Charles Tenot

CEO @lemlist & lempire. I share what I learn as the CEO of a profitable SaaS growing to $40M to $100M+. Follow me to learn from the journey.

I'm a business generalist who loves tech & running high-performing businesses.

Happy to meet Sales professionals
If you're:
- An SDR or Sales Rep
- A Sales Manager, Head of Sales, or Head of Sales Development
- A VP Sales or CRO

And you work at a B2B company between 50 and 1000 employees,

I’d love to connect for 30 minutes to chat about outbound strategy, share ideas, and learn from each other.

Don’t hesitate to drop an email on charles@lempire.co

COO / General Manager

Growing lempire from 20M$ to 100M$ while generating 35%+ EBITDA

lempire products: lemlist, lemwarm, Taplio, Tweet Hunter, lemcal - more to come

6x7 is infinitely better than 8x5.

I prefer working 6 hours a day for 7 days. 
Rather than the standard 8 hours a day for 5 days. 

The total time is roughly the same, but the result is completely different. Here is why:

→ On & offs are exhausting It is always harsh to restart the machine on Mondays. 
And it is difficult to disconnect on Saturdays. I prefer to keep a steady momentum.

→ Frequency beats intensity
Finishing earlier leaves real time for sports or passions every single day. 
It is easier to build a habit when you do it daily.

→ Weekends are for deep work
No emails. No Slack. No meetings. 
I get more done in 2 hours on a Saturday morning than in 6 hours on a Tuesday.

→ The "fluff" disappears 
The extra 2 hours you do during the week are usually low energy. 
If you cut the least 2 productive hours it almost doesn't move the needle for work. 
But it changes everything for your life.

Society has normalized the 9-5. 
But it is far from being the optimal setup, of course when your business allows it. 

Holidays are different. I take 10 days to fully reset and digest. 

But for the daily routine, I will take the 7-day week any time.

If you don’t love your job, try committing more to it.

It sounds counter-intuitive. 

Yet, every time I started doubting my role (even as a CXO/CEO), I realized it was because I wasn't giving my 100%.

It’s the "Little Prince" paradox. 

As the Fox says: "It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important."

When you hold back, you enter a negative loop: 

You do less → You have less impact → The job feels meaningless.

But when you fully commit, the dynamic changes. 

You become useful. 
You build things. 
You start to care because you are investing a part of yourself.

The hard truth: Unless the environment is toxic (in which case, leave), the boredom might not come from the job description. 

It might come from your level of engagement.

Don't do it for your boss, the VC, or the Shareholders. 

Do it for yourself. 

Action creates passion, not the other way around.

In 2016, I was Finance Manager and said to be a cost center, useless to the business. 10 years later, I'm CEO. 

While luck played a huge part, there is still one specific thing that helped me get there:

I never stayed in my lane.

Most people think career growth means becoming excellent at your job description.

That's wrong.

Your job description is the minimum.

It's what keeps you employed.
It's not what gets you promoted.

What got me from Finance Manager to CEO wasn't being great at finance.

It was doing finance fast enough that I had time left.

Then using that time to fix things nobody asked me to fix.

I automated reporting & order-to-cash process. 

Took me 3 months to build a system that saved me 10+ hours every week.

I used those 10+ hours to work on growth projects: running business operations.

Things that were broken but nobody had time to fix.

I asked for permission. 
I made sure I wasn't stepping on toes.

But I didn't wait for someone to expand my role.
I expanded it myself.

Then I showed the results.

Most people wait for opportunities.
I created mine.

---

The other thing that mattered was always network.
I found my last 3 jobs through people I knew and not by applying.

You can be excellent in silence.

But nobody will promote you if they don’t know who you are and how you are impacting the business. 

—-

In a nutshell, I see 3 main enablers to career growth:

1/ Do more than your job. 

2/ Make sure people know about it. 

3/ Build a network.

—- 

Hope that helps a few ✌

Stop asking your sales reps why they lost deals or you'll make strategic mistakes.

Not because they are dishonest. 

But because they are human.

When a rep loses a big deal they are frustrated. 

They want to move to the next one. 

They don't want to spend 20 minutes writing a thesis.

So they pick the easy option in the dropdown menu: "Lost - Pricing Reason".

And you end up making strategic decisions based on bad data.

This morning I didn't ask my VP of Sales for a report. 

I simply asked my AI.

I opened Claap and typed this: "Which deal with 5+ seats did I lose the last 10 days and why?"

The answer was brutal, but it was accurate.

It didn't look at the CRM notes. 
It analyzed the actual conversations. 
It gave me a direct link to the exact moment the prospect said no.

Claap AI shared things such as:
→ "Client A chose a competitor because of poor qualification and lack of decision-maker mapping." 
→ "Client kept their current solution because of a missing integration with their CRM."

If you want to fix your revenue you need the truth. 
You cannot rely on subjective reporting anymore.

We are entering a new era of management:
Where you don't blame people for bad reporting, but you just stop asking them to do a robot's job.

I don't believe in resolutions. But here are the 5 things I will improve to be a better CEO in 2026.

Waiting for January to change something is just an excuse. 
If you want to change you can and should do it right away.

But end of year is still good to take a moment to reflect. 

Here is where I want to get better in 2026:

1/ Talking to customers
There is no secret. 
You have to be close to your market. 
I will block 3 hours every week just for them. 
I will talk to current users and even the ones who left us.

2/ Speaking with the team 
We are now more than 100 people. 
I don't know everyone anymore. 
The best strategies don't come from meetings, they come from the people doing the work.

3/ Listening to sales calls 
This is where the truth is. 
The front line knows things I will never see from my desk. 
I need to hear what actually pisses people off.

4/ Being clear 
Vague goals create vague results. 
I need to tell people exactly what to do. Clarity always brings performance.

5/ Bringing focus 
We need to say no to good ideas. 
So we can say yes to great execution. 
Less is more when you actually ship.

We are moving from "Get Shit Done" to "Get Impactful Shit Done"

This is not a resolution. 

It is just continuous improvement 🧘

56% of our support tickets are now handled by AI, CSAT is 91%. 
Here’s what we learned that can save your some time:

12 months ago, we started using AI for customer support.

Today:
→ 56% of tickets are closed without any human
→ CSAT is 91% (vs. 93-94% for human responses)
→ 30% of human-handled tickets are answered using AI suggestions
→ Median response time: <30 seconds (vs. 5 minutes for humans)

But it wasn’t plug-and-play.

Here’s what actually worked:

→ Letting users choose: "Do you want an answer now from AI or wait a few minutes for a human?" Simple, but powerful.

→ AI is only as smart as your content. We spent weeks structuring the Help Center and Product Bible.

→ AI can only performed if trained and guided. 
We built up a set of guidances and escalation rules to get the best of AI and human duet.

→ As humans only handle the complex tickets, their CSAT naturally drops. And onboarding new agents takes way longer now.

→ AI also helps behind the scenes:
 (i) writing articles
 (ii) spotting gaps in the docs
 (iii) reviewing human responses

What’s next?

→ We’re now testing AI agents that help Team Leads:
 (i) spotting knowledge gaps
 (ii) identifying skill gaps in the team

→ We don’t believe AI will solve 100% of support.
But we do believe in a model where AI helps everywhere, all the time.
Maybe even inside the product:
 (i) guiding users step-by-step to download their invoice
 (ii) or set up their first campaign

We’re just getting started, and that's really exciting as AI enables better customer experience overall with faster reply rates, 24/7 and allows humans to focus on more complex case-handling, where a human touch can really add value.

Curious to see how voice can help in the future too when users are asking for a call (cc ElevenLabs 👀)

Big shoutout to our CX team: Julien L., Teodora Martić, Guillaume RIEU, and the whole crew.

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CEO @ lemlist & lempire

When HubSpot starts copying your narrative, you know something shifted.
A year ago, we said spray and pray was dead.

Today, they're saying the same thing.

But here's what they're missing about the future of outbound.

Outbound is not dying.

It's the most cost efficient channel for customer acquisition.

Show me another channel where you can deliver a unique message to one person at scale.

Inbound is about throwing money at the problem.

Outbound is about being smart. Being creative. Being technical.

And I'm genuinely excited to see HubSpot betting on this.

Because now we get to compete, and that will help the entire market level up and build better products for Sales teams.

Here's our vision:

→ Nothing will ever beat unique signals.
Companies with technical teams will keep building custom workflows with Clay, n8n, and other tools.

→ But most SMBs don't have those resources.
They can't build complex workflows.
They're stuck between enterprise tools they can't use and spray and pray that doesn't work.

→ So we're building something different.
Dozens of signals that you can set up in less than 5 clicks.
Zero technical skills needed.

Smart outbound for everyone, not just the companies with GTM engineering teams.

Can't wait to see how this plays out.

Nobody talks about this in sales: we analyzed 5,000+ sales deals and the data says that gender matching impacts conversion.

Here’s what we saw:
→ When women sell to women: 44% close rate
→ When women sell to men: 34% close rate

That’s a 29% difference 🤯

More broadly:
→ Women close 39% of their deals
→ Men close 36% of their deals

The worst results were when one gender sells to the other.
Same-gender conversations perform better.

I haven’t seen this talked about anywhere, have you? 
Curious if others have run similar analyses.

Tell me who you are hiring and I'll tell you what problems you have:

→ VP Engineering: My co-founder CTO is poor at management and we need someone who can fix this without hurting the CTO ego

→ CRO: I sold 100% growth to my board but things don't add up and I'm 50% short

→ CMO: I don't know what my marketing team is doing and I need someone to translate and build a plan

→ Head of People: Our best people are leaving and I have no idea why

→ Chief of Staff: I'm drowning in meetings and emails and can't think anymore

→ Head of Product: We've been building for months and nothing ships

→ CFO: My board wants a budget and I have no clue where the money goes

This is the reality of most executive positions.

You're hired to fix urgent problems.

Problems that nobody before you could solve.

With limited time, limited resources, and high expectations.

Good luck to anyone taking a new CxO role 😇

Don't forget to challenge your hiring manager as much as they challenge you and make sure there is a clear contracting in expectations.

While everyone is complaining about landing in spam, we just managed to reduce lemwarm's user spam rate to below 2% through R&D.

This means that our customers at lemwarm average less than 2% of spam, which is the best proxy we can have of lemlist's campaign deliverability for lemwarm users.

We achieved this by improving a few things in the algorithm.

I won't share publicly all our R&D but it includes templates, sending algorithm, and server management.

Really excited to see all our customers achieve better deliverability to ultimately book more meetings.

Big up to the team 🔥

A VC friend of mine said something that hit hard: "The founders who post the most on LinkedIn usually run the worst companies."

But then I see amazing founders like Alex (Deel), Arthur (Pennylane), Guillermo (Vercel) or Varun (Clay) crushing it on LinkedIn.

So, where's the truth?

Here’s my take:

Being great at running your company is 100x more important than writing great posts.

But the best founders do both.

The trick is not to confuse posting on LinkedIn with your *real* job.

Your real job as a CEO is to move the needle. That means:

→ Hiring and leading an amazing team
→ Talking to customers every single day
→ Setting a clear vision for everyone
→ Making sure the company has money to grow

Posting on LinkedIn isn't on that list.

But it can actually help with ALL of it. 

It gives you an incredible advantage in hiring, sales, and building your brand.

Most founders think they don't have time.

But you don't need hours.

With the right system, you can spend less than 30 minutes a day and generate millions of views in a few months.

There aren't many activities that offer that kind of return.

So, my VC friend is half-right:
→ If LinkedIn is your #1 priority, you're making a mistake.
→ But if you ignore it, you're leaving a massive opportunity on the table.

What do you think?

This weekend, I built an app with my kids to find the best cookie places in Paris.

None of us can write a single line of code.
But it took us less than 30 minutes to have a functional V1 we could use.
Thanks to Claude Code. 

What's happening in software right now is really interesting.

Warren Buffett said that brand is the most important moat.

I think the next 10 years will prove this more than ever.

Because building simple apps is becoming virtually free.
(I'm still curious how this will apply to complex apps and ecosystems.)

But one thing is clear.
More value will be in understanding user problems and workflows.

Branding and distribution will be increasingly critical.

Influence will be a strong lever. 
Look at the 1 billion dollar Khaby Lame deal.

15 years ago, you'd find geeky profiles in small businesses building custom Access databases.

I wouldn't be surprised to see more and more custom applications that fit user needs better.

Apps that can evolve fast with clean UI.
Apps that are much more cost efficient overall with almost no fixed fees.

The barrier to building is disappearing.
The question now is what you build and how you get it to people.

The average win rate after a demo is 20%. This campaign gets 73% reply rate, and I created a public version that you can copy.

I have worked with 100+ sales reps in my career.
What separates top reps from others is how they manage their time:
→ They know which deal to prioritize. 
→ They know how to optimize productivity via relentless organization.

In the quest for time automation is a must. 
But automation should look human or it just destroys conversion rates.

I recently spotted a campaign with a 70%+ reply rate. 

I dug in and noticed it was a post demo automation.

The flow is actually simple:
→ You run the demo. 
→ You let Claap fill in your CRM automatically. 
→ From the CRM you push the attendee to lemlist in a dedicated campaign.

To make it really perfect you use variables from your discovery questions. 

For instance if you use SPIDED, you can use Claap to automatically fill in the SPICED criteria. 
Then you use the SPICED in the email. 
Example: "You told me that you were experiencing {{Pain}}".

You could even use Claap to generate the full follow up email using a template.

You can adapt next steps depending on whether or not there is already a follow up meeting planned.

Sales reps don't need to spend 1 hour of manual follow up & prospect chasing after each meeting, and RevOps should clearly build these kind of workflows for their entire sales teams.

Sharing public link to campaign in comment 👇

A like or comment is appreciated if you think that's useful 🙏

PS: Nicolas Marchais from Phacet sent me one of the best post-demo follow up mail that I received in my life - 
Nico would you be open to sharing it publicly? 
Did you use AI to write it?

If your sales team is not hitting quota, maybe you don't have a sales problem but a lead generation problem.

In 2026, if your strategy is still to:
→ Let sales organize themselves with the CRM
→ Define territories as they want
→ Research accounts manually
→ Source prospects manually for each account
→ Decide which accounts they should engage with
→ Find phone numbers and emails on their own

You are far from getting 100% from them.

This might have worked in 2015.

But since then, CAC has increased by over 300% and competition has never been stronger.

Your competitors are doing it right with a Growth Outbound team (or GTM Engineer) who:
→ Maps the entire Total Addressable Market
→ Collects useful data on accounts (firmographics, technographics, etc.)
→ Scores accounts
→ Continuously monitors the existing TAM with signals and identifies new potential accounts
→ Sources all contacts in your target persona for each account
→ Defines engagement rules and territories
→ Assigns accounts on a weekly or monthly basis, or helps reps engage with the warmest and most promising accounts

This difference (which is usually 1 FTE) explains at least 50% of performance gaps.

The technology is here for all of this, eg: Clay, lemlist, Leadinfo, Warmly, n8n, FullEnrich, and more.

The problem is usually dedicating the resource and setting up a good methodology.

---

Thanks to Francis Brero for this amazing meme seen on Business Operations Network 🙏

"We have built territories so everyone has the same chance of success." This is almost never true. 

Here is the reality of most sales floors:

→ The best industries are reserved for 1 or 2 reps in the name of specialization.

→ The best companies are kept by historical AEs giving no chance to newcomers.

→ The same quotas are given on new countries with zero brand and a barely translated product.

Giving equal chances of success to all reps is the most important thing to do in any commercial organization.

This creates true and healthy competition.
And ultimately it maximizes business impact for the company.

If the game is rigged the players will quit.

⚖️

Marketing is not about acquisition. It is about Motivation.

We think marketing stops when the user signs up and Product takes over from there. 

But that is wrong.

Your marketing dictates your user's patience.
It includes your brand reputation and word of mouth.

Think about it: If users come with low conviction, they quit at the first bug. 
A confusing menu, a single bug, is enough to make them leave.

But if they have high conviction, they'll stick around and try hard.
They might ignore a few bugs.
They might read the docs.
They might contact support for help.


Great marketing doesn't just fill the funnel. 

It buys time for the product to be imperfect.

The problem is that Google Analytics doesn't measure "Motivation".
But it is often what separates successful users from early churners.

Sales-Tech & GTM Systems | Head of Ops @ ColdIQ

Co-Founder @ Workflows.io | Content, Outbound & AI RevOps engines for hypergrowth startups.

With the experience from:

- Working with 200+ companies on their go-to-market motion
- Generating over +8M organic impressions on here
- Closing $5M+ as a full-cycle AE
- Testing 250+ AI sales tools

I noticed three main problems companies face:

- Not enough leads
- Not enough conversions
- No automated systems & AI

Our solutions:

- LinkedIn content 
- AI RevOps workflows
- Automated outbound systems

The best work in most companies lives in people’s heads, dies when they leave, and can’t scale.

I believe the future is structuring knowledge work with living code:

Productizing AI workflows that human experts are already building.

👉 Follow: Dan Rosenthal for AI growth playbooks

👉 Get in touch: DM me on LinkedIn or email me at dan@workflows.io for collaborations.

👉 Visit: workflows.io if you want help implementing end-to-end AI go-to-market systems for revenue growth.

Dan Rosenthal

GTM tech you should keep an eye on in 2026.

20 categories. 52 tools.

↳ CRM
- HubSpot
- Salesforce
- Attio

↳Marketing Automation
- ActiveCampaign
- Customer.io
- HubSpot

↳Company Database
- DiscoLike
- Ocean.io
- Exa

↳Contact Database
- AI Ark
- Apollo
- BetterContact

↳Intent Signals
- Seam AI
- LoneScale
- Clay

↳Website Visitor ID
- Warmly,
- Vector
- RB2B

↳Data Scraping
- Apify
- RapidAPI
- Octoparse

↳Data Orchestration
- Clay
- Cargo 🧱
- Freckle.io

↳Contact Enrichment
- Findymail
- BetterContact
- Clay

↳CRM Enrichment
- Clay
- Freckle
- Findymail

↳Automated Sequencers
- Instantly.ai
- HeyReach.io
- OutboundSync (to pair with the other two)

↳ Manual Sequencers
- Outreach
- HubSpot
- Salesloft

↳ Power Dialers
- Nooks
- Orum
- Trellus (YC W22)

↳LinkedIn Content
- MagicPost
- Trigify.io
- EasyGen

↳ LinkedIn Ads Tracking
- Fibbler
- ZenABM
- Usermaven

↳SEO/AI Search
- Ahrefs
- Nightwatch
- Profound

↳Deal Room
- Qwilr
- Aligned
- Dock

↳Sales Enablement
- Sybill
- Exec
- Momentum.io

↳ Channel Attribution
- HockeyStack
- Dreamdata
- Factors.ai

↳ Automations/AI Agents
- Lindy
- n8n
- Airtop

Any that you'd add to the list? 👇

Co-Founder @ Workflows.io | Growth playbooks using AI

The 2026 GTM Flywheel Playbook

This is how we think about mapping out funnels.


1️⃣ Traffic Generation Channels

4 main buckets:

Content:
- LinkedIn
- X
- Facebook
- Instagram
- YouTube
- TikTok
- SEO/AI Search
- Podcasts

Ads:
- Google Ads
- LinkedIn Ads
- Directories
- Meta Ads
- Reddit Ads
- Event Sponsorships
- Billboards/TV

Outbound:
- Cold Email
- LinkedIn DMs
- Cold Calls
- Warm Outbound
- Conferences (In-person)

Partnerships:
- Agency Programs
- Integrations
- White-label
- Referrals
- Influencer Marketing
- Joint Ventures
- Platforms
- Affiliates

This is your top-of-funnel.


2️⃣ Lead Capture

4 main ways to turn traffic into captured contact info:
- Landing Page Forms
- Lead Magnets
- Social Engagement
- Social Followers


3️⃣ Lead Nurturing

10 methods to nurture that captured audience:
- SDR Touchpoints
- Retargeting Ads
- Content
- Newsletter
- Community
- Webinar
- Dinner Invites
- In-Person Events
- Email Flows
- Gifts


4️⃣ Conversion

If you're sales-led, meetings are the goal.

If you're product-led, trials are the goal.

But leading up to this, buyers tend to inform their decision by consuming on-site content.

6 primary categories:
- Video Demos (e.g. how the product actually works)
- Testimonials (e.g. social proof quotes)
- Case Studies (e.g. editorial-style client stories)
- Product Marketing (e.g. feature deep-dives)
- Resources (e.g. useful content for niche)
- Free Tools (e.g. AI Generator)


5️⃣ Qualification

Sales process would need a whole other flowchart.

But I believe 90%+ of lead qualification processes can now be automated using AI. 

This is key across every type of signal workflow.


6️⃣ Retention & Expansion

Great CS is a giant moat.

Investing into keeping your customers for longer and having them spend more money with you, is just as important as net-new revenue.


TL;DR

This is a flywheel because every channel feeds into eachother.

- You run outbound to hand-raisers from content. 
- Your best-performing organic content becomes your ads. 
- Your ads target the same accounts in your outreach lists.

And by capturing 1st-party signals.

Top-of-funnel traffic gets nurtured at scale.

Not every path in this playbook needs to be activated.

But at least 1-2 should be.

Most people bashing signals don't know how to use them.

This is the 2026 Signal Playbook.

These are the 5 main ways to use "intent signals":

- Awareness scoring
- Trigger automated outreach
- Slack/CRM notifications for manual outreach
- Customer expansion monitoring
- Build targeted lists for ABM

Here's a breakdown of the 3 signal categories,

and the sub-categories within them:


1️⃣ 1st-Party Signals (Your internal data from your tools)

→ CRM- Data already in your CRM.
[HubSpot, Salesforce, Attio]

→ Product Usage- Product analytics triggers.
[Mixpanel, Amplitude, PostHog]

→ Meeting Forms- Demo bookings or form drop-offs.
[Chili Piper, Default, Calendly]

→ Gated Content- Opt-in content/lead magnets.
[Webflow, Distribute.so, Gamma]

→ Marketing Sequences- Engagement with email flows.
[beehiiv, Customer.io, Kit]

→ Webinar Attendance- Attendees of online events.
[Luma, LinkedIn events, Goldcast]

→ Website Visitors- Deanonymized web traffic.
[Warmly, RB2B, Instantly.ai]

→ Outreach Replies- Sales engagement tool prospects.
[OutboundSync, Instantly, HeyReach.io]


2️⃣ 2nd-Party Signals (Exclusive data from external tools)

→ Partner Signals- Shared data from integration partners.
[Crossbeam, PartnerStack, WorkSpan]

→ Warm Intros- Common connections with prospects.
[Commsor 🦕, The Swarm 🔆, LinkedIn]

→ Review Sites- Intent from software review sites.
[G2, Capterra, TrustRadius]

→ Champion Tracking- Previous customer job changes.
[LoneScale, Champify, Clay]

→ Ad Insights- Engagement from ad campaigns.
[ZenABM, Fibbler, Factors.ai]

→ LinkedIn Engagement- Interactions on LI posts.
[Clay, Teamfluence, Trigify.io]


3️⃣ 3rd-Party Signals (Public data from external sources)

→ Technographic Data- Changes in tech stack.
[BuiltWith, HG Insights, TheirStack]

→ Job Openings- New postings on job platforms.
[Clay, PredictLeads, People Data Labs]

→ Firmographic Data- Company demographic changes.
[Apollo, DiscoLike, Ocean.io]

→ People Data- Staffing changes.
[Sales Nav, Clay, Apollo]

→ News- Company announcements.
[Clay, Google News, Perplexity]

→ Advertisement Activity- Media buying behavior.
[Adyntel, Adbeat, Apify]

→ Web Data- Data scraped from the web.
[Clay, Apify, ZenRows]

→ Social Signals- Engagement on socials.
[Clay, PhantomBuster, Trigify]

→ Search Analytics- SEO changes.
[Semrush, Similarweb, Ahrefs]

→ Funding- Recent fundraising events.
[Crunchbase, Owler, Pitchbook]


Every marketer's dream would be to know exactly who is ready to buy, and which qualified buyers already know your brand.

Signals are the closest proxy to this.

Doubling down in 2026.

This is the best way we've found to set up ABM in 2026.

It's been molded through tons of iterations from previous projects, but I whole-heartedly believe in after seeing it help:

- Sales and marketing teams finally work in unison.
- BDRs double their volume and smash their quota.
- LinkedIn ads influencing 80%+ of deals.

I don't believe in "traditional ABM" that's only for small TAMs.

ABM is for anyone selling high-ACV to anything less than a giant TAM.

30 steps to modern ABM:

1. Closed won + lost analysis.
2. ICP + account tiering model.
3. Backtest model against closed won.
4. Broad TAM map from multiple providers.
5. Trim list using qualification agents.
6. Aggregate + dedupe + enrich in Clay.
7. AI account research for every company.
8. Score accounts: Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3.
9. Look-up companies against CRM.
10. Create CRM property map.
11. Create/update companies in CRM with rules.
12. Run ABM ads to qualified accounts.
13. Source contacts at qualified accounts.
14. Split into: decision-maker, champion and influencer.
15. AI persona research for every contact.
16. Look-up contacts against CRM.
17. Create/update contacts in CRM with rules.
18. Track signals for every contact/company.
19. Split into 1st party, 2nd party, and 3rd party.
20. Sync signals back to CRM as custom objects/events.
21. Route signals to reps based on territory.
22. Create CRM tasks + Slack notifications.
23. Roll-up 1st + 2nd party signals into awareness score.
24. Split into: Aware, Interested, Considering, Selecting.
25. Automatically update awareness using workflows.
26. Use tiering + awareness for account planning.
27. 1:1 demand gen for priority accounts (e.g. gifting).
28. 1:many demand gen for others (e.g. content).
29. Push channel data back to CRM.
30. GTM flywheel orchestration.

Comment "ABM" if you want the full graphic

LinkedIn has been the primary acquisition channel that grew us from 0-$2M ARR in 7 months.

I am breaking down exactly how we did it. 

Here's the Workflows.io Content OS:

1️⃣ Content Strategy

I've found these to be the most important practices:
• Schedule interviews with your team to brainstorm ideas
• Always look out for what is performing in the niche
• Analyze your post performance to understand what's working
• Use AI for research + concepts, not writing

Tools: Sybill, Favikon, MagicPost, Claude, Perplexity, Shield

2️⃣ Winning Formats

The best creators don't chase trends. 

They double down on formats.

Find a concept they can rinse-and-repeat.

These are our winning formats:

TOF
• Personal stories
• Quarterly milestones
• Industry stories

MOF
• Resource giveaways
• Workflow infographics
• Carousel breakdowns

BOF
• Feature demo GIFs
• Media from case studies 
• Product launch videos

3️⃣ Content Team

To properly scale content, you need a team.

Here's how we structure ours
• Writer
• Designer
• QA/Editor

4️⃣ Content Pipeline

We mainly collaborate in Notion:
• Kanban stages for content production
• Comments for feedback
• Link back to idea sources
• Preview our posts with our own embedded tool 

5️⃣ Content Calendar

You won't stay consistent if you don't plan in advance.
• Block off Sundays to plan out the week
• Build up a backlog of posts in Notion to choose from
• Try tools like Ordinal to help with scheduling
• Stick to the same posting time

6️⃣ Lead Capture

6 main ways you can capture leads:
• Track engagement [Trigify.io]
• Track profile views [Teamfluence]
• Lead magnet opt-ins [beehiiv]
• Download connections [LinkedIn]
• Website visits [RB2B]
• Direct bookings [Tally]

7️⃣ Enrich + Score

We funnel leads from these sources into Clay.

From there we:
• Enrich
• Score
• Sync to HubSpot
• Setup retargeting flows

8️⃣ Retargeting

We've primarily focused on two retargeting channels:
• Outbound
• Newsletter

Now we're investing in:
• Retargeting ads
• Email flows

Tools: Instantly.ai, HeyReach.io, Nooks, Customer.io, beehiiv

9️⃣ Dialed Sales Process

Fivos, Lorenzo and I all come from sales.
 
Since our sales motion is consultative, we spend a lot of time doing:
• Process breakdowns
• Business cases
• Live demos
• Custom offers

---

We work with GTM + AI founders to build out their Content OS.

DM me if you want to chat it through!

"People get lucky on LinkedIn." I disagree.

After posting 500+ times for ourselves + clients, we started obsessing about the small details that the best creators take into account.

- Post structure + line breaks
- Mobile optimization
- Packaging

I've always used "LinkedIn Post Preview" tools because LinkedIn's UI is very limited.

But each tool had their own drawback.

That's why we decided to over-engineer the best LinkedIn previewer ourselves, with every useful feature we could think of:


- Create a unique link for every post to send to friends for feedback.
- Fix line spacing when copy-pasting from external sources.
- Preview posts on exact app dimensions across all devices.
- Accurate preview of every visual asset type on LinkedIn.
- Embeddable anywhere e.g. Notion
- White + dark mode toggles.


Made it free for anyone to use with no log-in.

Comment "Preview" if you want to get the link.

"AI SDR" Artisan got banned on LinkedIn (incl. founders).

And I see a lot of GTM tools kicking them while they're down.

Promoting their own tools.

Now for the record, Artisan doesn't support the types of GTM motions I am interested in building. So I haven't used it.

And I'm also not saying they didn't deserve the ban if they were breaking LinkedIn TOS.

But quite frankly, I think many people harped on this because they were threatened by Artisan.

There is an emerging market for out-of-the box AI GTM tools/agents, and Artisan were one of the leading horses.

Controversial at times? Yes.

But as a business owner, it is your fiduciary duty to find methods of distribution.

Artisan took the path most B2B business are afraid to take.

And it paid off.

If you're in tech + B2B, LinkedIn is without a doubt the most important social channel.

Artisan isn't as big as Apollo.

This will be a huge hit.

Friendly reminder to diversify your GTM channels.

11.8k emails sent. 10.2% reply rate. 178 opportunities.

Still managing to find ways to cut through the noise.

---

When I first started doing automated outbound in 2023, the results were insane.

Most people were still sending manually.

And numbers like these were more common.

Nowadays, it's so much easier to get started.

But the bar to crushing it is higher than ever.

Today, 1 positive response: 333 contacts is a decent benchmark.

But we're not settling and continue to level up our game.

We found a winning strategy for this client using:
- Psychologically compelling copy + offer.
- AI personalization that made the emails sound human.
- Creative list building.
- Dialed deliverability.

Not every Instantly.ai campaign we run is a winner.

But your GTM alpha is out there.

Just have to find it.

Today we'll ship the 7th issue of "Workflows Weekly".

The concept of our newsletter is simple.

Every Friday:
- 1 Featured GTM workflow
- 1 AI tool to check out
- 1 GTM resource to read
- AI news of the week

2 min read with the option to go deeper.

Small initiative but very proud of how it turned out.

Took inspo from Tim Ferriss.

But with a twist for AI + GTM.

https://lnkd.in/esizPvCW

taplio

The Battle

Charles Tenot

Dan Rosenthal

Followers

Posts

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Performance ScoreCharles Tenot's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreDan Rosenthal's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

The Battle

Charles Tenot

Dan Rosenthal

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Charles Tenot's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreDan Rosenthal's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreCharles Tenot's LinkedIn Performance