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.

CTO at lemlist - building the best place for devs

👨‍💻 CTO with 20+ years in tech—from C++ in Taiwan to AI agents in France.

CTO focused on building high-performing teams and delivering real business impact through tech.

After starting my career coding in C++ and .NET in Taipei, I spent over a decade managing large-scale projects at Airbus, before diving deep into the startup world.

Today, I lead engineering at lempire, where we build sales tools like lemlist, lemwarm, and lemcal. I joined as a fullstack dev passionate about Meteor.js—and grew into the CTO role by focusing on scale, simplicity, and impact.

I love:
✅ Lean dev processes that actually deliver value
✅ Empowering devs to think like entrepreneurs
✅ Keeping tech aligned with real business goals
✅ Still getting my hands dirty in code when it matters

Whether it’s building teams, launching products, or simplifying complexity, I bring both the mindset of a developer and the vision of a product leader.

Mika F

L'IA en dev, le défi qu'on n'adresse pas assez : l'identité professionnelle.

En tant que CTO qui pousse fort sur l'adoption de l'IA dans nos workflows, je vois une résistance qui n'a rien à voir avec la technologie.

Elle est humaine.

Le problème de fond :
Un développeur senior, c'est des années d'expertise accumulée. Des patterns maîtrisés, des réflexes acquis, une capacité à résoudre des problèmes complexes. C'est leur valeur sur le marché. C'est ce qui les définit.

Et maintenant, l'IA fait en 30 secondes ce qu'ils faisaient en 2h. Parfois mieux, surtout sur des technos qu'ils maîtrisent moins.

On dit "vous allez monter en abstraction", "vous devenez orchestrateurs d'agents". Techniquement c'est vrai.

Mais émotionnellement ? C'est une transformation profonde de ce qui fait leur métier.

Le vrai change management :
Ce n'est pas d'expliquer comment utiliser Claude ou Cursor.
C'est de repositionner l'expertise : passer de "j'écris du code qui marche" à "je définis ce qui fait du bon code et je garantis qu'on le respecte".

Architecture, edge cases, review, qualité, limites : tout ça demande du jugement humain que l'IA n'a pas.

Mais reconnaissons que c'est moins immédiatement gratifiant que de voir son code compiler du premier coup.

On avance vite sur l'IA. Mais je comprends pourquoi certains freinent. Ce n'est pas du conservatisme. C'est une question légitime : si l'IA code, qu'est-ce qui me définit encore comme développeur ?

Ce que l'IA ne fait pas (encore) :
- Les décisions d'architecture système : L'IA peut coder un microservice, mais elle ne va pas décider si tu dois découper ton monolithe maintenant ou dans 6 mois. Ça demande de connaître ton équipe, ton produit, ta dette technique.
- Penser le scale avant le problème : L'IA va te faire du code qui marche pour 1000 users. Mais anticiper qu'il faut prévoir pour 100K users dans 18 mois ? Ça c'est de l'expérience.
- Les trade-offs business/tech : "On fait quick & dirty pour valider le market, ou on prend 2 semaines de plus pour bien faire ?" L'IA ne connaît pas ton runway, ta roadmap, tes priorités business.
- La dette technique stratégique : Savoir QUELLE dette est acceptable et laquelle va te tuer. L'IA ne voit pas 6 mois devant.
- L'ownership du produit : Comprendre le WHY derrière le code. Contester une spec qui n'a pas de sens. Proposer une solution tech plus simple pour le même besoin business.

En fait, le dev senior devient quoi ?
Un architecte de systèmes qui délègue l'implémentation. Mais pas juste "architecte" au sens design patterns. Plus un product engineer qui :
- Comprend le business
- Prend les décisions structurantes
- Valide que l'IA a bien compris les contraintes
- Garantit la qualité et la maintenabilité

C'est plus proche du rôle de Staff Engineer que de dev qui code 8h/jour.
Mais comment tu vends ça à quelqu'un qui AIME coder ?

On utilise Claude Code et Cursor au quotidien.
Et justement pour ça, on est encore plus stricts sur les bases.

L’IA fait gagner du temps sur l’exécution.
Mais la lisibilité, la structure et les responsabilités restent humaines.

Ca se traduit par des règles très concrètes :

- chaque feature a une structure explicite et prévisible: quand tu ouvres un dossier, tu sais où chercher et pourquoi

-  les responsabilités sont clairement séparées: le métier est lisible sans connaître Mongo, HTTP ou React, les détails techniques restent à leur place

- TypeScript n’est pas “optionnel” (si tu me lis depuis longtemps tu auras compris qu'on a évolué sur la question): types clairs, exports simples, imports propres, JSDoc quand c’est utile.

- côté backend, on assume la perf et l’observabilité: logs structurés, métriques, Mongo maîtrisé.

- pas de magie cachée, pas de .map() naïfs sur des gros volumes.

- les code reviews sont exigeantes: architecture, perf, sécurité, lisibilité: pas des “LGTM”, mais des retours argumentés, avec du code.

L’idée n’est pas d’être “puriste”.
L’idée, c’est que même avec du code généré, un dev senior puisse comprendre une feature rapidement et avoir confiance dans ce qu’il modifie.

Si tu vois l’IA comme un levier, pas comme une excuse pour baisser le niveau, on devrait bien s’entendre.

taplio

The Battle

Charles Tenot

Mika F

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The Battle

Charles Tenot

Mika F

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