Getting First Client - Sales Skills in IB

I want to hear from VPs / Ds at EBs or boutiques out there hustling to close your own first client on your road to MD. I feel like the topic of sales and winning mandates just don’t come up in these threads, relative to the vomit-inducing amount of anxiety from the nerds worried about their esoteric financial modeling skills. After all, getting clients is the prerequisite to generating revenue and therefore making the big bucks (not to mention you don’t have to open Excel ever again if you can reliably do this).

Talking to my enterprise SaaS friends, good firms like Oracle have a structured playbook that their salesmen get trained on and learn to execute like a machine. We get no such training in IB, even though flying through Excel with no mouse is somehow viewed as a critical skill… 

So, for those of you who had to prove their worth at non-BS banks by navigating the treacherous road to their first very own advisory mandate, how did you do it? Please no hand-me-down accounts that you co-led with your MDs or lending relationships at a BB.