Was looking at a client I worked with in 2006 & realized he made the ultimate CMO power move. CMO to CFO, and of course how he's a CEO of a large company, imagine the ability to deeply understand marketing AND finance at an insanely high level in the same brain.

I can only imagine how he sees marketing and finance problems through a totally different lens.

At a much lower level this is why I push people @SeerInteractive to swap roles, the SEO who understands PPC is a BEAST, your customers see both, the ability to know how both move together & independently is KEY. It also is a major competitive advantage in the market.

A PPC'er who has a hypothesis about snippets has to "send an email", wait for a response, a PPC'er who knows a good bit about SEO - gets that answer instantly / knows where to look. Over the course of a week, person A can answer 10 hypotheses while person B is "bridge building"

with another div to get an answer. Remember our customers see the whole SERP, not just paid, not just organic, so for me understanding only 1/2 the SERP is just bad marketing. Also the person adept at both & given the right power moves money from both to get maximum yield.

The SEO is going to defend SEO even when the data says, it ain't working at the same yield as PPC b/c that is how they get paid. The PPC'er is going to defend PPC the same way, who gets hurt? The company who is over investing in one channel b/c it effects someone's self worth.

Things I rarely hear SEO's say: Hey you haven't been able to execute for 3 months, lets stop the SEO contract and put that into X where we can execute and get a return, then if we do that well, in 6 months we'll have the $$ to hire a developer to knock out these SEO tasks.

Self preservation > whats best for the client.

A big part of my job is to remind people NOT to do that, instead pause contracts / build trust in advance of the client asking "why are we still paying for X, when we're working on very small tasks that won't hit my overall goal"

Another reason to save your $$ and bank it, you have runway to do what's right for the client (build trust) and not have to instantly lay people off who are unbillable. Without that cushion it leads to recommendations that are better for the agency than the client, which leads to

lack of trust, which leads to
no referrals, which leads to
hiring more sales people, which leads to
smaller margins, which leads to
short term thinking, which leads to
agency over client, which leads to
lack of trust, which leads to
no referrals, which...