduce our fee. Running ZoomInfo/Apollo on our licenses may let you retire subscriptions for the pilot's duration.
Every seat, what they own, and how the pod is built around the named leads: the team in full →
Staffing is priced into the tier fees. Win the Year adds a dedicated analyst and deepens the strategist and field roles.
That split is among the most replicated findings in B2B marketing science: Ehrenberg-Bass's 95:5 rule (Prof. John Dawes), Binet & Field's IPA study across 996 campaigns, the LinkedIn B2B Institute restudy. Whoever Zip hires, both motions must run.
Sales-led and deeply personal: executive outreach, seller sequences, direct mail, gifting, field moments, committee-specific creative. Media plays support here, through retargeting and staying visible with people who already engaged. Judged on committee coverage, meetings, account progression.
This is where paid media actually runs, because it's the first point with enough audience for the platforms to optimize. Creative personalized by segment, vertical and persona rather than by logo. It warms every other seller's territory so nobody's patch goes quiet while account #1 gets the attention, and it builds the bench that becomes pilot #2.
Run both rails and you have the Demand Activation engine, the game-changer for Zip. The pilot wins the quarter. The engine wins the year.
And for scale on the numbers above: Affirm reported $434.8M of sales and marketing expense in its FY2025 10-K. Both tiers on this page, combined, are less than 0.2% of that single line on one competitor's books. Whichever number you pick, the position on this chart says the same thing: the route is up, and the only question is whether the climb starts now or later.
Channel by channel, with the job each one does and the budget behind it: the full channel architecture →
Sources: Binet & Field, IPA "The Long and the Short of It" (60:40, 996 cases); Binet & Field × LinkedIn B2B Institute (46:54 for B2B); Ehrenberg-Bass / Prof. John Dawes (the 95:5 rule); Federal Reserve BNPL usage data; Affirm Form 10-K, FY ended June 30, 2025 (sales and marketing expense, incl. warrant amortization). Chart is our synthesis, directional by design.
You don't need to be told what ABM is. What you need is someone to run the engine, the unglamorous parts, so that your team is the team that proved ABM works at Zip.
Everything the brief asked for is in here: timelines, budgets, committee maps, dashboards, contact strategy. Those are table stakes, and we did them at a level you can audit. But table stakes don't create the thing your sellers actually want, which is leads that beg to be closed. That takes the machine, the creative bets, and a reason to be prioritized. That's the part we brought that nobody asked for.
That's the job we want. Not to be the agency that advised on the pivot. To be the reason your people get to stand up in a QBR and show a number that moved.
The creative stays yours. The relationships stay yours. The wins are yours. We're the nuts and bolts underneath, and we're fine being invisible if the results aren't.
You said you want to punch above your weight class. Punching above your weight class is a coverage question. Prove it in 90 days. Scale to 25, then 50. Every ring, every account.
This experience stays deliberately light. The depth lives one click away below, and the complete response is also available as a document for anyone who prefers paper.
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