Suppose you have this wonderful idea, but you need to sell it to your company’s Powers That Be. If you’re a midlevel manager or blindly optimistic rank-and-filer, this might be your one chance to impress the chief executive officer and other people near the top. So how do you do it effectively?

A DVD called “Speaking to the Big Dogs: A Boardroom Survival Kit,” featuring comments from 17 top executives, has a variety of useful suggestions about what steps to take and what to avoid. The DVD from Frederick Gilbert Associates (www.power speaking.com) comes at a gasp-inducing price of $239, but the product is far more useful than any other book or seminar I’ve come across. When you consider that a promotion or bonus might be at stake, $239 is a bargain.

The DVD emphasizes that such a presentation isn’t like your typical PowerPoint speech that you give to the Rotary Club. The executives will be impatient and might pursue their own agendas, so you have to make your crucial point quickly, then use the rest of the presentation to support it. If you have half an hour, figure that 10 or 15 minutes is really yours and the rest is for questions and interruptions.

“You’ve probably never seen a commercial that’s too short,” Edwards Lifesciences Chief Financial Officer Corinne Lyle says on the DVD. “If you keep that in mind, you can convey a huge amount of information in 30 seconds.”

Other key points mentioned on the DVD include:

Find a sponsor first. You need to persuade a leading executive to get you on the agenda, and sometimes even hooking up with that person is difficult.

“What I used to do was say, ‘I’ll come in Saturday and Sunday. I’m here at 5 in the morning; I’ll be here at 7 at night. When would you like to do it?’ ” says John Kispert, CFO at KLA-Tencor in San Jose. “That always pushes people like me to say, ‘OK. You want a meeting bad.’ Calling me from your car phone while you’re going home at 5:30 isn’t going to help you get on the calendar.

“I’ll react to anybody’s passion — to get in front of us or get in front of me to plead a case or get something moving.”

Explain why it’s important. As Network Appliance CEO Dan Warmenhoven explains, “If you can’t relate your presentation to one of those three — how is this good for the shareholders, good for the customers, bad for the competitors — we’re probably going to come to the conclusion, ‘Why are you telling us this? Is this just good for you?’ ”

Adapt to your listeners. “I process data in pictures and charts,” says Steve Blank, the founder of E.piphany in San Mateo, Calif. “I have to tell you very few CFOs do. You put up a picture to a CFO and their eyes will glaze over. Put up the same information in numbers and they could spend an hour. Other people process text. Others process animation.”

Blank says that trying to understand the learning styles of the top executives in the room is critical. “You might be surprised: What was a great pitch to you and your peers actually turns off an entire audience.”

Watch the audience’s response. If people’s eyes start to glaze over, make the presentation more interactive. If they begin talking about an unrelated issue, nudge them back to your topic. If it’s obvious that you don’t have a crucial piece of information, ask if you can continue the presentation at another meeting.

In short: Think of Charles Darwin. If you want to survive, evolve to fit into your surroundings.

“All of a sudden there’s a side conversation and the briefing is going in a different direction — but in the direction that the executives want it to go,” says Robert Drolet, a retired brigadier general. “You have to be willing to abandon your presentation, pick up on that conversation and try to lead it to where you want to go, which is your bottom-line conclusion.”