How To Confidently Add Sales Accomplishments To Your Resume.

Resumes are windows into your career, providing the right balance of accomplishment, personality, and passion for your industry to turn the head of any hiring manager. Crafting the perfect sales resume is the same, only more so. 

A sales resume has to tell a professional story, like any resume. But traditionally they are focused on end results, figures hit, targets smashed and money made, rather than the myriad personal processes that drove them to hit those targets. The ends justify any means, and as such, the end is the only thing of importance - how you got there is merely a chapter on your way to sales success.

But in our current working climate - where empathy reigns, sales priorities are shifting (such as the shift to digital or remote selling), customer care and management are precariously balanced within a post-pandemic world, and traditional models of selling are considered anathema to basic industry survival (see the 4 R’s of Sales Response to see how this has changed) - how can you build a sales resume stacked full of the right kinds of accomplishments? What do your employers want to see in a sales resume in 2022?

Is there such a thing as including the wrong accomplishments in a sales resume?

We feel there are three elements that go into building not only the right sales resume, full to the brim with the right sort of accomplishments but the right context of you as a developing sales professional, with the ability to bring nuanced, contemporary sales skills to any new employer.

Set your context

By this, we mean lean more on your situational accomplishments as much as your sales figures. 

Consider the pandemic: driving business development in one of the most febrile and difficult of global business environments is nothing short of miraculous. In this context, maintenance of existing sales figures is an enormous accomplishment, and despite your figures perhaps being objectively “low” (in comparison to non-pandemic years), setting the right context is vital in showing any new employer just how persistent, supportive and agile you can be as a salesperson.

We also think this sort of context-setting builds a timeline of personal growth. No salesperson works in a vacuum, and tying accomplishments to contextual personal growth sets a personable foundation for your career movements. Who were the mentors, trainers, and business leaders you learned from? How much did you grow a certain account by and who helped you on your path to success? How long did it take, and what were the main barriers to growth that you scaled? 

What we mean, in essence, is this: ground your sales accomplishments in the time, environment, and people you were surrounded with. They are the context in which you worked.

Highlight figures tied to behaviors

Drilling down into context a little further, one of the primary focuses in your sales resume should be on how you developed positive sales behaviors. This is especially important in relation to how you dealt with COVID-19, how you reacted to changes in your specific market, and how you managed the changes to remote work/hybrid work within your own organization. 

Critical sales behaviors such as resilience and passion are perennial sales skills that are important to include on any resume, but balance them against the more patient and empathic skills you’ve developed over the last 18 months, such as customer care, agile payment strategies, supply chain, and logistics collaboration, etc.

There has been no industry unaffected by COVID-19. But resumes have to tell your story, as much as that of your customers, company, and the wider industry. Tell your prospective new employer how you have changed, what behaviors you developed, and how they helped you succeed in such a difficult time.

Validate through References

Accomplishments mean nothing without validation. Seek to claim references that augment and support your sales figures, behaviors, and development. 

This not only gives you an objective springboard for your skills, it provides credible and worthwhile long-term advocacy, as previous employers are tapped for their “view” on your work. Corroboration in this regard builds trust - not that everyone lies on their resume (although embellishment is very, very common), but being “loose” with the truth (especially in regards to your skills as a salesperson) can only lead you to a short, sharp and mistrusted tenure with your new employer.