Your About Page Is Selling You, Not Them. Nobody Came Here to Read About You.

The job was already gone

I once gave a presentation that was built to create demand, not to sell.

In that room sat the person who had already chosen someone else for an $80,000 job. Decision made. They came and listened anyway.

Afterward they walked up to me and said it plainly. They were going to hire this other person to do the job. They were going to pay them $80,000. But they thought I could do it. Could they hire me instead.

No pitch. No proposal. No negotiation. I never asked for the work.

$80,000, already committed to somebody else. Nobody pitched them out of it. They reopened the decision themselves.

That day taught me what the presentation was actually for. Build the room to create demand, not to close it. When demand exists, the buyer opens the conversation and brings the budget with them.

And if I had built it to close, I would have walked in on a buyer who had already chosen somebody else and had no reason on earth to reopen the decision. I would have met a closed mind with a better argument. A closed mind does not receive a better argument. It receives nothing.

That is not a sales trick. That is a human truth, and it is where this starts.

The first principle: state precedes message

You cannot move a mind whose state is closed. Attention and openness are physiological before they are intellectual. Change the state first, or the message never arrives.

I call that state precedes message, and it gates everything else I am about to hand you.

So let me rank your attention honestly, because pieces like this usually pretend every part is equally important. The state of the reader is the whole thing. Your headline, your design, the order of your logos: minor. Not unimportant. Minor. If the first two lines close the door, nothing underneath them lands. Get that part right and the rest is decoration.

The framework: The Selling Principles

The Selling Principles: the universal principles of selling anything to anyone. The human reasons a persuasive pitch works, independent of product or industry. The method, not the content.

I teach a framework by that name, and its shape is the point.

Every principle in it is a human truth plus the reason it works. Under each principle sit moves. Those moves are tactics, and tactics are disposable. In a live room I might have everyone stand up. The stand-up does a job: it pulls people out of their chairs and out of a defended posture. But standing up is not the point. If standing up is not practical, a different move that meets the same human need does the same work.

Say that back to yourself, because it is the hinge of this whole piece. The tactic is never the point.

The spine of the framework is one sentence. You earn the sale by serving the buyer's real decision. Not by winning the argument. Not by proving you are worthy. You serve the decision the buyer is already making.

Then it goes one step further, and that step is where it starts to cost you something.

Guide, don't steer

My friend Kat Merrick gave me the framing I have used ever since for what a seller is actually doing in a sales conversation. Guide, don't steer. Stop steering the buyer toward your sale. Help them set their course, even when that course leads away from you. I credit her for it, because it changed how I work.

Three things fall out of that. I am giving you the charge on each one, because a free consequence is not a real one.

You will lose sales you could have closed. Not might. Will. A buyer you guided in the right direction sometimes sets their course toward somebody else, and you watch it happen knowing a pitch might have turned them. The charge: no invoice, and no complaining either, because the whole point was that you were not steering.

A buyer you helped in the right direction becomes a referral source, even if they never buy. The charge: you do not get to see it happen on the day. You watch them walk. No invoice, no credit, and some of them never come back and never send anyone. The referral is not payment for the sale you lost. It is a different thing that may or may not arrive later, and you have to be fine with that before you guide anyone.

Caring about the outcome of the sale shows up as desperation. The charge is why this one stings: you cannot hide it. Your body leaks. If you need the sale, the buyer can smell it, and needing it is the fastest way to lose it. So the honest instruction is not "care less." It is "build something that survives the no." That is expensive, and it is the real price of guiding.

The framework at a glance

That is the framework. Now let's spend it on the page you have been avoiding.

The tactic: your About page

Most About pages get written as a formality. A website needs one, so it gets filled with the story of you. Founded in this year. Started by this founder. Here are the awards, here are the logos, here is a paragraph about how passionate we are.

That is a sales pitch wearing a biography costume, and it is aimed straight at the part of the reader that is already closed.

Assume the reader landed with something already decided, even if that something is "not yet." They are comparing you against two other options and against doing nothing at all. You are not the only tab open. Your About page is a sales conversation you are not in the room for.

State precedes message. So the page's first job is not to close, and it is not to prove. It is to change the state of a closed mind so the message underneath has somewhere to land.

And here is where I refuse to hand that to you as a free consequence. Every credential on that page is armor. Taking it off feels like walking into the meeting with nothing on. So when you write the first two lines of your About page, you will feel underdressed, and you will want to add a line about how long you have been doing this. That feeling is not a sign you are doing it wrong. It is the price of doing it right, and you pay it in the first paragraph or you do not pay it at all.

One caveat, and it is not soft. If you need revenue this month, do not start with your About page. Go do the outbound work that pays the rent. This page compounds. It is not the rent, and treating it like the rent is how people turn it back into a biography.

Before you rewrite a word, check the page against what you actually sell

Some years ago I learned why that check is not optional. I spent a long stretch building an audience. Real growth, real people, real engagement. When I finally had it, I turned to putting an offer in front of it.

And what the company was offering had changed. The offer had moved underneath me somewhere in the middle of the build.

So I looked at what I had made and said it out loud. This audience does not want this thing we are bringing to market.

The work succeeded. It was worth nothing. I built the wrong audience.

Read that again, because it is the part that should bother you. Nothing failed. The audience was real and engaged and mine, and it still did not want the offer. A successful build can be aimed at nothing at all.

The lesson is not "audit your copy." The lesson is: audit the audience against what you actually sell today. Your About page carries the same exposure. You wrote it to a buyer who existed when you wrote it. If what you sell has moved since, the page is pointed at someone who is no longer walking through the door.

Now the cost of looking, which is exactly why most people skip it. You sit the page down next to what you sell today, and you may find the drift. Then you have two options: pretend you did not see it, or rebuild on top of what you just found. Checking part way through would have caught the drift while there was still time to steer. Checking now means finding out whether the last stretch of work was aimed at the right person, and you cannot un-know the answer once you have it.

The two About pages

Monday, with the cost attached

Sit your About page next to what you sell today. Then do this, and know what each step costs before you start, because the cost is the step.

1. Say the decision out loud, in the reader's words. Something like: "I am trying to figure out whether hiring this person costs me more than doing nothing." The cost: writing it in their words means you stop writing in yours, and your words are the ones that make you feel qualified.

2. Write the first two lines to change the state, not to make the case. The cost: this is the paragraph where the armor comes off. You will read it back and feel like it does not sell hard enough. It is not supposed to. If it feels comfortable, you wrote a pitch.

3. Put the honest next step on the page, including when the answer is not you. The cost: you will hand a live lead to somebody else, you will know it, and you will not get paid for it. Do it anyway. That one sentence says more about whether you can be trusted than your credentials section ever will, and it says it to the buyer who is actually deciding.

Then read the first two lines out loud. If they would not survive being said to another founder over coffee, cut them and write again. That test is free. The rewiring is not.

The verdict

The Selling Principles have exactly one verdict for your About page, and it is not "make it better."

Stop selling.

Serve the decision the buyer is already making. The page will feel like it is doing less for you, because it is. It is not proving anything. It is opening a state, so the message underneath has somewhere to land.

That is how a sale gets earned instead of won. Not by out-pitching the other person, and not by laying your awards in a row. By being the one who helped the buyer decide.

The person who had already chosen someone else for that $80,000 job did not switch because I out-pitched anyone. The demand was already there, and they reopened the decision themselves.

Your About page cannot manufacture that. It can only stop closing the door on it.