If you present for a living – whether you're a CEO selling your ideas to the board, a department manager trying to get funding from corporate for a capital project or a salesperson trying to win new business – your job is tougher than ever. You face relentless competition. People are bombarded with messages from the media, the Internet and other sources. It's getting harder and harder to break through the clutter, yet that's what you must do in order to persuade your audience. And ironically, in a time when you most need to hit your prospects with a powerful pitch, you're likely to fall back on an ineffective crutch: PowerPoint.

"Sellers have become projectionists, throwing words onto a screen while listeners read ahead and sellers plod behind, mouthing what's already been displayed," says Paul LeRoux, the co-author (along with Peg Corwin) of Visual Selling: Capture the Eye and the Customer Will Follow (Wiley, April 2007, ISBN-10: 0-4717936-1-2, ISBN-13: 978-0-4717936-1-8, $24.95). "PowerPoint's electronic barrage of words, bullet points and sentences threatens to turn the art of persuasion into a lost art."

That's right. LeRoux is on a mission to break presenters from the seductive PowerPoint routine. When you allow yourself to play second fiddle to PowerPoint text, you cripple your own selling efforts. [Sure, sure mixed metaphor...] By adopting the principles of visual selling – which basically means drawing attention to yourself and shaping images, room environments, personal appearance and gestures for maximum impact – you can give dynamic presentations that truly persuade.

Interestingly, says LeRoux, presenting your ideas with images rather than text says four important things about you:

1) You're different from the average presenter. From the first visual, you're separating yourself from competing ideas, dramatically and non-verbally.

2) Your work and service also will be personalized. Tailored image presentations are more difficult to create than text slides, and they show you'll go the extra mile.

3) You're smart enough to speak without huge cue cards on the screen.

4) You're creative. Rather than presenting the same old material the same old way, you've demonstrated your ability to think conceptually. Your images reflect your imagination.

"People respect individuals who exhibit these four qualities," says LeRoux. "Even without saying, 'I'm dependable; I deliver,' you're conveying these facts. They understand implicitly that the person who is creative, who is smart, who makes an effort and who is different is more likely to deliver than someone who is not."