How Lemlist added $1.4m arr in 30 days

To Marketers,

Okerosi here with Product Weekly.

In this newsletter, I share proven insights I have gathered this week across; product marketing, B2B ad creatives & SaaS growth playbooks from the top 5% minds in the space.

In this week’s roundup:

- Adding $1.4m arr in 30 days

- LinkedIn Ads mistakes

- How to do ABM right

3- Partners
We always had a lot of agencies and partners implementing lemlist, but we never created a proper program for that.
We simply believed that because we had the best product, people would always implement what was best for their customers.
We were wrong.
If you want to grow a partner program, you need to invest heavily in it.

5- Talent density
None of this would be possible without an amazing team!
We spent the last 18 months with Charles hiring a world-class executive team and helping the team level up in every department.
We hire less than 1% of people applying to lemlist because we know how important it is to keep a team of A players.

But here’s the thing: PLG isn’t about slapping a self-serve motion on top of your product.

THE DON’TS

1. Don’t rely on guided tours
Guided tours sound helpful, but most users click through them without actually learning. Instead, build a product that a user can understand right away.

2. Free trials > Freemium
Freemium sounds great, but it often attracts users who have no intent to buy. A trial with a clear end date creates urgency and lets people experience the full value.

3. Skip referral programs
Referrals only work when users genuinely love your product. If your product isn’t solving a real problem, no referral program will save you.

3. MIX OF PLAYBOOKS TO DRIVE BUYING COMMITTEE AWARENESS AND ENGAGEMENT.

The biggest mistake with ABM is treating all accounts the same way and running the same playbooks.

We split other accounts into two groups and ran a mix of playbooks to connect and engage buying committee members, including:

-Cluster (use-case/challenge-based) content
-Cluster webinars or in-person events
-Buyer interviews and collaborations with internal marketing teams to spread awareness
-Constant engagement and content distribution to open conversations

For these two segments, the core KPI was achieving # of accounts that hit our engagement threshold instead of trying to generate a sales opportunity with them.

Here’s my ABM tech stack recs, organized by campaign phase:

→ Define who to target
→ Know when to engage
→ Personalize outreach
→ Track what’s working

First mine: You create a campaign group, the default is group objective.

Which means whatever objective you choose (website clicks, awareness, lead gen, etc.), all campaigns in that group must have the same objective

ZERO reason for this, if your campaigns are the same objective, you’ve lost

You can create group objectives for each objective if you want, but that is like have a separate laptop for every day of the week

Why?

Second mine: you now create a new campaign. You’ll get an option to select accelerate or classic.

Then default will be accelerate. Don’t do it, select classic

Accelerate leverages LinkedIn‘s AI to show your ads to the right people and companies, severely limiting targeting options

In theory sounds amazing! In reality, it’s not

Third mine: Location default settings is going to be permanent or temporary.

Click it and choose permanent

99.9789784746% of companies should not use temporary

Fourth mine: Audience expansion will be checked. Find that blue box and uncheck it, immediately.

Here’s what will happen. You say “I only want target CFOs at 1k+ employee companies”

Your ads will show up for a lot of non-CFO’s and under $1k employee companies

Uncheck it

Fifth mine: LinkedIn audience network will be checked by default, and more worrisome, is hidden not as easy to find some others.

Find it, uncheck it

LAN is essentially display ads and most of your budgets will go towards that, not ideal.

Note: This is not a post about why LAN is bad, I get it, there’s use cases but please separate it out into a different campaign

Sixth mine: By default, maximum delivery bidding will be active. TBH, I think there is use cases for this, but not to start.

This will be the difference of a $400 CPM and $180 CPCs, in comparison to $100 CPMs and $22 CPCs to the same exact audience

Switch to manual bidding

 Six and a half mine: Only half bc i don’t think it’ll be detrimental but there is a setting that by default is going to show “best performing”

You should switch this to rotate ads evenly

With best performing, they’ll show the best performing based off of the objective. Low CPCs, reach, CPMs, etc. might be the campaign objective

But it shouldn’t be the goal of the ads.

Here are the 4 most common reasons LinkedIn Ads are failing for you:

1. You're Doing Literally Everything Wrong:
Audience expansion/network activated, poor audience segmentation, careless bidding strategies, uninspired creative, weak landing pages, misguided budgets.

2. You're Doing One Big Thing Wrong:
Most elements are solid, but a single critical issue - such as stinky creative, improper bidding, or incorrect targeting - drags performance down.

3. Your Account Strategy Is Off:
Copying campaigns or playbooks from other companies without full context is a recipe for disaster. B2B is a big world. What works for startups doesn't always work for Enterprise. What works for DevOps Engineers doesn't always work for CFOs.

4. Your GTM or Marketing Strategy Is Fundamentally Wrong:
Good execution but lacking Product-Market Fit, unclear positioning, or no clear differentiation.