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

Outbound is about to change forever.

Today we’re launching the most important feature we’ve ever built.

It’s called Signals.

And I believe it’s going to become a new industry standard.

Because here’s the truth: 

People don’t hate sales reps.

They hate being interrupted for the wrong reason.

But when timing and targeting are perfect...

Sales doesn’t feel like spam. It feels like help.

It feels like:
→ An expert spotting a problem you missed
→ A guide bringing a solution you didn’t know existed

That’s what we’re making possible with Signals.

It tracks buying intent across your accounts.
Or it finds the right ones for you, automatically.

Right now we detect 3 key intents:
→ Website visits
→ Hiring activity
→ LinkedIn engagement

And we’re adding 4 more in the next few weeks.

This is just the beginning.

Our long-term vision is simple:

Make intent-based outreach insanely simple
And partner with the best data providers for every signal

So now in lemlist you get:
→ 450M lead database
→ Email & phone enrichment (80% / 60% find rate)
→ LinkedIn, email, phone, WhatsApp, soon SMS
→ Deliverability tools built-in
→ AI outbound coach
→ And now... real-time signal tracking

We’re building the most complete outbound platform for small & mid-size teams.

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Talks about #tech, #sales, #growth, #startup, and #revenueoperations

CEO @lemlist | Building the sales operating system teams actually want to use

Really excited to share that from today, lemlist is SOC 2 Type II certified 🔥

Until 2024, we had never lost a deal because we weren’t

Then in Feb 2025, we lost our first 50+ seats deal

Just because we weren’t certified

Then another one; then a third

That’s when we said ok, let’s do it

It took us around 4 months

In the meantime, we signed a few deals with an exit clause if we didn’t provide the report by a given date.
That gave us just enough time to complete it

We already sent the report to 10+ prospects who had been waiting for it

Excited to see what it brings

One more step on our way to becoming the go-to sales engagement tool for 5-100 sales teams

Big congrats to the team for pulling this off 👏

Here’s a real outbound email that helped an SDR book a meeting with the CPO of a $40M ARR business (us) 👇

Every line was about us.
→ It referenced a product we just acquired.
→ It made a strong connection between that move... and their product.
Overall, it didn’t feel like outreach. It felt like someone already in the loop.

Here’s why it worked:
→ The SDR shows deep industry expertise.
→ They understood our product roadmap and what matters to US
→ The email is sharp, clear, remaining short but with the right level of details.
→ They wrote the email like a real person, not a bot

No fluff, no gimmicks.

Just sharp thinking and human writing.

Most teams do the opposite:
They automate what should feel handcrafted.
That’s why reply rates are so low.

You can of course have templated micro-campaigns (50-150 leads size) for lower tier leads, but for top tier, you should go 100% human.

This is what the best teams do, they go smaller and deeper:
Fewer prospects.
More relevance.
Higher conversion.

Because ultimately it's better to achieve 10% reply rate on 20 leads (2 meetings) than 0.05% on 2000 (1 meeting)

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4 good reasons why we 𝘀𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱𝗻'𝘁 have bought Claap. And why we still 𝗱𝗶𝗱 👇



1 - We could have built it
Today, it's easy to build something that records meetings and gets transcripts. There are even APIs to do it in minutes.

But, software always looks simple at first.
That's why you see new tools coded overnight every day.

But the devil is in the details.
You can build a feature.
But building a product takes years.
Even with AI.
We could have built something that checks the box.
But we would have built 5% of Claap.

Claap is not about recording meetings.
It's about capturing conversations & interactions and turning them into value for Sales:
→ Reps coaching 
→ CRM filling
→ Get insights across all conversations

That's not a feature. That’s a product.


2 - Founders might just wait for the earn-out
Classic M&A risk. Founders join, stay 2 years, don’t push, then leave.

With Robin Bonduelle, Pierre Touzeau & Thomas Hernandez, we share the same ambition: build a global leader.
I’ve rarely seen a team more committed post-deal.

Robin even joined our SteerCo retreat last week... last minute.
That tells you everything.


3 - M&A = defocus
To succeed, you need focus. We learned that last year.
By focusing 100% on building the best engagement tool for sales teams, we’ve grown like never before.

But now the team is more mature.
And sometimes, creating a bit of chaos is what drives long-term growth.


4 - Integrations take forever

You pause your roadmap. You lose speed. You lose your edge.

We don’t want that. We’re not rushing integrations. 

We’re focusing on growing both products while creating integrations on selected use cases that makes sense, like
→ auto-create tasks from meetings
→ re-engage prospects at the right moment

Small, high-value use cases first.

---

You can always find good reasons not to do something.

No one ever got fired for not buying a company.

But if you still feel it’s right, even after listing all the cons...maybe you should do it.

"Clay might be the most impressive company of the last 5 years".
I said that to Bill over dinner last week. He asked me why.

There are a few reasons:

1️⃣ Resilience
They struggled for years before the so-called overnight success.
Just like Notion.
This is incredible to see Founders fight for their vision for years to ultimately being proven right.

2️⃣ Customer obsession
From day one, they knew they had something.
But they spent years meeting hundreds of growth people before cracking it.
They ended up with one of the deepest market understandings I’ve seen.
And made the most advanced growth techniques accessible to anyone.

3️⃣ GTM playbook
They turned partners into a growth engine.
Thousands of them, at scale. And they grew with them.
Their GTM model will be studied in business schools.

4️⃣ Category creation
When Gainsight created CX tools...
Clay created GTM Engineers.

5️⃣ Corporate decisions
They already gave a $20M secondary option to employees.
Very cool signal to reward people who committed early.

6️⃣ Brand
This one is more subjective, but I really think they nailed it.
The name, the visual identity.
It all feels fresh, clean, and modern, and it sticks.


---
Really excited to welcome Varun Anand, one of Clay’s co-founder, at our office tomorrow.

He is clearly one of the leading minds on where GTM is heading.

With the amazing Bill Stathopoulos from SalesCaptain, we will be talking GTM trends for 2026.

Join us (link in comments), limited spots

Just landed in Paris from Tekpon AI Summit and in 1 hour, I’m going live with Taplio.

I’ll break down everything I’ve learned growing to 34K followers.

→ How I come up with ideas
→ How I organize my content
→ What drives the most engagement
→ What I’d do differently if I had to start from 0
→ How Taplio actually helps me
→ Even the stuff I don’t do (but probably should)

Already 1000+ signed up.

Why not you?

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The real reason we bought Claap is 𝐍𝐎𝐓 because it's an invisible note-taker that fills your CRM automatically... It's much more evil 😈

Context is to AI what fuel is to a car.
Or what records are to a CRM.

No context = useless AI.

When you ask for public info like Einstein's birthday, ChatGPT nails it.

But when you ask:
→ When is this prospect planning to buy?
→ Who's the decision-maker in this account?
→ What competitor am I facing in this deal?

ChatGPT doesn’t know.

Because it wasn’t trained on that kind of private context.

That context lives in:
→ Sales calls and meetings (captured by Claap)
→ Emails and LinkedIn messages (soon captured by Claap)
→ CRM notes and fields (captured via Integrations)

Sure, you could connect all these sources yourself.
But good luck building a data architecture that scales across your entire GTM stack.

That’s not plug-and-play. That’s enterprise-level messy.

And even if you do it, there’s another problem:

Generic AI isn’t built for Sales.

It works by looking at "semantic proximity", fancy way to say: finding similar words.

So when you ask for "Competitors", it might surface "Rivals" or even "Enemies"
...instead of your actual competitor in that deal.

That’s why vertical AI beats general-purpose tools.

To make AI work in GTM, the entire chain needs to be built for GTM, not just the prompting layer.

That’s where we’re heading. 

Claap will become the AI context center for lemlist products.

What do you think of this plan? 😈

I was shared over 50 AI use cases by world-class GTM teams.
Only 10% are actually driving positive ROI.


Every team wants to add AI to their GTM stack.

But the "why" and "how" should come before the "what" ; and that part is often forgotten.

AI looks amazing in demos. It creates that "wow" effect.

But when it comes to turning prospects into customers... it often falls flat.

That said, a few use cases are actually working. 
And they all have one thing in common:

They help teams handle large volumes of unstructured data.

Here are use cases I’ve seen deliver results across top GTM orgs:

→ Data cleaning & smart filters
Use Clay, lemlist tables, or even a Gsheet linked to LLMs to streamline data cleansing or enrich your records.

→ Research automation
Clay (Claygents), Firecrawl, and similar tools can automate prep work and save hours.

→ CRM hygiene
Auto-fill CRM fields with tools like Claap to save reps time—and finally get data quality you can trust.

→ Prospect scoring
When you're handling high volumes, AI can score leads by combining structured and unstructured data.

→ Deal & account scoring
Top GTM teams do regular deal and account scoring using all touchpoints—calls, emails, signals—and AI helps scale that.

→ Lookalike identification
If you're still mapping your ICP, AI can help find similar customers so you focus on who’s likely to close next.
Some more advanced use cases are also showing serious ROI:

→ ElevenLabs (cc Jonathan Chemouny) built a voice agent using their own tech to guide inbound leads through their buying journey.

→ HubSpot and Pipedrive are testing AI sales agents to answer product questions.
 It sits between website and sales and from internal feedbacks I could get, it gives pretty interesting results.

I’m sharing more about this today at the Tekpon AI Summit.

I'll walk through what I learned from 20+ GTM leaders at Ramp, Revolut, Paddle, Alan, Pennylane, and more.

And over the next few weeks, I’ll keep posting examples here.

Please help 👇
What AI use cases have you seen deliver ROI ; or fall short?

DM me if you're working in a 5+ people sales team and want to chat use cases.

---
PS: this pic is from the event: great session with Bill Stathopoulos from SalesCaptain and Frank Sondors 🥓 from Salesforge 🔥

We did 40% off for Black Friday last year. But, we won't be doing it again this year for a few reasons.

Every year, PLG SaaS tools rush into Black Friday (or Cyber Monday) like it's a must.

We did it for 2 years. It worked "on paper".

But now we're done with it.

There are a few reasons:

1- Time-shift revenue vs. actual revenue

Yes, we got a spike in conversions.

But it just pushed people to convert earlier. 
After the deal... conversion dropped for a while.

This means we just time-shifted revenue.

2- It kills focus.

The team spent days prepping offers, landing pages, emails.

We'd rather have:
• Product & Tech improving the tool
• Marketing working on stuff that brings actual value to Sales teams

3- It impacts Brand perception

It sends the wrong brand message.

We're not a random tool you can find for cheap, and don't want to be.

We're a team of 50+ engineers based in Europe, building something great.

We want to build trust, not urgency.

4- It doesn't really help customers make better buying decisions

Buying software is not a 24h impulsive decision.

It's a choice that should help you for months, ideally years.

But a Black Friday offer puts pressure.

People buy because of the price, not because of the fit.

And that leads to the wrong kind of customers.

Most of the discounted users churned within a year.

---
We're not here to be the cheapest.

We're here to be the most helpful.

To deliver recurring value, over the long term, with an unparalleled product.

---

So this year, no Black Friday. 
No FOMO.
Just focus.

🙌

Last minute plans are always the best.

Paris was not even supposed to be part of Varun Anand's Europe tour for Clay.

Thanks to SalesCaptain and TC9, it was added at the last minute.
And it turned out to be an amazing event, my favorite of 2025.

The energy was 🔥

A room filled with insanely talented GTM engineers building best in class systems to make outbound always more precise and targeted.

Varun said that he believes France has some of the top talents in Growth in the world.

He gave the example of our Growth Twins, Edouard and Louis, who are, he said, building GTM engines for Pigment comparable to what exists at Stripe or OpenAI.

My vision for 2026 is unchanged:

We need to keep improving GTM systems to make Sales more targeted and more valuable for buyers.

Spam is the enemy.

GTM Engineers should focus on building small and very targeted lead lists.

Or even better, focus on scoring and helping sales teams prioritize by giving them tools that make all the context available quickly so they can make better decisions on what to do next.

This is why Clay and lemlist work so well together and why so many customers use both.
→ Clay helps source, score and prioritize leads
 → lemlist helps engage across all channels including email, LinkedIn, phone, WhatsApp and SMS, which maximizes the chances to get buyer attention

Thanks to everyone involved yesterday and to everyone who joined.

--

cc Julia Guenier, Bill Stathopoulos, Jérémy Grandillon, Theo Kanellopoulos, Frank Sondors 🥓 Valentin W., Pierre-Baptiste Landoin

You don't need to send 1,000+ emails a month to close $1M in outbound sales.

Actually... the best reps I know send very few messages.

But each one is tailored with care.

Let’s do the math:
→ $1M target with a $40K ACV = 25 deals
→ Let’s say you close 1 in 4 = 100 qualified meetings
→ A good personalized outbound can get 5% reply rate
→ That means you need 2,000 leads
→ That’s just 9 accounts per day

Don’t tell me you can’t do that.

Every day:
→ Pick 9 accounts
→ Do your research
→ Write quality messages
→ Book one meeting every 2 days

Sales is not a spam game. It’s a discipline game.

The lazy shortcut is blasting 10,000 emails.

The smart way is caring enough to make 9 count.

Most CEOs spend too much time with investors, but that's not how you create value for your business. 
Here’s what I believe a "perfect" CEO week looks like in a 100-300 people company 👇

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to use my time better.

What creates real value? What’s just noise?

Here’s what I’ve learned the hard way:

What doesn’t work:

→ Spending hours with investors. It’s mostly about optics. A 3-month doc + reaching out when needed is often enough.

→ Jumping into shiny new topics already owned by the team. You’ll probably slow them down more than help.

→ Sharing new ideas and articles every day. I’ve been guilty of this. It’s distracting. Focus beats stimulation.

What works:

→ 5 customer calls per week. Mix of long-term users, new wins, and churned ones. Especially those who fit your ICP.

→ 5 employee 1:1s per week. Not just your execs. Anyone. Just listen and understand what’s working and what’s not.

→ 5–10 hours of deep work on big bets. Future products. Strategic questions. The stuff no one else can do.

→ Use your own product or go through the full buying journey. Spot the frictions.

→ Work with your managers like a coach. 
Not status updates. Real problem-solving. Building trust.

 → Talk with other CEOs and advisors. 
Helps you zoom out and see things differently.

 → Take care of yourself. 
Walk. Exercise. Most good ideas won’t come from checking Slack.

→ Stay in touch with the market. A few newsletters. A few creators. Just enough to stay sharp. Not too much to lose focus.

One of our most successful 2025 features is a pure trojan horse. 
And most companies can steal this GTM strategy to accelerate growth.


When it comes to outbound, companies have 3 options:

1/ Work with a spreadsheet and forget 90% of follow ups

2/ Use their CRM, e.g. an "all-in-one" approach (Hubspot, Salesforce Engage)

3/  Go for the "best-of-breed" and use a tool like lemlist or Outreach

All-in-one tools are convenient but not really best-in-class in terms of features.

On the other hand, best-of-breed tools are the most powerful and give better results. 

But they have one big flaw, they require the team to adopt another tool.

And in 2025, teams want less tools, not more.

So what we did is simple: we decided not to position "against" the CRM.

We embraced it.

We embedded lemlist inside Hubspot and Salesforce.

All key jobs to be done... 100% available in the CRM:
→ Enroll leads in a sequence
→ Pause or remove from campaigns
→ Edit the campaign
→ Find phone, email, LinkedIn
→ Engage via email, phone, LinkedIn, WhatsApp
→ (soon) Find new prospects in target companies

No tab switching. No training needed. No resistance from reps.

We have still people using lemlist in lemlist.

Because our overall strategy is simple:
1️⃣ Build lemlist to be the reference for people who do outbound most of their days (SDRs)
2️⃣ Build lemlist "from CRM" for those who want to only use 1 tool
3️⃣ Build lemlist "for builders", via API, for those who want to build more custom use cases

---
It’s not the first time this strategy worked.

At Botify, we launched in the US selling SEO software.

We positioned it as complementary to the suite people already used.

That’s how we grew from $0 to $10M ARR in under 2 years.

---

If your market is crowded, don't fight for space.

Find the cracks.

Me in 2020: "Sh** the candidate rejected us, what did we do wrong?"

Also me, in 2025: "Good news, they understood our culture and said no."

And that's actually a win

Because a good culture is not about pleasing everyone.

It's not a one-size-fits-all.  It's a filter.

If you're trying to be for everyone, you end up being for no one.

I’m not saying losing candidates is good.

But losing the wrong candidates can be.

There are bad reasons to lose someone:
→ You were too slow
→ You failed to explain the role properly
→ Hiring manager didn't inspire
→ You didn’t show what’s exciting
→ You lowballed the offer

But here’s a good reason:
→ They felt it wasn’t the right culture or role for them

That’s alignment.
And that’s exactly what you want.

You’re not just hiring skill. You’re building a team that wants to be there.

Last week, I saved 2+ days as a CEO by using a vibe coding tool.

I’m convinced these tools will change how teams collaborate long before they ever replace Software Engineers.

Here are 2 moments where it made a real difference in my CEO role:

1. Pricing Iterations

Normally I’d open Notion or FigmaJam. 
Build a doc no one reads.
Instead, I used Lovable.
I built 5 versions of our pricing page. Using our real UI. In minutes.
Then shared with the team. Got async feedback. Clear and fast.

2. BI Dashboards

I needed specs for 2026 performance dashboards.
The usual way is a long doc, a meeting. 
People misunderstand half of it.

This time, I made a working prototype.
With fake data. Real filters. Actual charts.

The exec team played with it. Commented inside. I updated the prototype.

We had the final version 24h later.

Another example: when we shipped the Calling feature at lemlist, Maël Ezzabdi skipped the doc too.

He used a vibe coding tool to build a live prototype.
The team instantly got the vision. Built v1 in weeks.

So no, I don’t think AI tools will replace engineers anytime soon.
Actually, hiring Software Engineers has never been harder.

But I’m convinced they’ll change how we work together.

One visual beats 100 words.

Curious if others are seeing the same shift?

CPO @lemlist - On a mission to help ambitious businesses become big names!

Really happy to share that we hit a 9.1 eNPS score (+72)

This is another +0.2 improvement from 8.9 earlier this year.

It might not look like much... but to me, it means a lot.

I’m a competitive person. I love chasing growth.

But I’ve learned you don’t fully control success.

You do control the environment you build.
The people you hire.
The ones you keep.
The ones you promote.

So for me, this is the biggest win.
Seeing the team happy and thriving.

Now let’s make sure we keep that level of engagement as we scale.

We're still hiring:
→ Product designer with strong convictions
→ Experienced Software Engineers (🇫🇷 speaker)
→ Sales reps (anywhere 🌍)
→ Product / Content Marketers (sales mindset is a must)

Reach out if that sounds like you.

Everyone is excited about AI for sales, but very few are getting positive ROI.
And it’s not just my opinion. 

Kyle Poyar and Maja Voje surveyed 195 software leaders.

One of their key findings is scary but not surprising: 

→ AI in GTM is underwhelming.

Ahead of my talk at the Tekpon AI Summit, I spoke with 20+ leaders of top global companies (Ramp, ElevenLabs, Agicap, Pennylane, Paddle, Gorgias, Revolut and more.)

I had the exact same feedback:

→ Everyone has use cases with AI
→ But very few are convinced by the total net impact vs. costs (time spent, tools, etc.)
→ AI is great at some tasks, but disappointing at others
→ Adoption remains the #1 problem to make AI use cases ROI-positive


Ahead of the conference, here’s where it actually delivers value in sales:

→ Processing a lot of info, fast
Example: doing account research before meetings

→ Spotting buying signals in messy data
Example: detecting office openings in news articles

→ Auto-filling CRMs
Example: turning call transcripts into structured data with Claap

→ Turning chaos into clarity
Example: classifying companies as B2B or B2C from descriptions

→ Catching what humans miss
Example: flagging churn risk in emails and meetings

I’ve built a simple framework to figure out when AI helps, and when it fails to deliver.

I’ll also share 9 real-world use cases that are already driving ROI.

All of this is part of my session at the Tekpon AI Summit.

👋 I’ve got 3 free passes to give away.
➡️ Drop a comment and connect with me if you want one.

PS: you can read the full article from Kyle's newsletter
https://lnkd.in/evrRtxpV

Founder & Creator | Growth Unhinged

Bestselling Author | Empowering 9,500+ Companies with My GTM Method | B2B AI-GTM Consultant | Building AI Agents & Agentic Workflows | 73K LinkedIn | 25K Newsletter

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The Battle

Charles Tenot

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