According to my experience in selling services to small software engineering firms: they rarely buy anything. The majority of small engineering teams are often in a survival mode and typically encounter lack of funding. So their main focus of attention is own sale, new projects and their salaries.

My advice would be:

1) Change the targeting from small to medium/large scale companies (starting from 200 software engineers). For such companies your service will compete with hiring of internal manual software testers, so if you charge less than salary of such QA tester – they might prefer your service;

2) Try to grow the value of your service and add more on top of your offer. Example: manual crowd testing + automated testing scripts + crowd testing on specific devices.

3) Your first goal is getting trials – when they try your service first they might find it valuable. To get the trials talk with CTOs via LinkedIn, Xing or Shapr

4) Get further traction by collecting case studies and posting content (articles) about how you support companies with your service.

We can always help to push your ideas on a market: https://growspire.agency

You can use Upwork, but the problem is that you'll receive 50-100 replies from all over the world. And it will be hard to select a subcontractor.

When choosing an agency or a single sales/marketing manager (it can be an individual freelancer) note the following:

● Decide what kind of marketing channel you plan to choose (talk to a couple of agencies and sales experts to understand what kind of activity will work in your particular case).

● Each agency (the same with freelancers) is good in some particular narrow strategy. For example, my agency works with B2B social networking (LinkedIn, Facebook, MeetUp) and email channels. We don't work with other strategies, like SEO or PPC. So, when you know which strategy works in your case, it would be easier to select a subcontractor or find a right employee;

● Don't try to recruit people for a % on a deal. Nobody wants to test your unknown business model, people would work more eager if you pay for some interim results, or quantitative work (i.e. getting a negotiation, or getting a contract signed);
● Test the agency on small amount of work, let's say, order one week and see results, or order one piece of result and see if it works. Again, it is better to spend some money and pay a reduced cost for this work. But in some cases people may agree to do it for free.

Build a strong lead generation and sales.

● Outbound marketing like b2b inquiries to potential clients via LinkedIn (active sales) is your key tool to start a conversation.
● Inbound marketing has a supporting function: write articles, give free advices and participate in conferences as speaker. Could be also free or paid trainings to attract attention.
● Sell your expertise, not the hours. Promote key employees (service providers in your company) via video, posts and photos on your website.

Thinks about your unique trade proposal. What differs you from the other thousands of similar companies?

As an example: I noticed that outsourcing companies are very slow in quotes and feedbacks so we made a key focus on fast replies for one of my clients, so it was a successful strategy.

Read more about sales strategy in my blog here: https://medium.com/@ganja_agency/key-factors-of-successful-b2b-sales-for-a-small-it-company-8fc9bcbb690b#.b2m2ydbfk