Ask HN: As an IT freelancer how do you approach marketing and sales (survey)?

I'm an independent IT consultant and recently I've been researching how to do marketing and sales in the industry. I tried different approaches and made some experience with what works (and especially with what doesn't ...). I'd like to share this experience with other IT consultants (e.g. through tutorials, best practices and tools for supporting sales processes)

In order to get a better picture about how others in the industry approach marketing and sales I created a short survey (10 questions). If you're doing IT consulting / freeelancing I'd be happy if you participated:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/RSQJWYY

I'm also curious to know how folks get new clients if their services are very niche.

I'm going to release the results next Thursday (Jan, 14th).

The reason I'd like to give it time till next week is to give people who'll just be returning from their Christmas holidays next week an opportunity to participate as well.

It depends on what you mean by creating an independent IT consulting network. Informal networks (i.e. talking to other consultants, going to events, generally business networking) certainly do exist and they're as helpful as in any business. Sometimes they help you generate new leads, sometimes you'll learn about interesting new opportunities and in general knowing other people from the industry will help you learn and share useful information about how to run your business.

Then there are sales-orientied networks like Gun.io . Do you have something in mind more along those lines?