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When you are planning on selling something to a lot of people I have found that a great exercise is to pretend that you have to explain it on national radio.

On radio you only have between 1 to 3 minutes to get the message through. This is great to train your elevator pitch and drop out of the conversation a lot of the accessory things you know you can do and zero on one or two aspects _ the most relevant ones. On national radio you have to talk to people who are not familiar with the slang and details of your area. On radio you have to imagine your whole family is listening. Your granny is listening. And you want the whole of them to kind of get what you do. And remember it later so that they can talk about it to someone else. A lot of people you need to sell to (investors, included) don't really understand the details of why you are different and they appreciate you making it easy for them to get it immediately.

The best way I have found of doing this is by using metaphors. A metaphor brings a familiar context to the conversation and lets you position your value proposition in a way that lay people can then follow. My company, OutSystems, sells a platform where IT departments can build web-based enterprise applications iteratively so that you can adjust the software cheaply and fast as the business demands it. This is hard to understand for lay people. They don't understand that other technologies make it very hard for applications to change. That applications once built are brittle and stiff and that the cost of change gets higher and higher until the application has to be thrown away and replaced. That agile methodologies that focus on improving things iteratively are hard to implement using these inflexible technologies.

So I compare the OutSystems value proposition with the one of "making a suit". You can buy prêt-a-porter suits (packaged applications) or have a tailor make the suit (a custom application in IT lingo). Enterprises business processes and operation are like the body of a person. If you want your suit to fit perfectly you have it custom tailored, like an application built to serve a business. But if your body keeps changing like an enterprise business does then after a while the suit stops fitting more than perfectly. Or it doesn't fit at all.  What OutSystems has done is create a new "permanently adjustable material" and a "special scissor" that lets you constantly change the suit. If your arms grow or you suddenly become slimmer you don't need to throw the suit away or take ages to rebuilt large parts of it. You adjust fast to fit perfectly.

People now remember us as the guys who are in software enabling "everyone to have tailored suits that never age". Not perfect, but better than be remembered as the guys who are in "software, doing something that sounds like everyone else and... sorry, I slept through the rest".

If you think your product is not explainable in lay terms have a look at some of the explaining done by Richard Feynman (1965 Physics Nobel Prize). If he can explain the chemistry of fire and trees I am sure you can find a way to explain what you do. And if you are not on radio you can use your hands too.