How to get past the velvet rope

Back in the day when I was selling technology to banks I used my social selling approaches to get a meeting with a super-senior executive in a super-large bank (you know it, but I can’t tell you which one on a blog post.)
It turned out this super-senior executive was a very nice bloke and I stayed in touch for many years. What actually happened when I called though is a I spoke to his assistant. So in reality I actually stayed in touch with his assistant–maybe more than I did with him.
It seemed whenever I did speak to the executive himself, anything I had told his assistant seemed to have made its way to his ears too. They really were a tight team.
As the years passed, this super-senior executive ended up becoming the head of another financial firm that was based in the middle of the country. He had to move there.