Unless you are good at sales, focus on<p>1. provide a product with a compelling, obvious, and objective advantage over the competition. (either better or cheaper, but preferably both.) You don't have to be better in every way, just obviously and objectively better in some way.<p>2. let people know you exist.<p>Seriously, this is the way to 'scale' sales. Face-to-face selling is excessively expensive, and best left to the professionals.<p>Personally, in person I usually end up talking up my competitors. For example, I always say I've heard good things about slicehost. Slicehost sells a directly comparable product, and my advantage over them is obvious, dramatic, and objective. Other than price, though, I haven't heard anything bad about them.<p>If you need to co-locate high-power boxes, or rent high CPU but low-ram boxes, I like rippleweb.com. Rippleweb charges something like $80 for each rack unit of space, no matter how much power you use. So if you have a 1u box with 2 CPUs, (likely eating more than 200w) rippleweb is cheaper than I am for co-location. (I happen to know that rippleweb has significantly lower power costs than I do. And Raphael is pretty good.)<p>If you do have a low-volume, high-margin product without sales skills, I'd suggest getting a hired gun. Do you think you can compete with a professional on sales? Do you think a professional salesguy could compete with you when it comes to programming after reading a few books?<p>I personally don't use a reseller program or commissioned sales folks, first, because I have a low margin, high volume product, so giving someone 30%, while doable, would hurt some, and secondarily, because I have very specific ideas about what I want my image to be. And personally, I like the "I'm bad at marketing" image. Besides, I'm selling out about as fast as I can put servers up, even with my nearly zero effort marketing.