In-market account

Most of what gets labelled in-market is a model output with no visible basis: a score derived from anonymised browsing, attributed to a company by IP, and sold as intent. It may be right. You cannot check it, cannot cite it in an email, and cannot tell a rep why the account is on their list.

The alternative is narrower and duller and much easier to defend: an account is in-market when there is a dated, public artefact you could send someone a link to. A posting. An announcement. A published change. If the evidence cannot survive being shown to the prospect, it should not be driving the email.

In-market is worthless without fit. A company doing exactly the thing you sell into, at a size you cannot serve, in a market you do not sell to, is not an opportunity — it is a distraction with good timing. The right order is always: define the profile, then let signals rank the accounts already inside it.

Run the other way round and the list becomes whatever the signal source happens to surface, which is how outbound teams end up working accounts nobody can close and blaming the copy.

Treat it as a decaying state, not a label. A hiring post is live while the role is open. A funding round is warm for a quarter. A published migration is interesting until it is finished. An account whose evidence has expired should quietly fall back to the ordinary list rather than staying flagged forever.

That decay is also what stops the same accounts being emailed repeatedly by a team that never re-checks why they were flagged in the first place.

SalesShift keeps signals and prospects in one place, so an in-market account is the intersection of the two rather than a separate list: filter the shared signal pool by type and score, then push the accounts worth working into leads and, from there, into the same pipeline as everything else.