Don't Be the Stain Remover Agent

There was an advert on television when I was young. A person is going about their day — carrying a mug across the living room, distracted — and spills coffee on a white carpet. A dark stain spreads. And then, without warning, a stranger appears in the room.

He is wearing a branded polo shirt. He is holding a bottle. He was not invited, he did not knock, and nobody asked him to be there. He simply materialises beside the stain, uncaps his product, and demonstrates how effortlessly it lifts the mark away. Fast. Easy. No scrubbing. The carpet looks new. Everyone smiles.

Even as a child, one thing about this bothered me. Not the product. The man.

Imagine that you spilled some wine on your carpet, and next thing you know, there is a stranger in your living room with a stain remover, how would you react?

You are the man with the bottle

Here is the uncomfortable turn. When we promote our own work — a message on LinkedIn, a note to a prospect, a service pitched to someone who did not ask — we are very often the man with the bottle.

We appear in a room we were not invited into. We point at a problem the person had not asked us to find. We unveil our solution in the exact moment they feel most exposed. And we expect them to hire us with a huge smile.

They rarely do. Not because the product is bad. Because of how it arrived.

But this does not stay only on the marketing level. It goes deeper. The same move happens inside our conversations.

The call where nobody asks a question

Sit in on enough sales calls, pitches, and meetings and you start to see the same shape. Two people on a call, and only one thing happening: a person listing all the wonderful things they are capable of. Waiting for the reaction — oh, that's exactly what I needed.

It is not a conversation. It is a performance with an audience of one, and the performer's hand is already on the stain remover.

What is missing is almost always the same thing: curiosity. A few questions here and there but there is no real interest in who is actually sitting on the other side of the table — what they are dealing with, what they are worried about, what they came into the room hoping to solve.

The person pitching decided all of that in advance, the way the stain remover man decided your carpet was the problem before he walked in.

Same bottle. Same room. And it lands as an intrusion, because the person doing the talking discovered the problem for the other party rather than letting the other party name it themselves.

Why we do it anyway

We so easily slip into the role of the stain remover guy. I caught myself many times.

It would be easy to call this selfishness. It is not. Almost nobody behaves this way because they only want to talk about themselves. There is a logical reason, and it is worth naming honestly.

We do this because we want the work. We want to make a living, and we genuinely believe we can solve the problem in front of us. We have real confidence — and we want that confidence to be seen.

Underneath that is something deeper. We need to see ourselves as the professional who solves exactly this kind of problem. The pitch is not really aimed at the client. It is aimed at our own self-image. We are confirming, out loud, the identity we have built: I am the one who fixes this. Call it self-verification — the (not so) quiet need to prove to ourselves that we are what we say we are.

And because that need is ours, not the client's, it makes us rush. We run ahead. We race to the heart of the matter. But the heart we are racing toward is our own, not theirs. We solve the problem we specified for ourselves, in the room where someone else's problem was waiting to be heard.

Find their heart first

The fix is not to lose faith in your service. It is to delay it.

Before you solve the problem you have trained yourself to solve, learn what the heart of the client's matter actually is. What is his real issue? What is he worried about? What is he trying to protect? Get a clear enough picture of that, and something useful appears: the overlap. The area where his genuine concern and your service actually meet.

Lead with that overlap, and the same pitch that would have felt like an intrusion now feels natural — because by the time you name what you carry, he has already named the stain himself.

This is not passive. You do not sit and wait for the client to hand you the answer. You need to drive the conversation, deliberately, with more questions than statements. But you are driving toward his heart, not performing your own.

The stain remover man would have been welcome — if he had knocked, asked what happened, and let the person say I've spilled something and I don't know what to do. Same product. Same room. A completely different reception.

The difference was never the bottle. It was who did the discovering.

So before you reach for the bottle, knock on the door first.