My colleague, Dexter Charles, communications manager over  at First Citizens once said that there was only one thing people feared more than death, and that was delivering  a presentation. 

I think he may have been on to something. 

And I am not referring to the sweaty palms or the palpitating heart beats that anyone gets when they stand in front of strangers, these are just signals that point to the fact that people generally 1)  hate giving presentations and 2) are pretty bad at it.

I had cause to think about this deeply when we got a call saying  that our firm was to compete for a significant account that placed us up against some of the biggest names in the advertising world. 

We weren't phased for a second. 

In fact, we thought we would do the request justice and designed what everyone (forgive the bias of our team) thought was a winning campaign. 

There was one caveat, on our team of 8 we had just 3 strong presenters.

Our designers, a  super talented duo, balked at the idea of standing up and talking. Our creative director, like a turtle,  always pulls his head into a  shell anytime there is a hint of creative sales pitch in the air.  

Of course, I understood the reticence.

In 'Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes' writer Andy Goodman points out is that boring presentations are  a disservice to the audience and the presenter.  And that presenters need to think about how to make their  information [feel] fresh and come alive for the audience. "I think we owe our audience respect, to give them presentation that is solid, good and interesting," Godman writes.

That's sound advice.

But it made the predicament that we were  in no less real, that is until I figured a way to turn our presentation into a non-presentation. We would ditch the power point.

On D-day we walked  into the room with no projector, no slides, no power point, and no bullet points to hide behind.

Instead, we carried  big design books (25 x 19) with all our creatives (print, tv, web, social).

"Let's have a conversation instead," I said when I entered the room.

I figured that we should position ourselves less as experts and  more  as  a team of professionals willing to share some great ideas but also grateful for the opportunity to listen.

Instead of standing in front of the prospective client we sat around the table with them. When we handed  each member of the team their individual design book we told them to regard them as pads  that could be marked and  written upon. We assured them we wouldn't be offended. As for our team of non-communicators, we honoured their preferences by having them lend their expertise in the Q&A session, where conversation and not presentation was again the rule of engagement.

Did it make a difference. Heck yes. The folks in the room never zoned out. They asked questions, we felt an enthusiasm and a connection to our ideas. More importantly their eyes never glazed over, you know that dazed look people in a room get when they wish they were elsewhere. Well, it was never there. 

We were in the room for an  hour-and-a-half and yet we never felt the seconds drag by. We'll know next week if our campaign ideas won but I have to tell you ,we left that room feeling like winners.

Oh!  And as for those design folders?  They became  the  outcome of our working session. 

We left them behind when we exited the room.