Turn your customers into your sales force

I started SourceSouth and did what most entrepreneurs think they are supposed to. I wrote a sales plan, defined my customer profile, and grepped all the numbers from the online yellow pages I could into an excel spreadsheet for my, at the time, one employee to start cold calling to generate business.
It didn't work at all. I got one meeting and no business from it.
I also spent a good deal of money flying to Hosting Conferences to try and sell sell sell my outsourced tech support services. That essentially failed as well. Luckily I simply believed that the overwhelming size of IT in the U.S., combined with the still-relatively new phenomena of Outsourcing was a good play to put my time and effort into, to open an office an Argentina.
I did so, I got an account in Tech Support and I luckily landed a development account as well.
I worked my ass off on these accounts and found some others as well. And because I did that I received personal referrals into new "accounts". Then I got referrals to other accounts. That's when I realized that, at least when you are small just do a great great job with your initial clients and sure enough they will refer you to new business. In other words, take the money you have ear marked to put into some sort of sales and/ or marketing campaign and reinvest it into more development time into that great customer that pays you their hard earned money.
Then next time they are out mountain biking with their buddy that needs some development done, they'll mention you.