Merchandising, customer interactions, restocking, display design and setup—you do everything you can to further the company’s goals of maximizing sales. You’re an integral part in the mission of increasing profits while ensuring peak customer satisfaction!
But even if you’re thoroughly familiar with guiding customers towards the ideal purchase, you might still have questions about selling your qualifications on a solid resume.
Hey, we’re in a good position here because we’ve helped people in your profession before! We’ve consolidated years’ worth of experience into three helpful sales assistant resume templates and some solid advice.
Related resume examples
What Matters Most: Your Skills & Work Experience Sections
You’ve built up plenty of impressive interpersonal and critical thinking skills throughout your experience in sales, and recruiters want to see the core takeaways! What tasks do you know how to perform that will further company and customer success?
Make sure your skills are short and formatting in a tidy list, featuring abilities that are highly relevant to your field. (Think of how you’d make sure all parts of a seasonal display actually fit the theme.) And be specific!
Getting super specific about your skills shows deeper knowledge and will get you way further in the application process. Think of broader soft and technical skills that apply to most any role, and then branch them out to show how they apply to your role as a sales assistant.
Here are some examples:
9 most popular sales assistant skills
- Customer Service
- Active Listening
- Conflict Resolution
- Problem-solving
- Organization
- POS Systems
- Inventory Management
- ZoHo
- MS Word
Sample sales assistant work experience bullet points
Once you’ve laid all your skills out on the table, it’s time to show recruiters how you’ve maximized your capabilities! Even if your job experiences look somewhat patchwork, you can spin this to your advantage by referencing skill utilization that overlaps with sales techniques.
If you worked a job that didn’t have a lot to do with sales initiatives, make your experience relevant by talking about your customer service efforts or your project performance assessments.
And always use metrics to quantify your impact! Give numbers on how you used assessment results to improve said performance. Provide satisfaction rates demonstrating that your customer engagement was successful.
Here are some samples:
- Answered customer questions regarding menu items, payment, and bakery history to build lasting connections and boost customer retention rates by 11%
- Stocked, organized, and inventoried over 1.1K products and supplies, using MS Excel to reduce inventory error rates by 9%
- Greeted customers, located merchandise, and rang up purchases for 54+ customers daily on average, earning an employee rating of 4.8/5.0 stars
- Processed 164+ cash, credit, and check transactions daily, using POS Systems to ensure a 99% accuracy rate
Top 5 Tips for Your Sales Assistant Resume
- Consider your objective
- Sometimes an objective statement can really set off your resume by giving recruiters a quick snapshot of your career goals and qualifications as a sales assistant. If you include one, just make sure it adds fresh value to your resume so that nothing feels repetitive.
- Think creatively about your history
- If your work history’s all jotted down and you still feel like your experience section looks a bit sparse, think beyond the limitations of paid employment. You can include volunteer experience and college projects that prepared you for customer relations or sales displays, too!
- Use a professional layout
- Which resume templates and colors make your individual set of qualifications look the best? Stick to the templates as closely as possible so that your final product looks as polished as one of your freshly stocked shelves.
- Always proofread
- Speaking of polishing up your resume, don’t ever forget to proofread! While any human being is bound to make some mistakes, proofreading your resume to ensure that it’s error-free will make you a much more appealing candidate. Attention to detail makes for a great sale opportunity, after all.
- Avoid fluff
- Make sure you aren’t scrambling to come up with content just to fill up the page. If your experience section is somewhat limited, just pick your most effective, quantifiable points as a sales assistant and let them shine. White space is underrated!
Just one page! While you don’t have to fill it to the brim, you definitely don’t want to go over. Recruiters only spend a few seconds skimming each resume on average, so they want to see your sales goals and ratings quickly. Save extra details about how you closed some of the best deals for writing your cover letter.
Just one, and maybe two if you’re extra careful about how you use them. Don’t use any colors that clash, distract from key information, or interfere with readability! Again: You want to make it as easy as possible for recruiters to absorb your sales assistant qualifications.
Actually, maybe not! If you have a solid background in sales-related roles and have no problem fleshing out your experience section with engaging experiences . . . why use page space on a resume objective?
