How to Build a B2B Lead List for IT Services and MSPs (Owners, Sales Leads and Technical Leads)

IT services firms and MSPs are small, owner-led and easy to over-count. Filter by industry, headcount and seniority, count the list for free, then pull only the people you will email.

TL;DR

• Small IT firms buy through the owner or founder. Larger ones add a sales lead and a technical lead. Target all three at the same company.
• Size the list with a free count, then pull a 100-row sample. The recipe takes about 25 minutes and spends 100 records at most.
• On 2026-10-21 the free count found 37,456 mailable owners, founders and C-level people at US IT services firms with 11 to 200 employees, across 15,817 employers.

Prerequisites

• A LeadOcean account. The Free plan gives 1,000 records for life, no card, 5 requests a second. Sign up at app.leadocean.io.
• An API key stored as $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY.
• curl and jq, or any HTTP client. Optional: the hosted MCP server at https://api.leadocean.io/mcp if you work from Claude.

Base URL is https://api.leadocean.io. Every request carries the header x-api-key.

Step 1: Pick the buying committee

IT services is a crowded, relationship-led market. Who signs depends on firm size, so write the committee down before you query anything. This guide is for vendors selling software, tooling, services or data to IT firms and MSPs.

• Owner, founder or CEO. In a firm under 50 people this person signs nearly everything, including your tool.
• Sales or business development lead. A director or VP who owns the pipeline. Buys lead data, outreach tools and marketing services.
• Technical lead. A CTO, head of service delivery or head of operations. Runs the pilot for anything that touches the stack, the ticket queue or client onboarding.
• Finance or operations lead. Appears in larger firms. Rarely the champion, often the blocker on price.

Turn the roles into filter sets:

owner:     { seniority: [owner, founder, c_suite] }
sales:     { jobLevel: [Director, VP], jobFunction: [Sales & Business Development] }
technical: { seniority: [c_suite, vp, head, director], title: ["CTO", "Service Delivery", "Operations"] }

The title filter takes keywords. Use it for the technical lead, because job function for these roles is often filed as Information Technology or Operations inconsistently.

Step 2: Resolve the industry values

Filter values are exact strings. The industry list has 534 values and several describe IT services. Look them up instead of guessing.

for q in "IT Services" "Information Technology" "IT System"; do
  curl -s -G "https://api.leadocean.io/v1/enums/industry" --data-urlencode "q=$q" \
    -H "x-api-key: $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY" | jq -r '.data.values[]'
done

In Claude with the MCP server connected, the free tool does the same job.

leadocean_list_enum_values({ name: "industry", q: "IT Services" })

The values that matter follow.

• IT Services and IT Consulting
• Information Technology and Services
• IT System Operations and Maintenance
• IT System Design Services
• IT System Training and Support
• IT System Custom Software Development

The first two carry almost all of the companies: on 2026-10-21 the free company count found 44,982 and 15,979 US firms with 11 to 200 staff, against 47 for IT System Operations and Maintenance. Keep that third value, but expect it to add little. Add IT System Custom Software Development only if you sell to dev shops.

Step 3: Size the company list for free

Count companies first. A company count is free and tells you whether the segment can carry an outbound motion.

curl -s -G "https://api.leadocean.io/v1/companies/count" \
  -H "x-api-key: $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY" \
  --data-urlencode "industry=IT Services and IT Consulting" \
  --data-urlencode "industry=Information Technology and Services" \
  --data-urlencode "industry=IT System Operations and Maintenance" \
  --data-urlencode "hqCountry=US" \
  --data-urlencode "employeeRange=11-50" \
  --data-urlencode "employeeRange=51-200"

The same call as an MCP tool is leadocean_count_companies. It spends no records and returns breakdowns by industry, headcount band, HQ state and NAICS code, so you see where the segment clusters.

Step 4: Build the people filter

Search takes a flat JSON body. Filters are arrays. The count=true query parameter makes the call a free sizing call: data comes back empty and meta.total is capped at 100,000.

curl -s -X POST "https://api.leadocean.io/v1/people/search?count=true" \
  -H "x-api-key: $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "industry": ["IT Services and IT Consulting",
                 "Information Technology and Services",
                 "IT System Operations and Maintenance"],
    "country": ["US"],
    "employeeRange": ["11-50", "51-200"],
    "seniority": ["owner", "founder", "c_suite"],
    "limit": 1
  }'

Build one filter per committee role.

Enum values are case-exact: VP, Director. Seniority is lowercase. A people count with no email filter carries meta.distinctCompanies, which tells you how many employers the people span.

Step 5: Pull a sample and check email status

Spend a small number of records to check quality before a bulk pull. Page size is 1 to 100 and pagination uses cursor.

curl -s -X POST "https://api.leadocean.io/v1/people/search" \
  -H "x-api-key: $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "industry": ["IT Services and IT Consulting", "Information Technology and Services"],
    "country": ["US"],
    "employeeRange": ["11-50", "51-200"],
    "seniority": ["owner", "founder", "c_suite"],
    "emailStatus": ["verified", "catch_all_valid"],
    "limit": 100
  }' | jq '.meta, (.data | length)'

Read email_status on every row before you send. LeadOcean does not refund or credit back bounced emails. One search pages to 10,000 rows (meta.depthCapped is true on the last page), so narrow the filters rather than walk the whole index.

Step 6: Write the messaging

Pick one angle per role. Keep each first email under 90 words and make one ask.

• Owner. Lead with time. Owners of small firms bill hours or run on thin margins, so name the hour you save them.
• Sales lead. Lead with pipeline. Ask who owns outbound and whether the list is the bottleneck.
• Technical lead. Lead with the stack and the ticket queue. Say exactly what changes in their tooling, and what does not.

Use the firm's own segment in the first line, such as managed services or custom software, because the industry value tells you which. For a bulk run, POST /v1/exports takes up to 50,000 rows a request and 500,000 a day. Bulk CSV export is not on Free; Solo at $97 a month includes it. The app at app.leadocean.io also has an Exports page with a filter builder and a price preview.

A first email for the owner segment, with placeholders:

Subject: Quick question about Acme IT's pipeline

Hi Jane,

Acme IT looks like a managed services shop with a small sales team.
How do you find new clients today: referrals, partners or outbound?

We help firms like yours build a verified list of local businesses
that match your service area. Worth a 15-minute look?

Jane Doe

Three rules keep it working. Name the segment in line one. Ask a question the owner can answer in one line. Never attach anything to the first touch.

Send in small batches of 50 to 100 people and watch bounces before you scale. A catch-all domain can accept mail and still bounce later, so keep catch_all rows in a separate batch from verified ones.

Step 7: Segment by firm type and size

An MSP, a project-based IT consultancy and a dev shop do not share a pitch. Split the list before you write a sequence.

• Managed services. Use the two main IT values plus title: ["Service Delivery", "Managed Services"]. These buyers care about ticket volume, onboarding speed and margin per seat.
• Consultancies. Use IT Services and IT Consulting with seniority: ["partner", "founder", "owner"]. These buyers care about utilization and a steady flow of projects.
• Smaller shops. Use employeeRange: ["1-10", "11-50"]. The owner answers every email, so send fewer touches and make the first one short.
• Larger firms. Use employeeRange: ["201-500", "501-1000"] and add the technical lead and a finance contact. Expect a longer cycle.

Run one free count per segment and compare the totals. Spend your first 100 records on the segment with the highest ratio of mailable people to employers, because that is where one email reaches a real decision maker.

curl -s -X POST "https://api.leadocean.io/v1/people/search?count=true" \
  -H "x-api-key: $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "industry": ["IT System Operations and Maintenance"],
    "country": ["US"],
    "seniority": ["owner", "founder", "c_suite"],
    "limit": 1
  }'

Step 8: Enrich the accounts that reply

When a reply comes in, enrich the person before the call. POST /v1/people/enrich takes exactly one of linkedin_url, email, phone or person_id. Since October 2026 it also returns career history: past roles, education and certifications. Past employers carry no company id yet.

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" }' | jq '.data.resume_data.certifications'

Certifications are useful in this market. A technical lead who holds a vendor certification tells you which platforms the firm already resells, so you can open with the integration that matters. An enrichment that finds nobody is a 404 and costs nothing.

What you get

Free count run on 2026-10-21 with leadocean_count_leads. These are mailable counts (verified, catch_all_valid or catch_all), not everyone matching the filters.

Without the email condition the first filter matches 138,870 people and the second 21,097. The company count for the same industries, US headquarters and 11 to 200 employees returned 61,008 companies on 2026-10-21.

A search row looks like this. Response shape from the API reference, placeholder values. Rows carry no addresses: send meta.source_ids.person_id to enrich for those.

{
  "success": true,
  "data": [
    {
      "profile_data": { "profile_full_name": "Jane Doe", "profile_headline": "Founder at Acme IT" },
      "contact_data": {
        "has_email": true,
        "email_status": "verified",
        "email_type": "work",
        "contact_current_experiences": [
          { "company_name": "Acme IT", "company_domain": "acme.com", "job_title": "Founder" }
        ]
      },
      "meta": { "source_ids": { "person_id": "1234567890" } }
    }
  ],
  "meta": { "count": 1, "nextCursor": "..." }
}

Troubleshooting

FAQ