Innovative ways to market a niche B2B product

My partner and I have developed a product that is focused on a very narrow industry vertical, and which fills a very specific need. In the grand scale of software, this particular type of software is extremely expensive, with some packages costing a million dollars or more. As you can imagine, this is a purely B2B thing.

Our product, on the other hand, provides the same functionality but at a substantially reduced cost (one might even say it provides better functionality).

Thus far, we've been running the company solely using our individual connections to garner leads. This can be anything from family connections to friends to business connections. But my concern is this:

How else can we be looking for customers?

Surely there's a more direct route, right? I worry that eventually we'll run out of leads using our current tactics, and for a number of reasons I'd like to have a second "stream" of contacts coming in.

With a product that is B2B, very narrowly focused, very expensive, and which has a very long sales cycle, how can I take it to market without utilizing personal connections? I'm willing to look into anything, even social media -- although I wonder whether that would have any value with a product like this.

In your shoes I would:

• create a list of companies that are in your niche
• find contacts at each of the companies using linkedin or cold calling
• begin a sales cycle with each contact (call contact/send sales material/arrange initial meeting/organise sales pitch/ etc)
• iterate through contacts and make adjustments where necessary(e.g changing the order of the process or changing your sales call script etc

This is a numbers game and there is no shortcuts unfortunately. Just get on the phone.

What about contacting your competitors and telling them about your product. Perhaps they can become a distributor for you, if your product is so much cheaper and has comparable or better features it might be beneficial to you both.

Or they could just offer to buy the rights to your product if in fact it is a threat to them.

Also, not knowing exactly what you're talking about make it more difficult to give advice.