What Is Account Research?

Account research is the work of learning about one target company and its likely buyers before you contact anyone there. It turns a name on a list into a short brief a rep can act on.

Key takeaways

• Account research answers three questions: who is this company, who decides, and why talk to them now.
• It is done per account, not per list. A rep or an agent researches one company at a time.
• The facts are firmographics, people, technology and signals such as hiring or funding.
• LeadOcean supplies the data layer: company records, a roster of people per domain, and enrichment for contacts.

What it is

Account research is the process of collecting facts about a target company, its people, its tools and its timing, so you can decide whether to pursue it.

The output is a brief. A good one fits on half a page. It says what the company does, how big it is and which tools it runs. It names who owns the problem you solve and gives one reason to reach out this quarter.

It is used in account-based sales, where you pick named companies first and then work them. It also helps in plain outbound, whenever a rep wants more than a job title before sending a message.

How it works

The process has five steps. Each step produces one block of the brief.

1. Pick the account. Start from a domain, such as acme.com, taken from your target list or your CRM.
2. Pull the company profile. Get industry, headcount, revenue band, location and funding history. This tells you whether the account fits your ideal customer profile.
3. Map the people. List who works there, then narrow to the buying group: the function that owns the problem, and the level that signs.
4. Check the signals. Look for recent hiring, a funding round, a new tool in the stack, or a leadership change. A signal gives you a reason to write now.
5. Write the brief and pick contacts. Summarise in a few lines, choose one to three people, and enrich only those for email or phone.

A worked example

Take a fictional account, Acme, at acme.com. You sell a data tool to sales teams, so you care about its size, its stack and who runs revenue.

You start with the company profile. One call returns the company record, split into company_data, company_detected_technologies and company_metrics.

Next you list the people we hold at that domain. You filter the result for the sales function and VP level or above. That is your buying group, and it usually holds a handful of names.

You then check one signal. Acme posted five sales roles this month, so the team is growing. That is the opener. You enrich the head of sales for a work email, and the brief is done.

Account research vs lead research

People mix the two up because both start with a company. They differ in scale and in output.

Most teams do both. Lead research builds the list. Account research decides how to work the accounts that matter most.

When it matters

Before outreach to a named account

If you pick the company first, research is the step that stops generic messages. A rep who knows the stack and the hiring pattern writes one relevant line instead of a template.

Before a meeting or a call

A discovery call goes better when you know the company's size, the buyer's level and what changed recently. Five minutes of research before the call replaces ten minutes of basic questions during it.

When an agent does the work

An AI agent can run the steps above if it has live data. LeadOcean's MCP server at https://api.leadocean.io/mcp gives Claude and similar clients company and people tools, with OAuth sign-in and no key pasted. For a ready prompt, see research an account in 5 minutes.

When you size a territory

Reps with a large account list need to know where to start. Research at a light depth, such as headcount, stack and open roles, ranks the list so the deep work goes to the best fits.

How LeadOcean handles it

LeadOcean covers the data steps of account research. It does not write the brief or run outreach. It has no rep workspace, sequencer, dialer or CRM.

The calls map to the steps like this:

• Company profile: POST /v1/companies/enrich takes a domain or a linkedin_url. A company we hold nothing for returns a 404.
• Find accounts that fit: /v1/companies/search filters on industry, headcount, location, technologies and technologyCategories. Technology data comes from crawling about 7.8M sites.
• Map the people: GET /v1/companies/{domain}/people lists the people we hold at a company, one record per person returned. The roster stops at 10,000 rows.
• Contacts: POST /v1/people/enrich takes exactly one of linkedin_url, email, phone or person_id, and returns the email with reveal_email set to true.

Two calls cover the core of the worked example above: the company profile, then the people at that domain. Replace acme.com with your own target.

curl -X POST "https://api.leadocean.io/v1/companies/enrich" \
  -H "x-api-key: $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"domain": "acme.com"}'

curl "https://api.leadocean.io/v1/companies/acme.com/people" \
  -H "x-api-key: $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY"

The roster returns thin records without contact points. Pick the people you want, then enrich them by person_id. That keeps record use low, because only the chosen contacts are enriched.

The database holds 693M people and 63M companies (as of 2026-09-23), refreshed monthly. Each record carries its own fetched_at date, so you can see how fresh it is.

LeadOcean has no signals feed of its own for hiring or news. You bring that from another source, or from your own notes. Some tools bundle research agents into a table workflow. Clay lists its Claygent agent on its free plan (Clay pricing, September 2026). LeadOcean is the data source you call from your own workflow, an agent or the Exports page in the app.

The free plan gives 1,000 records, one-off, with no card. Pro is $499 a month, flat. See pricing. To run the same research from an editor, see research an account in Windsurf and research an account in VS Code.

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