In 2017, I was leading the Media and Entertainment vertical at Google. The streaming wars were on and life was good.The only problem? Google was also in the media business. Youtube, and by extension Google was the biggest competitor to all my clients.We competed in the market for ad dollars from the largest advertisers in the market.Our clients were a skeptical lot, initially. While there was no hesitation in using Google search, many felt that using Youtube, especially a visible property like the homepage, was a signal to their advertisers that they had conceded Youtube was ‘essential’ to every advertiser, even those that were competing with it. There were many of them that felt that discussing a sensitive campaign before launch with a competing partner would also compromise their competitive work. Their sales team would often complain to management about their marketing teams investments with Youtube – ‘It undercuts our sales pitch to advertisers when we try and take share from Google’ they would complain.

So how did we go from there to being publicly acknowledged as the most important channel of acquisition, in no less than the leading financial daily in the country?

Trust is the seller’s best weapon

In one word, trust.

The kind of trust that comes only when you genuinely believe that your primary interests as a sales team is that of your client, and nothing else. There are parallels between this and the Hindu epic Mahabharat, where the protagonist, while asked to fight his own cousins, is told by the Lord that his primary responsibility is towards his duty(Dharma) and then all else.As a Google sales team, we believed that our job was to best serve the interests of our clients, and we demonstrated it so well that our clients eventually trusted us.

What did we learn : Trust is the only value that humans add in a sales transaction. Your only job in sales is to build trust.