This is my second article in a series of Direct Sales Leadership subjects. The first article dealt with the importance of integrity in the direct marketing industry. This article examines the relationship between trust and respect.

Trust versus Respect

Do you know the difference between trust and respect and how they can impact your direct marketing effectiveness? I have found the relationship between trust and respect to be related, but perhaps not the way you would expect.

To begin, I would like to define what trust and respect mean. From one of my favorite sources, dictionary.com:

Trust: reliance on the integrity, strength, ability, surety, etc., of a person or thing; confidence.

Respect: esteem for or a sense of the worth or excellence of a person, a personal quality or ability, or something considered as a manifestation of a personal quality or ability: I have great respect for her judgment.

So, to trust somebody means that you have confidence in their integrity. You can rely on them. A person you trust is probably a friend or a relative. Not someone whom you have recently met, but someone you have some history with. You have observed how they conduct themselves and you can predict how they will respond in a given situation. You do not expect to be disappointed by people you trust.

Respect on the other hand, is an acknowledgment of a person's abilities. You respect a person when after they have demonstrated they can effectively achieve specific goals or have exhibited the capability to perform activities that you find of value.

That being said, I have observed that when we first meet a person; we respect them, but we don't necessarily trust them. On the other hand, as we get to know a person better; we trust them, but we don't necessarily respect them. In fact, there is an opposite relationship between trust and respect!

OK, so perhaps we do not really respect someone we have just met. But we treat them with respect. Since they have not established that they are not worthy of our respect, we give it to them freely. Over time, we learn not to respect our friends. If respect is an acknowledgement of a person's ability, than not respecting our friends simply means we acknowledge they do not have a specific ability. It does not mean we believe they are bad people or flawed in any way, it simply means we know them for the abilities they possess and we recognize the abilities they do not possess. Believe me, no one respects my singing ability if they have ever heard me sing! (But they love me to death when I stop singing!) And that's OK. We all have our strengths and our weaknesses; and believe me, our friends definitely know what they are!

So when we meet someone, respect is an attribute that stands the risk of being lost over time. While trust is a quality that can be expected to grow over time.

When we first meet a new friend, we don't trust them. We are not going to ask them to deposit our paycheck and we aren't going to ask them to babysit our children until we know them better. Remember, trust means a reliance that someone will perform a specific action. Until we have observed how they behave and understand what is important to a person, we are not going to rely on them to do something that is important to us. We are going to wait until we believe they are reliable. They will probably need to demonstrate to us that they are reliable, dependable, trustworthy friends by performing increasingly important tasks over time.

Impact to Network Marketing

So what does all this mean to our network marketing businesses? Well, believe it or not, when we began our network marketing businesses, the friends who did not come into the business with us probably rejected the opportunity because they did not respect us. I know that sounds harsh. And it doesn't mean they don't trust us, love us and want only the best for us. But we just started a new business and asked them to join us without proving our abilities in this new business. They knew that the day before we joined we were engineers, or bankers, or doctors or something other than a network marketing expert. We lacked credibility in their eyes, but yet we were asking them to whip out their credit card!

So, what can we do with this knowledge?

Easy! To bring our friends into the business, all we have to do is prove that we can be successful. And guess what makes that easier? People, who don't know us, don't know whether or not we are new to the business, so they just might respect our expertise a little bit more than our friends did. All we have to do is build our business with strangers, and our friends and relatives will suddenly respect us as network marketers and will gladly join our team.

I know that sounds silly. And the reality is our friends and relatives may never join the business with us. By building a successful business; they will learn to respect our network marketing abilities and our friends might refer us to some of their friends and co-workers.

Another reality is, as we work through our network marketing business, we are going to go through our friends and relatives fairly quickly anyway. So, sooner or later, we all have to start attracting prospects who don't know much about us. All direct sales companies train their representatives on ways to warm up their cold market. The Renegade Network Marketing system provides one more way to build a business that many companies have not yet fully embraced.

The Renegade System provides any network marketing professional the ability to market themselves as an expert. This marketing process reinforces respect for the networker through the internet. People who land on their website, blogs and other marketing content don't know that yesterday they were a banker, so their respect for the networker's abilities is reinforced. By following the Renegade System anyone can achieve the goal of attraction marketing while building a leads list of people who both trust and respect your direct sales expertise.

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