“I wonder why everyone looks completely checked out?” Susan thinks to herself, seeing nothing but yawns and phone checking among the 38 staff attending her late morning meeting. As the CEO of a technology startup, Terri couldn’t wait to share nine new revenue strategies she had for Q4. Yet despite all her enthusiasm for the rollout, she just couldn’t seem to connect with the crowd.

At soon as she concluded, everyone leapt out of their seats for the catered lunch next door. Susan pulled aside her marketing director, Sarah. “That didn’t go as expected. Can I ask for your feedback on what I shared?” “Well, I think you drowned them in information,” Sarah said, “they just couldn’t handle your onslaught of points.”

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Several decades ago, Texas Junior College debate team coach Don Nichols established a national reputation by consistently beating Ivy League teams. His secret? While all the other debate teams provided endless lists of claims and evidence the moment they spoke, his would stand up in front of the judges and make only two points. They’d then spend the rest of their time supporting and looping back to these two points, creating an organized and easily remembered performance.

Shortly after learning about this tool, I saw the effect of this method when the national director at a conference on improving communication gave a talk about the state of her field. “I have two points for you today, #1, we’re at a point where we can now unequivocally say that the knowledge and practices in this field work, but #2, we still don’t know how to embed and scale this knowledge and these practices across organizations and society.” To this day, I still recall and refer to those two points in my work.

Forcing yourself to prioritize and get to the core of a message is one of the top skills for leaders to master. While there’s longstanding debates on whether the quantity or quality of messages matters more, every leader’s need to sift the meaningful from the noisy remains unquestionable. Personalizing messages always helps too.

So, your challenge is this. The next time you have a whole host of information to present to others at a meeting, force yourself to ask, “How could I distill this all down to two essential points for this audience?”

Maybe everyone has just been handed some pages from the latest income statement. Your role is to present the two most important variables for discussion. Or perhaps you’re delivering news about a crisis in constituents’ confidence that your organization faces. What two points could you make to your team that could provide some measured and forward-looking ways to solve the challenge? You and others can always go deeper from there.

Try it at your next meeting. To increase the impact and memorability of your messages, you’ll find the “two-point method” provides a helpful way forward.