This CMO turned a $1.2M budget into $31M ARR (Dave's Newsletter)

How Lemlist's CMO Spent $1.2M on Marketing and Generated $31M in New ARR

One of the best ways to get better at this job is to see how other marketing leaders actually spend their money. The real numbers.

A few weeks ago I saw a post on LinkedIn that stopped me mid-scroll. Domitille de Saint-Exupéry, CMO at Lemlist, shared the full breakdown of how her team spent $1.2 million on marketing in 2025. Not a summary. Not a framework. The actual line items. I sent it to Erin immediately and said we need to get her on the podcast.

Lemlist is a bootstrapped sales engagement platform doing $40 million in ARR with a marketing team of nine. That $1.2M generated $31M in new ARR. We had Domi on the pod to dig into the details, and I wanted to share the biggest takeaways here.

Here's where the money went.

1. $550K on Paid Ads (From Zero the Year Before)

In 2024, Lemlist spent almost nothing on paid. In 2025, they went to $550K. They were shifting from a self-serve PLG motion to sales-led, going after a new mid-market audience. Paid gave them something brand couldn't: speed and control.

They started with Google search ads in one geo, validated performance, then expanded to new markets and added LinkedIn. They outsourced the technical execution to a freelancer (bidding, platform optimization) but kept positioning, messaging, and campaign strategy in-house. Domi was clear about this. The technical stuff can be outsourced. The strategic layer can't.

An example of a Lemlist ad. Domi's direction to her team: I don't care if it's not on brand. Make it fun and catch people's attention.

One thing I loved: when they expanded into Germany, they launched with the same messaging that worked in the US. It flopped. Turns out, cold emailing is poorly tolerated in Germany. So they shifted the messaging to LinkedIn outreach and phone, and performance jumped. Paid became a way to proof-test positioning in new markets, not just generate leads.

First-touch attribution on paid: $4M in new ARR.

2. $450K on Partnerships

This was the second biggest line item. Lemlist's partners are mostly outbound sales agencies who resell the product to their clients.

The interesting part: customers acquired through tier-one partners have more than 2x the lifetime value of customers acquired through other channels. The agencies don't just sell Lemlist. They build use cases around it, coach their clients, and make them more successful. Lemlist pays lifetime commissions to those top-tier partners because the math works.

Domi also sees partners as a brand play. Partners run events and webinars with Lemlist, and they extend the brand into geos where the company doesn't have a direct presence. One full-time partnership manager handles both acquisition and growth of the partner network. It sits inside marketing, not sales.

3. $60K on Influencers (And They're Doubling Down)

Lemlist spent $60K on influencer marketing and Domi said they're doubling the investment this year.

Most of their influencers have around 10K followers. Micro-influencers, not big names. And almost all of them are operators doing sales every day. Not book authors or conference speakers who left the field five years ago. Domi wants people who experience the pain of low reply rates and rejection daily because they talk about the product differently when they actually live it.

The brief: they never ask influencers to sell a feature. They ask them to share a method that solves a real pain. The method is easier to execute with Lemlist, but you could do it without the product. That framing is what makes the content feel useful instead of sponsored.

Every influencer gets a free license and onboarding. Most deals start at a minimum of three posts. The ones that work get extended to six-month packages or bundles of 10 posts. Domi said the content compounds. An influencer who actually uses the product for months creates way better content than someone doing a one-off.

When an influencer post gets strong organic engagement, Lemlist sponsors it as a LinkedIn thought leader ad. The click-through rates on those are significantly higher than standard brand ads. Then their growth team runs outbound to the people commenting on those posts. They saw 40% reply rates on that outbound. Some of it was even sent on behalf of the influencer (with their permission). People were thrilled to hear from their "sales hero" directly.

4. The Rest: $100K on Agencies, $50K on Tools, $10K on Outbound

The remaining $160K covered freelancers and agencies for things like technical ads management, blog writing, translations, and Reddit. Plus the standard SaaS tool stack (analytics, automation, CMS, SEO). And a small outbound budget used mostly for education, reactivating old leads, and targeting high-intent prospects.

Worth noting: salaries are not included in the $1.2M number. This is pure program spend from a team of nine.

This is the kind of stuff I wish more marketing leaders shared (I also get why not everyone is going to publish their budget publicly). Not because there's a perfect formula to copy, but because seeing where someone else put their dollars and what they got back is one of the fastest ways to pressure-test your own plan.

One of the things we hear the most in our community is that people want real examples from other B2B marketing leaders. We thought this was really useful from Domi. If you want to hear the full conversation, here's the link to the episode. Go follow Domi on LinkedIn. She's the real deal.

— Dave

P.S. What does your marketing budget breakdown look like this year? If you're brave like Domi and open to sharing, hit reply and let us know what's getting the biggest investment.

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