Why Marketing Should Stop Trying to Align With Sales

Sales and marketing alignment might be the biggest fantasy in B2B. After decades of dashboards, handoff frameworks, attribution models, and “smarketing” workshops, most companies are still running the same internal knife fight.This week on Lab Grown Marketing, Jon and Peter argue that the problem isn’t failed alignment — it’s the assumption that alignment should exist in the first place. Drawing on new synthetic research and LinkedIn behavioral data across 7,000+ B2B companies, they reveal why sales and marketing almost never target the same customers, why MQLs distort behavior on both sides, and why the pursuit of shared metrics may actually make performance worse.The guys revisit the infamous “Tokyo Test” — the moment LinkedIn’s brand awareness disappeared overnight — to unpack why sales teams dramatically underestimate the power of marketing until it’s gone. Then they introduce a different solution entirely: strategic misalignment. Instead of forcing sales and marketing to do the same job, companies should divide labor correctly, align around customer needs, and let each team execute independently against different parts of demand.Turns out the biggest opportunity in B2B growth might not be tighter alignment. It might be finally admitting alignment was never the goal.00:00 - Introduction – Sales & Marketing misalignment03:40 - The Tokyo Test – what a near-empty event taught us about brand09:10 - The case for strategic misalignment13:00 - Million dollar data – survey of 500 marketers vs. 500 salespeople20:25 - The Circles of Doom – LinkedIn's 7,000-company alignment study28:30 - Division of labor – the Adam Smith prescription for sales & marketing35:55 - The MQL problem – the metric distorting both teams40:00 - Category entry points – the one thing sales and marketing can agree on