What if you could conduct smarter, faster, and more cost-effective consumer research without alarming your budget-conscious finance team? Forget outdated advice about CTR and MQLs—what you need are evidence-backed strategies.
For over a decade, we’ve partnered with LinkedIn's experts to uncover key B2B marketing principles. Now, we’re using those insights and cutting-edge research tech to break down what really drives growth.
Join Peter Weinberg and Jon Lombardo each week as we explore proven, lab-backed tactics to help marketers thrive in today’s landscape.
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
27 Apr 2026TRANSCRIPT
Brand Breakdown: RAO's - How a 10-Seat Restaurant Became a $2.7B Brand
A 10-table restaurant in Harlem became a $2.7 billion CPG brand by mastering one thing: being easy to want and easy to buy. Rao’s didn’t scale the restaurant—it scaled the desire.
Jon and Peter break down how Rao’s built extreme mental availability through myth, scarcity, and cultural relevance—then paired it with physical availability through disciplined distribution. From mafia mystique to premium pricing, every move reinforced the same positioning: this is not everyday sauce. Also, Peter has a special guest joining him today: Eric Skae — the CEO who took Rao's from 5% annual growth to 40% in four months, and is now running the exact same playbook at Carbone Fine Food — for a rare inside look at how the brand actually scaled.
They unpack the full playbook—segmentation, positioning, pricing, distribution, and brand assets—and show why Rao’s is one of the cleanest real-world examples of Ehrenberg-Bass in action. If you want to understand how brands actually grow (and why most B2B companies get it backwards), this is the case study.
00:00 - The $2.7B question
03:13 - RAO's History and Strategy
17:44 - Segmentation and Targeting
24:08 - Positioning
28:14 - Line Extensions
30:48 - Distinctive Brand Assets
38:46 - Non-Synthetic Salon: Interview with Eric Skae, CEO of Carbone Fine Food
1:06:12 - Future Predictions of Carbone
1:09:23 - Ideas Wrap
1:15:36 - Commercial Outcomes
1:17:41 - Million Dollar Data
1:20:59 - B2B Lesson
13 Apr 2026TRANSCRIPT
From Ad Skeptics to Ad Empires: Why Every Tech Giant Becomes an Ad Company
From Sam Altman to Jeff Bezos to Mark Zuckerberg, the pattern keeps repeating—leaders dismiss advertising right up until they need it to scale.
Advertising isn’t a necessary evil. It’s the system that makes modern markets work.
This week, Jon and Peter take on one of marketing’s most persistent myths: that advertising is annoying, manipulative, or optional. The reality looks very different.
They unpack why advertising isn’t persuasion—it’s infrastructure. It connects buyers and sellers, subsidizes access, fuels competition, and quietly funds the innovations shaping the future. Including AI.
Backed by new synthetic research, they reveal how people actually feel about advertising (hint: it’s not what you think), why even ad professionals misunderstand it, and how better framing completely changes perception.
If advertising is the engine behind growth, innovation, and access—why does everyone keep pretending otherwise?
00:00 — The Most Misunderstood Engine in Marketing
02:10 — From the Feed: “I Hate Ads”… Until You Need Them
09:54 — Marketing Mental Models: Ads as Infrastructure
13:53 — Advertising Is a Weak Force (That Scales)
17:30 — Access, Innovation, Competition, and Survival
20:56 — Million Dollar Data: Do People Actually Hate Ads?
23:51 — Why Ad People Hate Ads the Most
26:48 — Good Ads vs Bad Ads
27:30 — Final Take: Advertising Is the System
Inside a recent episode
Why Marketing Should Stop Trying to Align With Sales
Published 11 May 2026 · Transcript excerpt
[…] So there's like an enormous amount of content on this topic of sales and marketing alignment, which means it's clearly a thing, right? But not in the way people think it's a thing. Yeah. I love this idea that the name of a thing often actually means the opposite of what's really going on. And I think that's exactly what is going on here. What we actually see from all this conversation around why do we need to talk so much about alignment? Because there is no alignment. There's just misalignment. There's chaos. There's mess. So whenever you see sales and marketing alignment or sales and marketing orchestration, you should assume there is no alignment whatsoever. […]
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