Hunting for mandates

Can we please get some of our IB/corporate finance veterans to share with us how they have landed mandates via cold calling and/or other approaches.

Including but not limited to asking CEOs whether they'd like to sell their company or an asset in their portfolio.

I've just been tasked to ask probably the most difficult CEO thats running a company into the ground whether he'd like to carve out one of the more profitable assets in his portfolio.