[jameshush]

I'm a software engineer who switched over to working beside Sales as a Sales Engineer. Referrals are the key to getting customers or getting a job.

Reach out to previous co-workers, managers, vendors you've spoken to, anyone. There's bound to be someone who has a broken website that needs to be fixed. It's more effective to spend two hours applying to one job via a warm lead than it is to send 100 applications out to cold leads.

Lowering your salary expectations won't help that much. If someone were optimizing for cost, they'd outsource to Southeast Asia or India.

Good luck!