I think you'll need to understand why they are being nay-sayers. It may be that you've landed in the snake pit of office politics and you're wondering why because herpetology isn't written in your job description.
Some of the complaints you may have heard from the Knights Who Say NIH (Not Invented Here)! may include:
Why Change? We've always done it the old way...
Sure, the old way works, but we've seen what happens to companies that don't change - they become extinct.
*Why Now?"
We have to start sometime. I've been given the go-ahead by management.
It won't solve everything
Nothing solves everything. Automated testing will help make it easier to ensure consistency in testing as well as ensuring that previously found bugs don't return in future releases.
You're wrong and here is why...
To some people, every discussion is a verbal match that requires someone to win, and the opponent defeated. A demonstration that can show that automated testing solves some problems that are hard (or "dirty" or just plain unpleasant) would help solve these folks. The part where you said "I've even spent time automating almost the entire QA process for a simple application, only for the QA lead to use outsourced QA testers to test it!!" gives me the feeling that they knew and didn't want to be proved wrong. Some people take being shown to be wrong as a moral judgement of themselves; you showed them that they were incorrect in this instance, therefore they are wrong in all other instances. About the only way to deal with these folks wold be to spend some time reading the series of books by Suzette Haden Elgin that have "gentle art of verbal self-defence" somewhere in the title.
Talk is cheap! I'm from Missouri, Show me!
These folks could be swayed by a demonstration (see preceeding paragraph), while the folks who engage in conversational warfare cannot be swayed by demonstrations.
It is too much work
Automation takes time to set up. Once the scripts are created and set up, it can be done easily. One anecdote I used in an interview today was mentioning continuous integration servers and how my last employer would have greatly benefitted from having one (I set one up at this job and the folks love it, although they didn't understand it until I set up a demo of one on my development machine). The guy who made the install packages was an earlybird - his 8hr day ended around 3:30PM. The developers were evening people, so they'd be working to 10PM, but if there was a build, they could not hand over the install to the QA people until he came in the next day at 0600. Running some automated tests over the code would enable the devs to take care of a number of known bugs/issues (not all devs would bother running the unit tests before checking code in to source control), and that would take care of a number of tests that the QA staff would have to do every time a new build was ready to be checked. Not all the devs had the same stuff installed, and some would forget to switch to a release build, so the consistency was sad enough that only a couple devs could be trusted to make builds (one product was so flaky that the only machine that could reliably build it was one left behind by a dev that quit around 2004, so his machine had to be carefully maintained until the product was rewritten so that there was something to ship and sell to customers). A build machine (aka CI server) would have resolved so many of these issues that they would have been forgotten in the mists of time.
We already tried this...
Yes, well, times and techniques have changed. That was then, and now we can do X, Y and Z.
Cut down this forest with a herring!
Getting back to the beginning, learning office politics is a crucial skill. Along with maintaining your sense of humor. Learning office politics is a nasty task, but it has to be mastered or else you may as well have WELCOME
tattoed on your forehead.
experts define office politics as "the way in which workers recognize, and seek to reconcile, their competing interests."
We like to pretend that we operate in a meritocracy, where what you do is more important than who you know, and where we're all in this together to make the company a better place. The world isn't fair. So learn office politics, not so that you can play them and abuse others; but so that you can bend like a reed and use your opponents' misdirected energies against them.