A target account list (TAL) is a named set of companies that match your ideal customer profile and that your team has chosen to sell to, in a fixed order of priority.
It is a list of accounts, not people. Each row is a company, usually with a domain, a size, a country and a reason it made the cut.
Why it matters for outbound
A TAL sets the boundary of the work. Reps stop chasing whoever replies and spend time on the companies most likely to buy. It also makes results measurable: you can say "31 of 120 accounts engaged" instead of counting loose leads.
The list drives everything after it. Messaging, contact search and territory splits all start from the same set of domains. A weak list wastes every later step, so most of the effort belongs here.
A TAL differs from your total addressable market. The market is every company that could buy. The TAL is the slice you commit to work this quarter.
Example
A rep sells payroll software to software companies. Her ICP is 50 to 500 employees, based in the US, in software. She filters to that profile and gets a pool far larger than she can work.
She keeps 120 accounts and ranks them.
| Rank | Account (placeholder) | Domain | Employees | Why it made the list |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Acme | acme.com | 240 | Hiring in finance |
| 2 | Globex | globex.example | 90 | Raised a round |
| 3 | Initech | initech.example | 410 | Uses a rival product |
The rows are placeholders. The ranking is the useful part: the rep works rank 1 first, and revisits the bottom of the list each quarter.
In LeadOcean data
LeadOcean has no object called a target account list. You build one from company search, and you keep the result in your own sheet or CRM (openapi.json, September 2026).
- Build the list with
POST /v1/companies/search. Filter byindustry,hqCountry,minEmployeesandmaxEmployees. Each company returned counts one record. - Size the pool first with
count=trueandlimitset to 1. It is a free call, andmeta.totalis capped at 100,000. - Add people later.
GET /v1/companies/{domain}/peoplereturns the roster for one domain, for exampleacme.com, and stops at 10,000 rows.
An AI assistant can do the same through the hosted MCP server. search_companies builds the list and count_leads sizes it for free. LeadOcean is data, not a rep workspace: it has no CRM, sequencer or dialer, so you rank and work the list in your own tools.
Free plan: 1,000 records, one-off, no card. Pro is $499 a month. See /pricing.
For a step-by-step build, see how to find target accounts with Claude. To pick buyers inside each account, read how to search for specific job titles within target accounts. If you only have domains, try the recipe to find champions at target accounts.
Related terms
All of these sit in the glossary.
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