It's a networking and numbers game.
Did you guys pick this product out of the blue, or do you have industry experience? If you have industry experience, reach out to your network. Both for trying to get actual leads and for simply soliciting their feedback, even if they won't be a customer themselves. The feedback in and of itself will be valuable, and after you've exposed it to them, they may know of someone to connect you with, and eventually you'll land on someone that's willing to bite.
> i have no company history, no clients, no credibility - in a word no social proof - for the life of me i can't get any traction.
The above piggybacks off your past experiences and working experience to try to force some initial social proof. If you can't do that, it does get harder and is more of a raw numbers game to try to have conversations with as many people as possible.
> i've had probably 10-15 sales conversations in the last 4 months that have gone absolutely no where
That's less than one a week. Your number should at least be an order of magnitude higher than that. Especially with Enterprise clients, the deal rate is going to be really low and you counter that by a high volume of outreach. Even if it's just cold contacting, rather than leads from investors, you should be reaching out to several people per day, and following up with a regular cadence (which can be automated). Rarely do you hear back on first contact, and multiple touch points, which works even if it sounds skeezy to non-sales people (including me, I work for a demand/lead generation firm and know sales pipeline figures from an analytics perspective, but hate doing sales myself). Or even just one new person a day. But definitely not one person a week.
> an enterprise saas product that involves some cool buzzwords and potentially really adds value in the space i'm targeting but i'm getting no traction.
Is the added value worth the headache of integrating your tool? Is your product replacing an industry-standard in the space or augmenting it? Introducing change is hard and every change introduced simultaneously introduces a level of operational risk (from the change management process itself to the added dependency of your product in their work chain). Most organizations resist change, and your product either has to be seamless enough to be perceived as low friction to introduce or have a large enough upside to be worth the hassle/headache of introducing it.
> (able to "speak sales")
In enterprise sales, you need to speak sales and dance politics. Depending on the level of decision maker you're targeting, they'll have different levers they can pull, different politics they have to play, and different constraints on what they can do. Your pitch needs to account for the concerns of the decision maker you're speaking to. A middle manager will have different concerns than a division director than a C-level individual. You also need to make sure the person you're speaking with can actually make a decision related to your. Are you BANT qualifying them[1]?
> one customer says price is too high, another doesn't even mention it.
Different customers will value your product's impact differently. You'll always get conflicting responses like this, and until you have a higher volume of responses you can't make much sense of this. But one thing to keep in mind is what I mentioned above - different level of decision makers will have different responses. A middle manager may have authority, but they're working off of a "what can I put on my procurement card" budget because they know your project will die if you have to actually get approved as a vendor and get billing set up with accounts payable. So your product can be perceived as too expensive, when it's really just too expensive for this individual to push through on their own. Don't take this response at face value, dig into the reasoning behind it. Creative payment terms can sometimes solve this. Other leads may know they have full authority to sign an annual contract and pay up front, and won't mention budget being an issue. Normalize your contradictory signals by the situation of the individual giving them, to get a better idea of what your target demographic is and what your true issues are.
Also, in the case where the customer says the price is too high, if that's their only hangup, discount the price significantly (or stretch an annual term into an 18 month term at the same rate, so they get a cheaper per-month rate but you lock them in for longer but renew at 12 months and the discount disappears without explicitly changing your rate on the client). Make sure you include language related to permission for a case study and testimonial as part of the discount terms. Chalk it up as a marketing expense to gain that first bit of social proof, and leverage it for other pitches.
[1] BANT - Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline. A crude but effective sales qualification process which validates a lead is worth continuing with, and also helps you identify which points you need to work focus on. For example, if you qualify the person has a budget, need, and timeline, but no authority, you know the company is a potential client but need to figure out how to get a more authoritative person involved in the discussion. If it's timeline, then follow up later on. If it's Need, then convince them of their need (or give up). Etc