After 35 years working in the aerospace industry I finally learned how to get through persuasive presentations.

If you are talking to your engineering peers to solve an engineering problem, use as much detail, graphs, etc as you can gather. There is nothing like real data to convince peers.

If you are talking to the engineering managers (akin to your customers?), present the problem and conclusion with succinct data from the peer data. If they ask question on the succinct data, link to the real data.

We had one real scary but good senior level technical manager who’s operational model was to scratch at the presenter as hard as possible until blood is drawn. If they cannot explain their conclusions clearly and succinctly, he threw them out of the room until they had the answer. Some were too stricken to ever return.

If your audience does not ask penetrating questions, I would question whether the audience knew what they were asking for. The more penetrating questions they ask, the better for you.