Is gaining others' approval and having them trust and act on your opinions important to you?

Usually that happens naturally. When I started in Marketing after my studies, I had to learn that tracking is your daily bread and butter (what a pity that nobody told us this during our Masters). But through tracking you will always be able to show where the company invests and which channel works best. From there building trust is just a matter of reporting frequently. I can only speak from a Marketing perspective, but people should not need to trust my opinion in the first instance, but the data we're seeing.