You're facing an important meeting. The future of your department, of your job and those of colleagues, might rest substantially on whether or not you can convince management that your department can progress in the future, and make a significant contribution to the continued growth of the company. It's a critical point in your career: two paths lay ahead of you, one of optimism, of personal and professional development; the other path... well, best not think about that.

Fortunately, you've come prepared. You've a welter of statistics and evidence to support the claim that the department is playing a vital role in the company's development. You've carefully researched a detailed report on how you and your team can be a boon to the organisation's future profitability. All of your arguments are precisely and energetically arranged to show to your department in the most positive light. You believe in your cause, and you're confident that management can be made to believe too.

Later that day, heavy clouds have gathered, and the light you sought to shine upon your department is flickering and faint. What went wrong? Your data was foolproof, your projections as accurate as can be, your report in-depth and accurate. You know that the company has scope within its resources to support your team in their current and future projects, and you had no shortage of evidence to back you up. The leaden sense of failure that now drags its weight around you had seemed unthinkable, not a speck on the horizon of possibilities. You ask yourself again, what went wrong?

The internet is home to a vast array of articles, much like this one, offering advice and guidelines for improving an aspect of your professional or everyday life. Each article will contain a number of details to be understood and followed, and numerous nuggets of relevant information. But they won't be (at least among the more effective and successful examples) plain lists, one sentence of advice at a time.

In-person training courses are widely available for similar purposes, and will never rely solely on handing you the information to figure out for yourself, regardless of how effective and beneficial that data might be.

Instead, the writer/trainer's principles, and your research and statistics, are like the foundations of a new home. These are vital. Anything raised upon insufficient foundations will come apart rapidly and likely collapse. Certainly, nothing positive can be developed without firm foundations. Yet a brisk perusal of an estate agency advert in the local paper will inevitably find no adverts for houses trumpeting the quality of their foundations. Houses aren't sold by what happens under the floor, however impressive it may be - but by what the buyers see before them. Presentation is everything.

Presentation is the key to turning your sound preparations into a convincing argument, to taking all of your statistics and reports and drawing from them the means to persuade others to see the situation as you do. There are a number of tools available to make your information more appealing and engaging, encouraging an audience to see how your data points towards your conclusion. Poorly presented arguments will often seem detached from the intended end result.

Software such as Microsoft PowerPoint can be used to create a presentation that gives your reports and data a stylish and professional appearance, whilst Word or Publisher both offer a range of tools to create attractive and effective documents for your audience to review your reports later on.

You can also make a greater impact with your information with simple techniques, such as highlighting the key points that best support your argument, and making reports more engaging and easy-to-understand with charts and diagrams. For instance, projected growth in revenue can easily be portrayed by a range of appealing graphs - Microsoft Excel can help with this.

With such importance attached to presenting your contentions cohesively and attractively, it's easy to overlook the other key detail - yourself.

The audience needs to be receptive to what you intend to tell them, and they need to be sufficiently engaged to give your argument the attention it deserves - so how you yourself come across is vital. Clarity, appearance, tone and directly addressing the audience are vital, but most critical of all is confidence. If you do not appear to believe in what you are saying, then how can you expect anyone else to?

The preparations you made so studiously can play a significant role in becoming more confident in your presentation. The more thoroughly you understand the information you have, the more clearly you see the likely outcome of your proposals, the easier it is to have the confidence to sell them to your audience. After all, you're promoting the intended consequences of the data more than the data itself, you're encouraging others to believe that your statistics and reports add up to a positive future for all concerned.

You'll find that it often helps to understand who your likely audience are, what angle they are coming from and what they're own hopes and intentions are. With this research, you can target your presentation at those who will see it, and have greater confidence that all of your work is getting the most apt and promising reception.

If you have confidence both in your arguments and in your ability to work with the audience, you stand a far greater chance of winning over all who need convincing. Practice is vital, to feel comfortable with your role as persuader, and a short training course in presentation techniques can also be highly beneficial. And you should take every opportunity to improve your presentation; when key decisions are to be made, you'll need your voice to be heard.