Charles Tenot's Linkedin Analytics

A competitor used lemlist to send cold emails… …to lemlist users… …explaining why their tool is better than lemlist. And no — they didn’t even use their own platform to do it. They used ours. Wild. So what should we do? → Add a “Sent by lemlist” footer to his emails? → Ban him? → Do nothing and move on? Please vote 🤣 Honestly? We're flattered. If your competitor is using your product to try and beat you… You’re probably doing something right.

Most “leadership teams” are just recurring calendar invites with fancy titles. At lemlist, the exec team isn’t just a meeting. It’s our growth engine. Last year, we managed to build a high performing leadership team and it's one of the reasons we grew by +$4.5M in ARR in just 4 months this year. Here’s exactly how we run our executive team to stay aligned and move fast: → We have a dedicated Slack channel that stays active daily. We share ideas, wins, struggles, and big news—no silos allowed. → We meet bi-weekly for 1 hour. No fancy PowerPoints—just a list of hot topics anyone on the team can bring up. We start by ranking them, then go through each one and make a decision. → Twice a year, we spend 4 full days together at a retreat. This week, it was at the Lemhouse in Avignon. Mornings: deep work on strategy. Afternoons: back to regular work. Evenings: dinners and informal chats (this is where real trust is built). → Every 2-3 months, we organize bonding events. Simple things like a good dinner or a party—just time together as people, not titles. Here’s how it plays out in real life: → When Sales miss targets, they take full accountability instead of blaming Marketing. → When Developers lose motivation, Sales join Tech meetings and share fresh customer wins. → When Marketing struggles with a story, the VP of Product steps in and shares insights straight from the product team. → When Sales fight a tough competitor, Marketing jumps into their meetings to help sharpen the pitch. That’s what a real exec team looks like. It’s not easy to build. But if you want to scale beyond 50 people, you can’t grow without it. --- Anything you’ve found that works well to keep your leadership team aligned?

CEO: “We need to reduce churn.” Same CEO: “Let’s sign this customer even if the product isn’t a fit.” I'm sure you have seen that happen way too often: Everyone agrees churn is a problem. It shows up on every board slide. But when a big logo shows up—or when sales targets are missed—we forget everything we know. Here’s how it plays out: → Sales flags the misfit → CEO pushes to close anyway → Product says: “We’ll figure it out” Everyone's happy. Until... → Onboarding is a mess → Support gets flooded → Tech builds custom stuff no one else uses → Product roadmap gets hijacked → Core customers wait for features that never ship → The customer churns → They leave bad reviews and bad feedbacks to anyone they know → Everyone’s frustrated The total cost is far more than the revenue you made. That’s the price of chasing bad-fit deals. Now—To be clear, I’m not saying you should only sell when your product is perfect. Selling slightly ahead of product readiness can be healthy. It creates urgency, internal tension, and often helps the team move faster. But only if: ✅ The customer is a true ICP ✅ The feature gap is small and clear We’re doing this at lemlist. We’re upfront with prospects about product gaps and how we plan to fill them. Sometimes it goes through long POCs with technical buyers. Right now, we have three deals with 50+ sales reps that are committed before year-end— Because we proved during the POCs that we can deliver. That’s the difference between healthy tension and a slow-motion disaster. Otherwise, you’re just setting the team up to burn. What’s your take?

Most companies struggle to find AI use cases that are actually adopted. Here's by far our #1 AI use case at lemlist. A few weeks ago, we built an internal agent connected to all our product resources: -> Public FAQ -> Internal product documentation -> Ticket responses from support We made this agent directly available in Slack. At first, people used it out of curiosity. But after one month, we’re still seeing a lot of usage every day: → Sales teams looking for answers to prospects → Account managers answering customers → Support teams trying to give the best answers → Marketing teams looking to document features It reminds me of how people describe product-market fit: “When you have PMF, you know it.” It’s exactly the same here. There are hundreds of AI use cases that sound good but are just painful to use. Nobody really wants to use AI for them. But when there’s true PMF, it’s obvious. One more learning for me: product documentation is becoming critical for any SaaS. By the end of the year, we’ll create the most complete public documentation of lemlist—not just to feed this AI bot, but also for another reason. It will help technical users find everything they need. And it will make sure crawling bots from LLMs see it too… So when someone asks ChatGPT about a use case they want to achieve, lemlist shows up. And you, what’s your most adopted AI use case at work?

Your impact as a manager isn’t measured by what you do. It’s measured by how much more your team can do thanks to you. If you manage 10 people and make them 20% more productive… You’re worth 2. If you manage 50 people and make them 10% more productive… You’re worth 5. If you manage 100 people and make them 10% more productive… You’re worth 10. If you manage 500 people and make them just 5% more productive… You’re worth 25. Yet many managers stay stuck on their own individual contributions. Yes, leading by example matters. But the real leverage comes from asking: → How can I create better alignment? → How can I spark more motivation? → How can I develop stronger skills in my team? Your time and energy are limited. Spend them where they have the most impact.

Type "Hubspot" on Google. What’s the first result? A landing page with a Contact Us form. No "Sign-in" button. This says a lot: if you are already a customer, just go to another place. It means the company cares more about getting new leads than helping existing users get back into the product. And they’re not the only one doing this. Check Typeform, same. So many companies build for acquisition first. Optimizing for demos. Forms. Lead scoring. Growth. Meanwhile, your actual customers—people paying you—are just trying to log in. They get buried behind CTAs and popups. That’s not just bad UX. It’s a bad mindset. Am I the only one surprised by this? --- PS: I'm aware how it works - A marketer created a Landing Page designed for form capture - Then the marketer pushes it in branded KW campaigns on adwords So I understand it's intended, and they just want to capture "new" demand and not demand from existing customer. Although, as a brand, they should know that some of your customers will bookmark, others will type the URL directly in the browser ("direct"), but some will always go through google search and type the brand name. So basically this is creating useless friction for existing customers.

We tried dropping the price. Nothing changed. Here's why people are less sensitive to price that what you might think 👇 At Taplio, when a user churns and selects “Too expensive” as the reason—we offer a 50% discount. You’d expect some of them to take the offer and stay. But very few do. And most of thosre who accept still churn shortly after. We saw the same thing at Lemlist. We dropped the price of data enrichment over time—thinking lower cost would increase usage. It didn’t. Today, we’re among the cheapest options on the market. Yet we discovered some customers still pay competitors up to 7x more. Another example: we launched a $39/month plan at Lemlist after hearing the product was “too expensive.” Three months after, almost no adoption. No bump in acquisition. Because the problem was never the price. It was the perceived value. ---- Here’s what we’ve learned: If someone pays $99 for your product, and 30 days later wants to leave, offering it at $49 won’t change anything. Not even $19 will save them. Because people don’t think in “value for money.” They think in value. Period. They put products in just two buckets: 1. Things they value 2. Things they don’t If your product lands in bucket #2, even free isn’t cheap enough. Price is just the final filter—after value is perceived. Not the lever to create value where none exists. — So next time a user says “It’s too expensive”... Ask yourself: Did they really get value? Or did they just realize they never cared enough to begin with?

Partnerships is a channel that's now $1M in ARR and 15% of our acquisition. Lilibeth Acuna built it from scratch and she shared with me her learnings 👇 18 months ago we had nothing: no playbook, no case studies. Lili was put in charge to prove partnership could be a win. End of Q1, we realised partnerships was becoming a key acquisition channel. So I asked Lili to share her learnings, so I can share them with you: Advice n°1: don’t treat partners like clients but like teammates Most companies act like they’re doing partners a favor. Lili flipped that mindset. She involved them in calls, decisions, product feedback. She made them feel like they were part of lemlist. That changed everything. Advice n°2: onboarding is not a checklist It’s not “send a deck and move on.” It’s weeks of back and forth. Helping them adapt their offer, rewrite landing pages, train their team. If you don’t do that, you’ll get clicks—not clients. Advice n°3: play the long game It took 6 months for some partners to bring their first customer. That’s normal. They need time to find the right angle, build trust with their audience, and get results. Most companies quit too early. She didn’t. Advice n°4: give first Lili didn’t wait for results. She started by sending leads to partners—without asking for anything back. It showed we weren’t here to squeeze value but that we were here to build something long-term, and make both sides win. Advice n°5: make it personal Most partners don’t stay for the commission. They stay because they feel connected. - Because someone texts them when they close a deal. - Because someone checks in when things aren’t going well. - Because they feel like someone on the other side actually cares. --- That’s how you turn a “channel” into a real growth engine. No hacks. Just hard work, human connections & discipline. Good job Lili 👏 I hope you'll like this format, I'll share more internal stories featuring our employee, stay tuned 👀

2010: I didn’t know what a P&L was 2014: I was building financial models for billion-dollar M&A deals 2014: I had no idea what ARR and churn meant 2018: I was creating SaaS metrics templates for other CFOs 2018: I had never touched a CRM 2020: I was leading a full Lead-to-Cash system for a $30M ARR startup 2020: I had never done sales 2022: I was running a 170-person revenue team hitting 120% of target 2022: I had no idea how to write on LinkedIn 2025: I reached 10M impressions in 365 days These are just examples, because this post isn’t about me. It’s about anyone with the will to work and grow. You can reinvent yourself. Again and again. You can always learn new skills, it’s never too late. The GOAT says it: « no human is limited »