Making yourself heard: Personal effectiveness for legal marketers

By Claire Rason, Director of Client Talk

When you work in a law firm, you don’t have just ‘one boss’. You might have a boss, a line manager, perhaps the CMO - or if you are the CMO, a managing partner. But the reality is that every practice group, every team, is run by someone who has skin in the game, and the matrix structure that most law firms operate means that, as a legal marketer, you have many people to keep happy. That also means there are many who you need to influence and persuade if you want to get things done. How do you make yourself heard against this backdrop?

Personal effectiveness – what is it?

The starting point for personal effectiveness is to understand what it is – and what it isn’t. It’s personal. Examine how you show up and what you might want to change in order to achieve what you need. This is important, because it isn’t morphing into someone else. It is about being the best version of yourself.

Begin by thinking about:

• how you show up,
• how effective you feel you are, and
• what a more effective you might look and sound like.

Spend some time now to do that.

Your four Ps

Us coaches speak about models and creating behavioural experiments to flex and change. For this article I am going to do something slightly different. I am going to use a very old marketing model – the 4Ps - to get you thinking differently about your personal effectiveness.

Product – Let’s start with the product. That’s you!

Your personal brand isn’t something you construct from scratch; it’s something you uncover and learn to articulate. Personal effectiveness starts with self-awareness; understanding your values, strengths, and drivers, and how these show up in your behaviour. Authenticity is not about self-expression in isolation, it is more about consistency: aligning what you say, how you act, and how others experience you.

This is where many people get stuck. Marketing yourself can feel uncomfortable because it brings vulnerability, self-doubt, and a fear of being seen. Reframing personal brand as ‘the value I create for others’, rather than ‘how I present myself’, shifts this emotional load. It allows you to show up not as a performer but as a trusted advisor whose expertise, relationships, and strengths all contribute to the experience others have of you.

Promotion

Promotion, in a personal effectiveness context, is not about visibility for its own sake, but about understanding who you need to influence - and how. Influence is not a one-size-fits-all activity; it requires preparation, listening, and empathy to understand what matters to different stakeholders and how they make decisions. That means adapting your approach without losing authenticity: flexing your style while staying grounded in your values.

In complex environments, like partnerships, this becomes even more critical. Stakeholders bring different motivations, fears, and competing priorities, which can surface as resistance, hesitation, or misaligned ‘yeses’. Effective promotion is about reading the system, understanding where influence sits, building trust through relationships, and recognising that buy-in is often emotional as much as rational. It’s not just what you say, but how well you’ve understood the person in front of you.

Place

Place is about deliberate visibility. Choosing where you show up so that your strengths are seen and experienced by the right people. This isn’t about being everywhere; it’s about being effective in the right places. Playing to your strengths can increase confidence, quality and impact. When you contribute in the right room, in ways that feel natural and sustainable, your voice will carry more weight.

Visibility doesn’t happen in isolation. In collaborative environments, where value is created across teams, your ‘place’ is also shaped by how you connect, contribute, and build relationships across the system. Being visible, therefore, is about being someone others actively want to bring into conversations because of how you think, listen, and add value.

Price

Price, in this context, is not about external valuation; it’s about the internal narrative you hold about your worth, and how that translates into your behaviour. Marketeers often struggle here, held back by limiting beliefs or imposter syndrome. These beliefs quietly shape how confidently views are expressed and how opportunities are pursued or avoided.

Building self-worth is an internal practice. It draws on resilience (recognising past successes and the resources you already hold) and on the courage to set and protect boundaries that reflect what matters most. When you have clarity on your value, this shows up externally: in how you communicate, what you say yes and no to, and the level at which you operate. In that sense, ‘price’ is not something you state, it is something others infer from how you consistently show up.

Making yourself heard

When we talk about making yourself heard, it can be tempting to default to persuasion, putting forward a strong case, advocating clearly, and hoping others will come around to your way of thinking. Persuasion has its place. It is often rooted in logic, clarity and confidence of argument. But on its own, it can become one-directional: something we do to others, rather than with them. And in complex, relationship-driven environments, that distinction matters.

Influence, by contrast, is more relational and adaptive. It starts not with what you want to say, but with who you are speaking to. It draws on listening, empathy and an understanding of different perspectives before advocacy even begins. It is less about winning an argument and more about creating the conditions for movement, where others feel seen, heard and, therefore, more open to change. This is why influence often feels quieter than persuasion but, ultimately, is more powerful. It works with the grain of relationships, rather than against them.

Making yourself is not about choosing between the two, but about knowing when each is needed, and how to balance them.