I run a small development agency in Cape Town, South Africa and I am looking to expand my client base in the US and UK. In Cape Town, the business has been built up over 15 years through word of mouth. That has given us a really strong base to work from and happy clients that freely advertise our services. Unfortunately most of our clients are extremely price sensitive (as most of Cape Town is) which has left us with little ability to increase our rates without losing clients. We're a small shop (4 devs and a designer) so we struggle when we try and compete at the top end of the market where sales cycles are long and expensive (although we do have some big clients).

I am looking at sourcing more business from the US and UK where we can earn more per hour as we have a fairly poor exchange rate. I am looking to build proper client relationships through quality work just like we have done in Cape Town. I would be pitching us in the $70 - $90 per hour range.

Our business proposition is that we offer a good quality customer service, good value for money and we are native English speakers. We are also able to confidently work in Wordpress (to an intermediate level) and custom software development in ASP.NET MVC (C#, SQL server, etc) for medium size projects (up to 6 months development).

How do I approach potential clients who have no reason to trust a small business at the southern tip of Africa so that we can start building the relationships that lead to sales?

One solution is to focus on companies that do business analysis (or some other client facing service) so that we just become the implementing partners and they are able to manage the client relationship. In Cape Town, this approach has been very successful for our Wordpress team.

Another option is to hire a salesperson in those countries but I'm not sure we would want to manage a person in another country and the admin overhead that would bring.