A key to achieving success is making yourself well-known in the firm. And that means marketing yourself. The goal is for you to make sure that people in the firm know who you are and how you can help them. Marketing yourself and marketing your department go hand-in-hand with one another.

Here are some suggestions for making sure people in the firm know who you are and how you can help them:

1. Be proactive: Don't sit around waiting for things to happen. New projects and new clients won't just come to you. Take steps everyday to get new clients on board and to keep existing clients happy.

2. Develop a marketing plan: In short, here's what you need to do:

€ Determine what your clients need and determine what services and tools you can provide. See where there's a match and develop your department around that overlap.
€ Determine appropriate marketing mechanisms (for example, a brochure with service descriptions, newsletters, presentations) and develop marketing materials.
€ Prepare a schedule and budget for marketing activities and line up resources. For example, if you're going to give presentations, then determine topics, dates, who's going to present, and so on. If you're going to travel to different offices to do marketing, build travel costs into your budget.

3. Get your ducks in a row: Make sure you can deliver what you are going to promote. Make sure that you have the right staff, the right technology, and the right processes in place. Don't start promoting services until you are confident that you can provide them. Taking on a task without sufficient resources can do damage that is devastating and hard to overcome.

4. Move forward with marketing activities: There are lots of things you can be doing€¦distribute service descriptions (or brochures), do seminars and presentations, create a newsletter, make trips to other offices to promote your services, build a web site or get a page on the firm's web site, become part of the firm's new-hire orientation program, do regular follow-up with attorneys for whom you've done good work and get referrals, testimonials and references.

5. Sell solutions rather than services: Don't tell attorneys what services you provide. Rather, tell them what problems you can solve for them. Describe how you can make things easier for them. Illustrate how you can save them time and money. Don't sell services and products. Sell solutions to the problems and challenges that your clients face.

6. Build good relationships: One of the best ways to get people on board with what you are offering is to build good relationships with them. People want to work with people they trust, and people will only recommend to others those that they trust.

Here are a few things you can do to build good relationships with the attorneys in your firm:

€ Always deliver what you say you can.
€ Be upfront about what you can't do and what you don't know. If you can't help someone, lead him/her to someone who can.
€ Be responsive and punctual.
€ Be enthusiastic.
€ Know something about your client and his/her problem.
€ Listen more than you talk and ask lots of questions.
€ Volunteer to help out, whenever you can.

7. Provide premier customer service: Most of us have had bad customer service experiences. When we do, we usually tell acquaintances so they can steer clear of the offending organization. And, when we have a great customer service experience, we're usually happy to sing praises, provide references, and give testimonials. The same holds true for the attorneys in your firm. You want every client to be telling peers about how you helped out and what you can do. You want others to help you become well-known.

8. Find a champion: Find someone who has influence in the firm - a department chair, a rain-maker, a senior associate who has influence over the partners - and get him or her on board. If he or she enthusiastically believes in what you are doing, they'll market for you.

So, what do you think? How have you made yourself well known in your firm?