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.

Michel Lieben 🧠

Founder / CEO @ ColdIQ | Scale Outbound with AI & Tech 👉 coldiq.com

I’m (Michel) the Founder & CEO at ColdIQ, a sales prospecting agency (+ we compare the latest sales tech, too!).

We worked with 100+ B2B organizations (including SaaS & Agencies!) and are using Clay, Prospeo, FullEnrich, Instantly, Lemlist, Ocean.io - alongside other great sales tools - to run outbound campaigns that flood 🌊 our (and our clients’) inboxes with interested prospects.


We can help you:

• If you’re a B2B business leader who doesn’t have the time to handle your prospecting engine or to hire and manage salespeople… You can outsource your lead gen to us, and we’ll transparently show you the exact way we run your campaigns. (We’ll provide SOPs, too… if it works so well that you want to build your in-house team).


• If you’re a sales leader or an outbound agency owner: We’ll help you set up the exact systems & tools we use to run automated ‘trigger-based’ campaigns that convert like crazy. 


• And… if you simply want to improve your B2B sales automation skills or learn to run these campaigns yourself, we’ll teach you by building a campaign from scratch together with you —from ‘idea’ to ‘running campaign’ (we’ve done it more than 50 times already, and the rumour says people ❤️ed it).


We've launched hundreds of campaigns, so you don't have to.


Thus - if you: 
- are a B2B service/solution provider making > $50k/month
- provide solutions with Lifetime Value > $10k
- want to shortcut your outbound success


We can help.

Send a DM, and I'll share more details.

Alternatively, reach out to michel[at]coldiq.com 
or via the website 👉 coldiq.com 


__________



And if you're looking to build your top-of-funnel tool stack... 
Check our curated lists of the best outbound tools here 👇

👉 coldiq.com/tools 👈
👉 coldiq.com/ai-sales-tools 👈

Performance-based B2B lead generation 💥 | coldiq.com
→ We help you scale your prospecting activities by implementing outbound sales systems in your business. We take care of sourcing leads, researching your ICP, crafting the sales messages, automating sending and ensuring the high deliverability of messages. We let you focus on what brings money into the business: closing deals.

The anatomy of a ~$7M ARR acquisition funnel:

+ $534,000 ARR added so far in January

Step-by-step breakdown ↓

1️⃣ Lead Generation

We get 40,000+ monthly visits on ColdIQ's website.

Our best traffic sources are: 

A. SEO (~12,000 visits)

More specifically:

- Standard articles = typical SEO-optimised articles (this still works, while everybody mostly focuses on AEO)
- Meta Pages = we build some exhaustive resources (e.g: Tools Directories) that rank well on Google.
- Programmatic SEO = we use AirOps to deploy templated pages at scale.

Useful tech: AirOps, Ahrefs, Webflow


B. LinkedIn Posts (~10,000 visits)

As a team (250,000+ combined followers): 

20+ separate post a combined 150+ times per month around prospecting, AI & GTM.

Useful tech: Taplio, Scripe


C. Paid Ads (~4,000 visits)

We run ads across LinkedIn, Meta & Google.

We budget around $10,000/mo to experiment across these channels.

Useful tech: Fibbler, Usermaven


D. Cold Outreach (~3,000 visits)

We constantly run prospecting campaigns based on various plays:

- Value-based lead magnet campaigns
- Success stories lookalike
- Inbound-led outbound
- Social re-engagement

The goal isn't to generate traffic, but at scale, it does come back to our site.

Useful tech: Clay, lemlist, Instantly.ai, Apify, Common Room, PredictLeads, Prospeo.io, Wiza, FullEnrich.


E. Others (~11,000 visits)

Rest is a mix of YouTube, Webinars, Referral, Newsletter & non-attributable Direct traffic (which probably comes from the above channels as well).

Useful tech: vidIQ (YouTube), StreamYard (Webinars), beehiiv (Newsletter).


2️⃣ Lead Capture 

To convert this traffic into meetings, we have:

- one-field signup forms that automatically route & enrich prospects to the right person, via Default.

- email marketing sequences, built inside Customer.io, to push leads to meetings.

- de-anonymization technology, via Midbound | Vector 👻 | Instantly.ai | RB2B, to re-engage qualified visitors.

- free GTM mini-tools, built via Cursor & Claude, to capture email addresses.

- a lead magnet e-book that pops up after 1 min of browsing the site.


3️⃣ Lead Conversion

Most of our deals are sales-led.

They close via Google Meet conversations.

Usually, in 2-3 calls, given the package size ($5,000-10,000/mo).

Attention records our calls.
Leads are stored inside Attio.
We send proposals via Qwilr.

... and we process monthly payments via Stripe.

Ran out of space, so couldn't go as deep as I wanted.
Lmk if you need clarification on any of the below steps 👇

P.S: Any channel that's crushing it for you... 
that we should implement inside our funnel? 👀

Founder & CEO at ColdIQ | Tomorrow’s GTM Systems, Built for you 👉 coldiq.com

Valley’s GTM machine books more meetings than 10 SDRs with just 1 person.

Zayd, their CEO, is convinced every GTM can replicate it 👇

1. Content Machine

- Zayd does bi-weekly content interviews on Riverside & turns these into shorts.
- They record all his calls using Fathom.ai / Fireflies.ai and mine them for content.
- He posts 5x per week on LinkedIn & leverages tools such as Taplio & Bluecast for inspiration.
- Their LinkedIn company page mainly comprises social proof posts (e.g, live reactions of new users discovering their product).

He takes screenshots with Shottr and turns them into good-looking graphics.

His personal account focuses on a few content pillars, namely: his founder journey & GTM industry insights.


2. Signal-Based Outbound

Every week he extracts:

- His profile viewers.
- His company page followers. 
- His post engagers (personal & company).
- His website visitors (via Valley, RB2B, & Vector 👻).

Valley autonomously qualifies & tiers each prospect (high vs. medium vs. low fit), removes competitors and enriches contacts.


3. Personalized Messaging

For every high-fit lead, Valley:

- Conducts additional research
- Writes relevant messages.
- Delivers > 30% replies.

This amounts to 40+ positive replies every day in their LinkedIn inbox.


4. Lead Orchestration

When leads reply positively, but end up ghosting, they’re pushed to Slack, with their contact details, via a Zapier automation.

Then, Alex Nelson, Valley's Founding AE, calls to check if there’s still interest.


5. Deal Closing

- They send one-pager proposals via paage.io, which tracks what part of the proposal prospects spend most of their attention on.
- Payments are automatically processed through Stripe.

This entire setup books them > 150 qualified meetings per month.

....and can be reproduced by most B2B growth leaders!

P.S: What would you advise Zayd and his team to get above 200 monthly qualified meetings?

Silicon Valley gets all the AI Agent headlines.

But have you seen what’s being built in Europe?

Here are the agents I’m closely watching
…most specifically to help with GTM:

1. Attio

Their agent autonomously ingests calls/emails, auto-extracts insights, populates CRM fields and triggers workflows based on pre-set conditions.

Example use-case: After a sales call, auto-updating deal-relevant information (value, prospect).


2. Apify

Their agents, or “actors,” autonomously navigate websites, bypass anti-bot measures, and extract data.

Example use-case: Extract conference attendee lists to re-engage them later.

3. Lovable

Their agent builds full web apps from natural language. It writes code, sets up databases, deploys & iterates based on feedback.

Example use-case: Building free mini-tools to capture email addresses.


4. ElevenLabs 

Their voice agent handles inbound calls 24/7, qualifies leads, books meetings & detects emotions across 32+ languages.


5. lemlist

Their agent score leads against your ICP, navigates websites for personalization & generate multichannel sequences in ~3 minutes.

Example use-case: Letting AI prepare a multi-channel outreach sequence from scratch for human review.


6. Linkup

Their search API gives other AI agents accurate, real-time web access. Not an agent per se, but an API that powers them.

Example use-case: A prospecting agent would query LinkUp to check whether a prospect has just raised funding before writing personalised outreach.


7. Dust

Custom agents that connect to Slack, Notion, Google Drive & your CRM to autonomously perform analyses across all sources.

Example use-case: Asking the agent to help you prep for a sales call, then the agent pulls CRM notes, recent Slack threads, and other helpful docs into a brief.

8. n8n

Open-source workflow builder with AI building capabilities.

Example use-case: Creating custom, agentic GTM workflows.


Other EU-based agents to watch:
- Make
- Tidio
- Modjo
- arcads AI
- ZenRows
- Pipedrive
- Jiminny
- Typeform
- Synthesia
- Amplemarket
- NiCE Cognigy
- Salesforge.ai 🔥
- Jason AI (Reply)
- La Growth Machine
- Enginy.ai (formerly Genesy)

P.S: Any agent I should be looking at?

How to write top 1% cold emails:

(Frameworks we use for our $6.5M+ ARR agency customers)

1. AIDA Framework by Monika Grycz 💌 

2. AI Campaign Ideas by Dujam Dunato 

(inspired from Eric Nowoslawski)

3. Right person for Opportunity by Kenny Damian

4. Similar challenges by Patrick Trümpi

5. Observation | Call-Out | Proof by Nick Abraham

6. Trigger | Implication | Pain by Aaron Reeves

7. Trigger | Process | Symptoms by Tal Baker-Phillips

8. Champion Play by Brian LaManna

9. Rhetorical Question by Leif Bisping

10. Content Assets by Ethan Parker

11. "Quick calculations” by Thibaut Souyris

What's your favourite cold email template?

Share it with us 👇

P.S: We compiled the copywriting frameworks we used to book 14,000+ B2B meetings for > 250 orgs in a (pretty) big Notion document.

Do you want it? Let me know below and it’s yours :)

Write Top 1% Cold Emails

AirOps scaled from $2M to $15M ARR in 11 months.

Here's every tool that made it happen:

Their Head of Growth, Eoin Clancy and their Co-Founder Matt Hammel were generous enough to reveal their complete GTM tech stack ↓

1️⃣ ADS & CONTENT

AirOps's mission is to help brands boost their presence on AI Search / LLMs.

Naturally, the primary lever to accomplishing that is content. 
And their stack features:

- Descript, a transcript-based video editing solution, to fuel their webinar and content processes.

- Circle, a community/cohort platform that they leverage to run their 'content engineer' group.

- Figma for design, which now offers robust AI capabilities that make visual creation quicker.

- AirOps, their own platform, to monitor their brand presence in AI search and automate content creation workflows + identify which content gaps to fill to earn citations in LLMs.

For LinkedIn, they use Fibbler to identify which companies engage with their thought leadership.


2️⃣ OUTBOUND

Their outbound tech stack is streamlined but features some of the top prospecting tools in the market:

- lemlist to coordinate multichannel outbound campaigns across email & LinkedIn with personalisation.

- Clay for mapping target accounts, enriching data via multiple providers, and triggering sophisticated outbound workflows.

- Common Room to consolidate buying signals across channels, score contacts/accounts, and drive intent-based activation.

- Trigify.io to monitor ICP relevant social signals and trends across key networks.

- Smartlead to scale bulk email outreach while delivering high volumes of email in the primary inbox.

- Attention to capture sales calls, & power internal workflows, enabling them to extract insights from their satisfied customers.


3️⃣ PRODUCT

They use a few software programs for production data, which feature:

- Hex, an AI-enabled analytics workspace for exploring production data, dashboard & launches.

- Amplitude, a deep product analytics tool, to monitor new users' onboarding journey and for product insights.

- Metabase, a self-serve business intelligence solution for dashboarding and reporting.


4️⃣ WEBSITE & ANALYTICS

Their website is hosted on Webflow, which offers a CMS & site builder that integrates seamlessly with AirOps and their broader content stack.

For tracking & attribution, they use HockeyStack.


5️⃣ HIRING / COMMS

Finally, for team hiring & communication, they rely on:

- Juicebox, an AI recruiting platform for leadership-led sourcing & candidate engagement.

- Loom for async video communication, project walkthrough, and to maintain teams aligned.

That's most of it.

I was actually surprised to see how efficient their stack is.

Just over ~10 GTM tools to scale beyond 8-figure ARR in just a year.

That's remarkably lean if you ask me.


P.S: Anything you'd add to accelerate their growth even further in 2026?

Most companies bet their LinkedIn strategy on the Founder.

We turned 24 employees into LinkedIn influencers:

Which led to: 

- 581 posts
- 43 473 reactions
- 28 130 comments
- +34 023 new followers

But most importantly:

- +27 new clients
- +$153,000 in MRR

… in less than 90 days.

And prospects kept telling our sales team: “We see you guys everywhere”.

Here’s how we made this happen 👇


1️⃣ We ran an internal LinkedIn challenge for Q4

Your team might want to post on LinkedIn. But if their job responsibilities don’t include “LinkedIn”… good luck.

We ran a competition & came up with a scoring system with the following prizes:

🥇 $5,000
🥈 $2,500
🥉 $1,500

… and $500 for every person publishing > 20 times over the quarter.


2️⃣ We made it as effortless as possible to post

Successful LinkedIn posts have a “recipe”.

It’s typically a combination of:
→ Well-structured, breathable writing
→ A proven angle or trendy topic
→ A strong hook
→ Nice visuals

But: 

Brainstorming hooks can be hit-or-miss.
→ I encourage my team to reuse variations of mines that outperformed.

Identifying proven topics isn’t easy.
→ We put Taplio & Scripe at their disposal to help the team find outliers.

Designing nice visuals takes time.
→ We put designers at their disposal, so they can focus on the ‘writing’ vs. needing to work on the ‘packaging’.


3️⃣ We invested resources in training the team

Making this work required 1:1 sessions in which we:

- Rewrote entire posts & hooks.
- Brainstormed post ideas
- Built a content calendar

As well as group sessions in which we:

- Ran team-wide sessions sharing best practices.
- Brought LinkedIn experts (Lara Acosta & Pierre Herubel) to share their knowledge with our team.


4️⃣ We found people who wanted to grow their brand

We’d ask applicants whether they wanted to grow their brands.
But also, many new joiners heard from us via LinkedIn.

If WE attracted them, they were more likely interested to grow.

Kenny learned about ColdIQ from a post by Monika.

He was already posting on his second day.

He started below 1,000 followers in 2025.
He’s about to reach 10,000.


5️⃣ We led by example, & every success made the others easier

We granted $500 prizes to team members who published 20+ times.
But, I published > 60 times in the same timeframe.

If you’re going to ask your team to post,  do it yourself as well.

Being at 60,000+ followers makes me more believable when I’m telling my team that I’m convinced they can reach 10,000.

But we also have 9 team members above 6,000 followers:

- Mich: 63,000+
- Alex: 57,000+
- Melissa: 43,000+
- Ivan: 19,000+
- Yevhen: 16,000+
- Soheil: 12,000+
- Monika: 10,000+
- Kenny: 9,000+
- Mai-Lan: 6,000+

Every successful internal LinkedIn growth story builds conviction for the rest of the team.

… and I’m pretty sure we’ll see many similar ‘team posting‘ stories in 2026.

If you want to be among these success stories…

Our team can help, just reach out :)

I tried 200+ AI GTM tools in 2025.

Here are the categories I'm bullish on for 2026:

1/ Workflow Builders

Why?
↳ They orchestrate advanced workflows for marketing & sales teams.

Example use-case: Running a personalised outbound campaign via Clay, on autopilot.

Software you can use:

→ Clay
→ AirOps
→ Default
→ Relevance AI


2/ AI Video Tools

Why? 
↳ They repurpose & edit videos autonomously. Some even generate videos from scratch. They can be used for short-form clipping, ads or even creating short movies.

Example use-case: Generating 150+ UGC assets in < 120 seconds to A/B test as Meta Ads.

Platforms you can use:

Video Generation:
→ Pika
→ Runway
→ Synthesia
→ Google Veo
→ OpenAI Sora

Ad Generation:
→ Icon
→ arcads AI

AI Editing:
→ Descript
→ OpusClip


3/ AI Coding Tools

Why? 
↳ They enable you to write code in plain English. They can be leveraged to build complex workflows (or better… build mini-tools for lead generation).

Example use-case: Build a phone number finder to collect email addresses.

My personal favourites include:
→ Cursor
→ Claude Code

Other platforms include:
→ Warp
→ Cline
→ Replit
→ Lovable
→ Windsurf


4/ AI Content Ideation Software

Why?
↳ They help you find viral ideas to inspire high-performing content.

Example use-case: Using vidIQ to find outlier YouTube videos & repurpose the idea as a LinkedIn content piece

Platforms include:

For LinkedIn..
→ Taplio
→ Scripe
→ Kleo

On YouTube...
→ 1of10
→ vidIQ
→ Viewstats
→ Spotter Studio

On Instagram...
→ Sortfeed


5/ MCPs

Why?
↳ They let your AI agents take actions across your software stack. You can use them to perform tasks inside your most-used tools, without having to open them.

Example use-case: Prompting Claude to review your sales calls of the day, research the leads, and cancel for the unqualified ones... without even opening your calendar app.

Platforms include:

For prompting actions...
→ Cursor
→ Claude

To connect apps without native MCP integrations...
→ Zapier
→ Composio
→ Pipedream
→ Docker, Inc


6/ AI Sourcing Agents

Why?
↳ They source precise lead lists in natural language or simply given a few prompting instructions.

Example use-case: Building a list of Marketing Directors who work at AI-native SaaS orgs in New York... by simply prompting the tools in plain English.

Platforms include:
→ Exa
→ Clay
→ Apify
→ Tavily
→ Relevance AI

I ran out of space, but there's more in the carousel 👇

P.S: What GTM trend are you betting on in 2026?

AI GTM Categories

OK- this is going to sound ridiculous.

But, I’ve made well over $2M from posting infographics on LinkedIn.

… and Ada Beltrán created most of these for me.

So here’s the thing:

My LinkedIn journey started with ‘text-only’ publications.
(Like everyone, I guess).

But early on, I started adding some visuals that I’d make myself.

I’d spend 3 hours creating a 7-page carousel.
For it to not even look pretty.

But crazy enough, this ugly visual was getting me 2-3x the likes & the impressions.

So I figured: “if I can write the exact same thing, but get 3x the engagement by just adding an image… why not do it every single time, right?!”

And so this was the beginning of a journey that led me, & then my team, to flood LinkedIn with infographics of all sorts.

20M+ impressions later, it looks like these visuals are still going strong.

My best explanation for why this performs so well is that ‘text-only’ posts take up very little space in the feed.

What this means is that you only have the first 2 lines of your ‘hook’ to entice people into clicking the “see more” button.

But when you publish a 1050 x 1380 image, it takes up the entire space on the feed. People can’t not see the image, and you can actually use it as a second hook by writing a big title on the image. And if it’s detailed enough, it can stand on its own as a post…

But then, everybody started publishing infographics as well.

So I did something even more ridiculous, which was:

Posting ANIMATED infographics.

So here’s the thing:

An animated infographic serves the same purpose as a static one does.

But it holds attention even more, especially if you speed it up, as it loops on itself, making it look like people are watching it over & over (in LinkedIn's eyes, I guess).

So if you want to tap into extra impressions without much more effort, have a look at the infographic below, breaking down how to create animated infographics (#infographiception).

Then, take your best-performing text post ever.
Add a nice visual to it that ‘respects’ the rules laid out below.

And I’ll bet you’ll be thanking me for how well the post performs ✌️

What GTM tools power CEOs at $10M+ ARR?

Their stack costs less than you think 👇

I asked all the 7-figure CXOs & GTM operators I know about the tools they used.

Here’s what they answered:

TOOLS MOST OFTEN MENTIONED:

- Clay (included in 71% of the stacks)
- n8n (48%)
- HubSpot (39%)
- Instantly.ai (35%)
- HeyReach.io (35%)
- Apollo (35%)
- LinkedIn (32%)
- Attio (32%)
- Prospeo.io (29%)
- Lovable (29%)
- lemlist (29%)
- Ahrefs (26%)
- Loom (23%)
- Fathom (23%)
- Calendly (23%)
- FullEnrich (19%)
- Trigify (19%)
- Google Analytics (19%)
- Airtable (19%)
- Zapier (19%)


PEOPLE STACKS FEATURED:

- Charles Tenot (CEO at lemlist | $40M+ ARR)
- Eoin Clancy (Head of Growth at AirOps | $15M+ ARR)
- Jonathan M (VP of GTM Momentum | $13M+ ARR)
- Glenn Miseroy (CEO at Expandi | ~$9M ARR)
- Benjamin Douablin (CEO at FullEnrich | ~$7M ARR)
- Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (CEO Artisan | ~$7M ARR)
- Michel Lieben (CEO ColdIQ | ~$7M ARR)
- Frank Sondors (CEO at Salesforge | $5M+ ARR)
- Hugo Fredon (Co-Founder at Prospeo.io | $5M+ ARR)
- Kai Brandt (CEO Genesy | $3M+ ARR)
- Jules Davies (CEO Scalerrs | $2M+ ARR)
- Eva Johanna Egg (CEO Scripe | ~$1M ARR)
- Nick Masters (Co-Founder at Vector)
- Pierre Herubel (Co-Founder at ContentPath)
- Nikola Sokolov (CEO at Influencer.club)
- Roq Xever (Founder at PredictLeads)
- Kathryn Wu🤝 (Co-Founder @OpenMart)
- Eli F. (CEO @Midbound)
- Jérémy Grandillon (CEO at TC9)
- Noam Nisand (Founder at Leed Services)
- Ada Beltrán (Founder at Dara Studio)


More stacks: coldiq.com/tech-stacks ✌️

Any results surprise you? 

*Note: The total sample is 62 people. As a GTM Agency Founder, I know plenty of others in the exact same line of business, which strongly biases results. This isn’t intended to be a large-scale statistical study, but more so an indication/discovery of what’s out there.

P.S: Want us to add you on here? 
Send a DM with your tech stack :)

Tech Stacks of the Top 1% GTM Operators

The best B2B data is the one your competition can’t find

...and you can source it for less than $29/mo ↓

With just an Apify subscription & a bit of creativity:

Whether you want to target…

→ Prospects complaining about your competitors (by monitoring Reddit, Inc.).

→ Companies outgrowing their current tools (by monitoring G2 reviews).

→ Companies launching new products (by monitoring ProductHunt).

→ Technical buyers (via GitHub)

→ Agencies (via Clutch)

... there's an easy-to-setup workflow for it 👇

P.S: What's your favourite data sourcing use-case?

7 data sourcing use-cases

Introducing ColdIQ's GTM Free Tools:

Try every growth use-case, for Free 👇

There are 1000s of GTM software solutions across 10s of thousands of use cases.

Trying these out usually entails:
- Signing up for a bunch of random solutions
- Trying them out (with a free trial if you're lucky)
- Singling out the right solution for your use-case
- Repeating the process over & over.

So we wanted to solve that.

By building a centralised place that doesn't require credits or signing up, and that lets you experience tech for:

- Enriching leads
- Sourcing signals
- Finding phone numbers
- Finding email addresses
- Uncovering org. tech stacks

... & more.

You can already test out the following solutions to test out against our GTM use-cases:

1. A Free Email Finder
2. A Free Email Verifier
3. A Free Phone Finder 
4. A Free Spam Checker
5. A Free Lookalike Finder
6. A Free GTM Strategizer
7. A Free Tech Stack Finder
8. A Free Email Copy Optimizer
9. A Free Intent Signals Sourcer
10. A Free Campaign Ideation Tool
11. A Free LinkedIn Post Previewer
12. A Free Outbound ROI Calculator
13. A Free People or Job Title Finder

Along with step-by-step guides on how to properly leverage this tech.

It's here: coldiq.com/free-tools ✌️

P.S: Which Free Tool would be helpful to you? 
Let us know, and we'll get on it :)

taplio

The Battle

Charles Tenot

Michel Lieben 🧠

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Performance ScoreCharles Tenot's LinkedIn Performance

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taplio

The Battle

Charles Tenot

Michel Lieben 🧠

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

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Performance ScoreCharles Tenot's LinkedIn Performance