How to Sell to a Marketing Director (and Size the List First)

TL;DR

• A Marketing Director owns a channel mix, a budget and a pipeline target shared with sales. Sell them a cleaner path to qualified pipeline, not "better data".
• Count first, send second. On 2026-10-21 LeadOcean showed 144,815 mailable people with the title "Marketing Director" worldwide, 67,940 of them in North America.
• The recipe takes about 25 minutes and spends about 26 LeadOcean records. Every count is free.

Prerequisites

• A free LeadOcean account and an API key from app.leadocean.io. Free gives you 1,000 records for life, no card, 5 requests a second.
• The key in your shell as $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY.
• curl and jq.
• Optional: Claude or any MCP client connected to https://api.leadocean.io/mcp, which has 13 tools including free counts.

What a Marketing Director actually cares about

A Marketing Director is judged on pipeline and spend efficiency. Everything they read is filtered through those two numbers.

They care about four things, in this order.

1. Qualified pipeline. Leads that sales accepts, not form fills. A director with a weak lead-to-opportunity rate will take a meeting.
2. Cost per opportunity. Channel spend divided by deals created. They defend this number to a VP or CMO every quarter.
3. Sales alignment. Sales says the leads are bad. Marketing says sales does not follow up. Anything that ends that argument gets attention.
4. Team capacity. A small team runs many channels. Tools that add setup work lose to tools that remove it.

They do not care about your feature list. They care about what changes in their next campaign.

What kills the deal

Marketing Directors say no for predictable reasons. Answer them in the first email, not the third.

• "We already have a data vendor." Do not argue. Ask what happens when they need a list for a new region on a Tuesday.
• "No budget this quarter." Offer a pilot that fits inside the free plan. One campaign, one list, one number to compare.
• "Talk to Marketing Ops." Good. Send Marketing Ops a one-paragraph note with the count, the filters and the endpoint. They will read it.
• "Not now." Ask for a month. Directors plan by quarter, so a named month is a real answer.

Where a Marketing Director sits in the buying committee

A Marketing Director is usually a champion or an evaluator, not the final signer. The title is a signal, not proof of rank, so check the seniority on the rows you pull.

Three roles show up around them:

• The VP of Marketing or CMO signs budget above a threshold. See how to sell to a VP of Marketing.
• Marketing Ops or RevOps vets tooling, integrations and data hygiene.
• Finance or procurement appears when annual spend gets large.

Write to the Marketing Director as the person who will say "this helps our pipeline" to their boss. Give them a sentence they can forward.

Step 1: Count Marketing Directors by region (free)

Start with a count. It spends zero records and tells you whether the segment is worth a campaign.

leadocean_count_leads counts mailable people by default (verified, catch_all_valid and catch_all addresses). Run it from any MCP client:

{
  "tool": "leadocean_count_leads",
  "arguments": {
    "title": ["Marketing Director"],
    "salesRegion": ["EMEA"],
    "facets": false
  }
}

Repeat with NORAM, APAC and LATAM, or omit salesRegion for the worldwide figure. Title search matches the profile title, so "Marketing Director" will not include every "Director of Marketing" or "Head of Marketing" phrasing. Run those as separate counts.

Step 2: Read the count for each region

Put the counts in one table before you pick a market. These ran on 2026-10-21, filtered by title "Marketing Director" and the default mailable email statuses.

Two things to read from this. North America is 47% of the worldwide mailable list (67,940 of 144,815). And the four regions sum to 98,903, so about 45,900 mailable profiles carry no region and sit only in the worldwide count.

The worldwide employer figure is not exact, so treat it as approximate. Without the email filter, North America alone matches 222,756 people. The gap is people we hold but would not recommend mailing.

Step 3: Pull a sample from your best region

Pull 25 rows from the region you picked. This spends 25 records. Search is a flat JSON body, filters are arrays, and limit runs from 1 to 100.

curl -s -X POST https://api.leadocean.io/v1/people/search \
  -H "x-api-key: $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "title": ["Marketing Director"],
    "salesRegion": ["EMEA"],
    "emailStatus": ["verified"],
    "limit": 25
  }' | jq '{rows: (.data | length), next: .meta.nextCursor}'

Add a company-size filter next if you sell to one segment, for example "employeeRange": ["51-200"]. Page by sending meta.nextCursor back as cursor. One search pages to 10,000 rows, so narrow the filters instead of walking the whole index.

Step 4: Enrich one record to read the career history

Before you write, read one profile. Person enrich returns career history: past roles, education, certifications and awards. Past employers carry no company_id yet.

Enrich takes exactly one of linkedin_url, email, phone or person_id. Each search row carries its id at meta.source_ids.person_id.

curl -s -X POST https://api.leadocean.io/v1/people/enrich \
  -H "x-api-key: $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"person_id": "1234567890", "reveal_email": true}' \
  | jq '.data.resume_data.experiences[0:3]'

This costs one record. A person we hold nothing for returns a 404 and costs nothing.

Look for the path they took. A director who came up through demand generation will respond to pipeline math. One who came from brand or content will respond to reach and message fit.

Step 5: Write the first line

The first line must show you know the job. Pick one of these four angles and keep the email under 90 words.

1. Pipeline: "Sales rejects some share of the leads your team sends. What do you do with the rest of the list?"
2. Cost: "If cost per opportunity went up last quarter, which channel did you cut first?"
3. Launch: "{Acme} is entering a new region. How long does it take your team to build a list for it?"
4. Territory: "I counted {N} mailable marketing directors in your target region. Want the list?"

The territory line works because it is checkable. You ran a free count, so the number is real. Send it with the count and the date.

Match the angle to the list. A director who runs paid channels gets the cost angle. One who covers several countries gets the launch angle. Where the list is small, as in APAC (9,562) and LATAM (2,463), a named-account angle fits better.

These are starting points, not measured results. Do not claim a reply rate you have not measured. Test two angles on 100 contacts each and keep the winner.

Step 6: Save the list as a CSV

When the sample converts, export the list. Bulk CSV export is not on the Free plan. Solo includes it, and Agency exports 50k rows a file. The ceiling is 50,000 rows a request and 500,000 rows a day.

curl -s -X POST https://api.leadocean.io/v1/exports \
  -H "x-api-key: $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "name": "Marketing Directors EMEA",
    "filters": {
      "title": ["Marketing Director"],
      "salesRegion": ["EMEA"],
      "emailStatus": ["verified"]
    },
    "limit": 5000,
    "preset": "full"
  }'

The body takes filters (any people-search filter set), limit (rows) and a column preset. Poll GET /v1/exports/{id} until it returns a downloadUrl.

You can also build the same export in the app at app.leadocean.io. The Exports page has a filter builder, a column picker and a price preview before you download.

Step 7: Plan the follow-up

One email rarely closes a Marketing Director. Plan three touches before you send the first.

Day 1: first line plus the count and the date. One question, no attachment.
Day 4: one sentence on what a pilot would cover, and the filters you would use.
Day 9: offer the list itself: "I can send the {N} names for your region. Worth a look?"

Keep each touch under 90 words. Change the angle on touch two instead of repeating the first. If the director forwards you to Marketing Ops, treat that as a win and send the endpoint, the filters and the count in one message.

Log each touch against the person id so you do not mail the same person twice from two campaigns. Check email_status on every row before the send.

What you get

The count in step 1, run on 2026-10-21 with title: ["Marketing Director"] and salesRegion: ["EMEA"], returned:

{
  "total": 18938,
  "totalIsExact": true,
  "totalAll": 79189,
  "distinctCompanies": 11145,
  "credits": 0
}

total is the mailable count. totalAll is everyone matching without the email filter. The call cost no records.

A search row, response shape from the API reference, with placeholder values:

{
  "success": true,
  "data": [
    {
      "profile_data": { "profile_full_name": "Jane Doe" },
      "contact_data": {
        "has_email": true,
        "email_status": "verified",
        "contact_current_experiences": [
          { "job_title": "Marketing Director", "company_name": "Acme", "company_domain": "acme.com" }
        ]
      },
      "meta": { "source_ids": { "person_id": "1234567890" } }
    }
  ],
  "meta": { "count": 1, "credits": 1, "nextCursor": "..." }
}

Troubleshooting

FAQ