Most ABM programs start with a 200-account target list and die inside a spreadsheet. The list lives in a tab somewhere, the sales team looks at it once a quarter, marketing sends a generic campaign at all 200 accounts, and nothing measurable happens. The problem is not the list. The problem is that the list is static and the buying is not.
At Leadpipe we build ABM watchlists for ourselves and for customers using Orbit. This guide is the exact workflow: how to turn 200 target domains into a live, person-level, daily-refreshed watchlist in about 15 minutes.
The short answer
Open the Orbit audience builder. Upload your 200 target domains into the companyDomain filter. Attach 2 to 4 topics that describe your category. Set the minimum intent score to 70. Filter seniority to VP, Director, and C-Suite. Save the audience. Every 24 hours, Orbit re-runs the query and gives you a fresh CSV of the specific people at your 200 accounts who are currently researching your category, with email, phone, LinkedIn, and intent score attached.
That is the whole workflow. Below is the walkthrough and the configuration choices that separate a working watchlist from a noisy one.
Before you start: get your 200 domains clean
Orbit filters on company domain. That means your target account list needs to be domain-formatted, not company-named. “Acme Corp” will not match. “acme.com” will.
Spend 10 minutes on data hygiene. Export your ABM target list. For each row, confirm:
- One canonical domain per account. No
www.prefix, no trailing slashes. - No subdomains unless the account actually uses one as its primary site.
- For parent-subsidiary cases (HubSpot owns Clearbit, Salesforce owns Slack), decide which domain your campaign is targeting. You can include both, but expect messier attribution.
- Strip out duplicates and test domains (mailinator, example.com, internal staging URLs).
A clean 200-domain list copies straight into the Orbit domain filter as a newline-separated paste. Messy lists produce zero matches and five rounds of “why isn’t this working.”
If you do not have a target account list yet, start with our ABM glossary entry and the ABM with visitor identification guide. Both walk through ICP-based account selection.
Step 1: open the Orbit audience builder
Log in to Leadpipe and open Orbit. You will land on the audience builder. There are three panels: topics, ICP filters, and a live preview showing count and sample records.
If you have never used Orbit, read orbit person-level intent audiences for the five-step tour. This post assumes you know the layout.
Step 2: pick 2 to 4 topics
The temptation is to pick 15 topics so you catch every possible signal. Do not. More topics means broader signals and weaker precision.
For an ABM watchlist, pick:
- One topic that names your category tightly. “CRM Software” if you sell CRM. “Endpoint Security” if you sell endpoint. “Contract Lifecycle Management” if you sell CLM.
- One topic that names your top competitor. “Salesforce alternatives” or “HubSpot alternatives” or “Okta alternatives.” Competitor-named topics are higher intent because the searcher has already decided to look beyond the incumbent.
- Optional: one adjacent topic. If you sell CRM and you want to catch early Phase 1 buyers, add “sales pipeline” or “sales engagement platforms.”
- Optional: one use-case topic. “CRM for Small Business” or “HIPAA-compliant CRM” if you are a vertical player.
Cap at 4 topics. You can always clone the audience and run parallel watchlists.
Pro tip: Set minTopicOverlap: 2 in the preview. That forces the audience to only include people showing signals on at least two of your selected topics. Fewer results, much stronger signal.
Step 3: upload your 200 target domains
In the ICP filter panel, find the companyDomain filter. Paste your 200 clean domains, one per line.
This restricts the entire audience to people working at your 200 target accounts. Everyone outside those accounts is filtered out. Everyone inside those accounts with active intent signals is filtered in.
This is the core of a true ABM watchlist. You are not looking at the whole market. You are looking at your market.
Step 4: set seniority, department, and score
Three more filters finish the job.
Seniority. For most B2B ABM work, set this to VP, Director, and C-Suite. This is the decision-making tier.
If you sell to a specific buyer role (for example, CISO or VP Sales only), also use the jobTitle filter with the exact phrase. Leave it blank if you want the full decision-making committee.
Department. Optional but useful. If you sell marketing software, filter to Marketing. If you sell to engineering leaders, filter to Engineering. If your category buyer can be multiple functions (for example, data platforms often sell to both Data and Engineering), include both departments.
Minimum score. Start at 70. This is the threshold where behavior stops looking like casual browsing and starts looking like research. If your 200-account preview is too sparse, drop to 65. If it is too noisy, raise to 75 or 80.
For the full breakdown of how to read the score, see reading the Orbit intent score.
Step 5: preview, adjust, save
Hit preview. Orbit returns a count and 50 masked sample records in a few seconds.
Expected outputs for a 200-account B2B ABM watchlist, in my experience:
| Category | Typical preview count |
|---|---|
| 200 mid-market B2B accounts, 1 topic, score 70+, VP+ | 50 to 300 people |
| 200 enterprise accounts, 2 overlapping topics, score 70+, VP+ | 80 to 500 people |
| 200 SMB accounts, narrow topic, score 80+, specific title | 20 to 100 people |
If your preview is zero, check:
- Is your domain list actually clean? Paste 10 rows into the builder as a test.
- Are your topics too narrow? Broaden one.
- Is your score threshold too high? Drop to 65.
- Are your filters too restrictive? Remove department temporarily.
If your preview is over 1,000, tighten. Add a second overlapping topic, raise seniority to VP and C-Suite only, narrow the department.
When the preview looks right, name the audience (“ABM Watchlist, Q2 Top 200”) and save.
Step 6: wire up the daily refresh
Saved audiences re-run every 24 hours on the Orbit infrastructure. The daily output is a new row count and a fresh dataset. You get three delivery options.
| Delivery | Best for | Setup time |
|---|---|---|
| CSV export | Manual review, batch upload to LinkedIn/Google Ads | 1 minute |
| REST API pull | Custom pipelines, Clay workflows, AI SDR agents | 30 minutes |
| Webhook push | Real-time CRM updates, Slack alerts | 30 minutes |
For most teams starting out, CSV export is fine. Open the dashboard, download today’s run, triage in a spreadsheet. Upgrade to API or webhooks once the workflow sticks.
If you want to push into HubSpot specifically, see our Orbit HubSpot live account heatmap guide. For the developer-heavy path, the full Intent API walkthrough covers saved audiences and CSV exports end to end.
What a daily run actually looks like
A healthy ABM watchlist produces a stream something like this across a month.
Day 1 Initial audience materializes, 142 people across 58 of your 200 accounts
Day 2 +12 new people, 4 new accounts trip into the watchlist, 6 people drop (decayed)
Day 3 +8 new people, same 62 accounts active
Day 7 Weekly rollup: 34 accounts newly active this week that were cold last week
Day 14 A competitor launches something. "Competitor X alternatives" spikes. +24 people
Day 30 About 80 of your 200 accounts have shown sustained intent at some point this monthThe math to watch: over 30 days, somewhere between 30 and 50 percent of a well-chosen 200-account list will show at least one week of sustained intent in your category. The other half are genuinely quiet. That tells you where to focus and where to nurture passively.
How to use the watchlist output
A daily watchlist is only useful if it feeds a workflow. Here is how most teams use it.
Sales team. Every morning, the SDR lead pulls the latest run. Accounts that surfaced for the first time get a direct outbound touch within 24 hours. Accounts already in sequence get a freshness check. Accounts that dropped off go back to passive nurture.
Marketing team. Export the watchlist as a CSV and upload it to LinkedIn Matched Audiences or Google Customer Match. You now have a person-level retargeting audience of senior buyers at your 200 accounts, refreshed daily.
RevOps team. Push the audience into your CRM with a custom field (“in-market, Orbit score 82, topics: CRM Software + Salesforce alternatives”). Use that field to route leads, raise priorities, and close the attribution loop. For the infrastructure side, see the RevOps guide.
Exec team. The weekly rollup becomes a pipeline forecast input. “34 new accounts showed intent this week, 12 are in our top quartile by deal size” is a real leading indicator of next-quarter pipeline.
Common mistakes
Three recurring problems we see when teams set this up for the first time.
- Using company names instead of domains. The domain filter only accepts domains. Names do not match.
- Picking too many topics. Five topics guarantees noise. Two well-chosen topics with overlap required is the recipe.
- Letting the audience go stale. Orbit refreshes the data daily, but if the spreadsheet sits on someone’s desktop, the freshness does not matter. Wire the output into a workflow.
Related reading
- Orbit audiences every SaaS company should build
- Orbit competitive intelligence
- Orbit LinkedIn ads audiences
- Person-level intent data, how it works
- Intent data glossary
- Intent data vs visitor identification
Spin up an Orbit watchlist for the accounts you actually care about and see who is researching your category right now. Get started with Orbit →
