Sticky-notes are like duct tape: you can use them for everything. They’re great for to-do lists, important reminders, for marking must-read paragraphs in documents – and they should be an indispensable tool in your presentation planning arsenal, says Dave Yewman, a presentation coach and president of Vancouver, Washington-based DASH Consulting (www.dashconsultinginc.com). Next time you’ve got a presentation on your horizon, grab a stack of sticky-notes, head to your local coffee shop and follow Yewman’s advice for creating a standout presentation:

1. Cut the leashes. Go somewhere you are unlikely to be disturbed or distracted by other work. Turn off your cell phone and any other electronic leashes. You’re going to do nothing for the next 45 minutes but think about and organize your presentation. And you’re going to do it from scratch. Why? Because most presentations are a cobbled-together mess of too many slides that have morphed over time into a meaningless, pointless blob. To create a winning presentation, you need to start over.

2. Get to the point. Start by thinking about the major point you want to get across. What one or two things do you want the audience to remember? What does the audience care about? Most sales presentations go on and on making too many points about too many things. But we’re all too busy to digest 45 minutes worth of PowerPoint. “We take away one or two things from a presentation and that’s it,” says Yewman. So you need to decide what you want those one or two things to be.

3. Write it down. Here’s where the sticky-notes come in. Once you’ve identified the main point you want your audience to take away from your presentation, write down everything you can think of to support it. Don’t edit yourself – that comes later – just jot down every statistic, every anecdote, every metaphor, every analyst report you can think of that supports the point you want to make. Write down one idea per sticky-note and stick it anywhere on the table. And keep it short – three or four words should be enough for you to remember the idea.

4. Organize it. When you’ve finished brainstorming, organize your sticky-notes into groups. For instance, put all the statistical support for your point in one column, all the stories in another, all the facts in a third column and so on. When you’re done, you should be looking at four to five columns of sticky-notes.

5. Edit it. Now you can “skim the cream,” as Yewman says. Pick out the one or two most interesting and most compelling ideas in each column. You want the absolute best stories, best statistics, etc. As you do this exercise, don’t think about having to fill a certain amount of time, just pick the best of what you’ve got. If the client has given you 45 minutes to present and it turns out that this “cream of the crop” material only fills 25 minutes, you’ll not only give a much stronger presentation, the audience will be relieved and thankful that you didn’t take up as much of their time as they had expected.

6. Develop the flow. Once you’ve got the best eight or 10 sticky-notes in front of you, you can start building the flow of your presentation. Do you have a powerful, memorable story you can use to open the presentation? Great. Put that sticky-note at the far left. After the story, you’ll probably state your main point outright, so put that next. Then maybe you want to use a statistic to support it, so put that sticky-note next, and so on. The great thing about sticky-notes is that you can move them around, experimenting with different outlines until you hit on the one that you think will best resonate with your audience.

Only after you’ve completed this exercise are you ready to sit down at a computer and create your PowerPoint slides, Yewman concludes. Most presenters do it backwards. They open up PowerPoint and think as they go. But you’ll never be able to create a powerful presentation if you don’t first sit down and think. So grab some sticky-notes and head out the door. Your audience will be grateful you did.