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Almost every person in charge of a team has had a similar experience. With only a few minutes to present to senior management, you must communicate a proposed project on behalf of your team. You labor until you perfect the delivery, only to see that the executives were unmoved by your proposal. Why?

I have found some excellent techniques to help gain senior level support through my work with change leaders over the past ten years. I have also seen more than one attempt flop. I decided to talk directly with several senior level leaders both in corporate and public organizations in order to discover best practices in presentations to senior management.

Too much information in a proposal for monetary or other support is one mistake made by many team leaders, agreed the executives. A lot of proposals they hear fail because the executives dont have time or interest to digest every nuance of the proposed project. It is not necessary for most senior managers to understand every task involved in the proposed initiative. And the executives agreed that in most cases, minor decisions can be left to the team, leaving senior management out of the day to day.

Here are three proven strategies to have a presentation to senior management that will limit the presentation to the most important details.

1. Use PowerPoint to summarize your main points.

Power point is so powerful in this type of presentation because it forces you to organize your key points into short and to the point statements. The Power Point Presentation should be high level key points, and you should be prepared with illustrative stories and anecdotes to bring those points alive. The goal will be to stay on any one Power Point screen no more than three minutes during your presentation. Make sure you have the details to back up your presentation, but only as a resource if you receive specific questions about a key issue.

2. Organize your main objectives and goals into relevant groups.

I recently saw one team leader list every activity his team planned to work on in 2009 in his pitch to executives. Instead of strengthening his case, all of the details turned off the executives he was trying to influence. One leader even spoke up to tell the team leader that they didnt want to know all of the team’s tasks. They just wanted to know the priorities.

Separating goals and tasks into related groups is a helpful technique. One example of this might be to state in your introduction that in the coming year, your groups goal is to focus on cost savings, making processes more efficient and creating a stronger bottom line. Then, your presentation would consist of giving examples of how you intend to be successful in each of these three areas. Using this approach will help senior management to focus on how the proposals you suggest for your team will impact the entire company, and allow them to decide if these are the areas that they want to stress in the coming year.

3. Concisely summarize what you need from the executive team in order to move forward.

A good deal of proposal presentations are merely informational. The team leader will give an update on the progress of the project and then asks the executives if there are any further questions. Their hope with this approach is that the executive team will be so impressed that they offer funding and support to the project without being asked, which is rarely the case.

A better approach is to end the presentation with a visual that describes what you are looking to senior management to support. Perhaps this will be a financial commitment, a key decision only they can make, or additional resources to complete the project. True, there is always the possibility that what you ask for will be denied, it is a much better situation to understand right away if what you need to be successful is a possibility.

In the 90s, a group of external consultants went to work with General Electric to derive a change acceleration process. As part of that process, the team found a four step process that worked very well in short, effective presentations:

* Our project or initiative is about . . . * It is critical to the company because . . . * What this means for you is . . . . * Heres how you can help . . .

This approach will work both in informal individual conversations with senior management staff as well as in your formal group presentations. And, as you become more proficient at answering those four key questions, your ability to get your proposals approve will increase.

Streamlining your sales presentations so that they are short and to the point, you will be much more successful at communicating your goals and not your tasks. Being very specific and clear about what you need will help senior management to know right away what you are proposing, what you would like from them to help you succeed, and, most important, how it will positively impact the entire organization.

Wendy Mack is a professional mentor, trainer, and author with a focus in spearheading and communicating change. Contact Wendy at, or Download her free e-book, Transforming Anxiety into Energy at www.WendyMack.com.