A standout sales development representative resume should prove your impact on the development pipeline, command of sales tools, and ability to convert cold leads into real opportunities.
Use it alongside a tailored cover letter, and make your mark by creating a resume for free that hiring managers can’t ignore.
Be ready for:
- ↪ 3 sales development representative resume examples to serve as benchmarks
- ↪ How to prepare your resume for success in today’s fast-paced hiring process
- ↪ Common mistakes to avoid and be on your way to the next job
Related resume examples
How to Write a Sales Development Representative Resume
Your sales development representative resume is like the beginning of an important cold call. Don’t grab attention within the first few minutes and you lose all chances of getting hired. Do the opposite, and you’ll be on the interview list.
Summary
Your SDR resume should be a cold call that lands — short, persuasive, and impossible to ignore.
Getting hired as a sales development rep is simple if you know the secrets of hiring and writing a good resume. The good news is we’ve got both. From the best recruitment practices to all the elements that make a solid resume, we’ll share what you need to demonstrate your potential to thrive in target-driven environments, plus:
- How to position your skills to emerge at the top of the stack
- Using your past achievements to pitch your value
- Following the best formatting practices to be a favorite candidate for ATS and hiring managers
- Deploying relevant education and certification to be a step ahead
Establish the first point of contact in your header
The first thing employers see is your resume header. In other words, they can judge pretty hard on this section alone. Just like you’d never send an email without a signature, your resume needs crystal-clear contact details at the top.
Remember to add contact information like:
- Full Name
- Email Address
- Phone Number
- Location
- LinkedIn (optional)
- Portfolio (optional)
Showcase your capabilities through role-specific skills
When performing market research, you look for key details to ensure a business opportunity will be successful. Hiring managers use a similar process by looking at the top skills on a resume to ensure candidates can perform well on the job.
A great way to optimize for this process is by using your top-notch analytical abilities to review the job description and identify what skills each company values most.
Do they use specific software like Salesforce or HubSpot? What about common prospecting techniques like cold email or social media marketing? Go through this process for each area to decide what you’ll include.
Here are some top sales development rep skills companies look for in 2026.
9 top sales development representative skills
- Salesforce
- Social Media Marketing
- Lead Scraping
- Microsoft Office
- Cold Email
- Event Marketing
- Outbound Calls
- Netsuite
- Customer Service
Tap and present your business value from past work experiences
Now that you’ve caught the hiring manager’s attention with your top skills like lead scraping and Netsuite, the next step is showing what you’ve achieved while using them.
Just like data is essential in prospecting, it’s also crucial to help hiring managers decide you’re the best fit.
Emphasizing key sales metrics like lead to conversion rates and acquisition costs in this section will help you stand out since it clearly illustrates what you achieved on the job.
Here are a few samples:
- Created sales scripts for a 5-person sales team during a cold calling campaign that boosted conversion rates by 28%.
- Analyzed market data in Salesforce to identify 7 new strategies that led to a $1.7 million boost in annual sales.
- Planned lead gen strategies for 32 yearly events with informational fliers and interactive booths that generated an average of 650 new leads annually.
- Implemented a new influencer marketing campaign that boosted brand awareness by 43% and generated 1,300 new email list signups.
Use verbs to start each bullet point
Before you begin a bullet point, use a strong action word at the start. These clearly show the level of impact you created.
Some of the best verbs for an SDR resume include:
- Closed (deals)
- Exceeded
- Converted
- Boosted
- Qualified
- Pitched
- Nurtured
Present your sales training
While getting into sales doesn’t require a degree in particular, having one on your resume helps if you’re a beginner candidate. Whether it be a degree in business administration or management, include whatever you’ve got at the moment.
Only have a diploma? That’s fine. Pair it with some credible certificates like:
Top 5 tips for your sales development representative resume
- Use reverse chronological order
- Lead gen technology and strategies constantly evolve, as have your sales dev skills. Therefore, listing your most recent experiences first will help catch a hiring manager’s attention with your most relevant abilities in prospecting and lead scraping.
- Keep examples short for the most impact
- While a lot goes into a cold email strategy, your work experience examples don’t need to include everything. Instead, aim for short, metrics-based examples that catch a hiring manager’s attention, like how you converted 25% of cold email leads into paying customers that boosted ARR by 56%.
- Optimize with action words
- Action words like “generated” and “led” will make your examples sound more impactful. For instance, you could say you “generated 1,600 highly-relevant cold leads using Apollo.io and converted 33% into paying customers within three months.”
- Proofread for errors
- When your market analysis can make or break the success of company decisions, hiring managers will want to ensure you can perform accurately. Start things off right with a resume free of grammatical errors.
- One page is the best length
- A resume that’s too long will lose a hiring manager’s attention when they have tons of applicants to review. Keep your resume to a concise page of information focused on the primary job needs like social media marketing or outbound calls.
Key takeaways
- Make a perfect first impression with a display of your skills
- Tap from your past achievements to showcase the value you bring
- Put your document in an easy-to-read, professional layout
- Ensure zero mistakes in your final copy
Sales Development Representative Resume FAQs
A resume summary will work well for SDRs with ten or more years of experience. For example, you could write a few sentences about how you’ve used solution-based cold email strategies to generate $4.5 million in revenue over your 11-year career.
Listing three or four jobs is optimal for SDR resumes. You want to include jobs that are the most recent and relevant to your use of key skills like Salesforce or event marketing.
You should tailor your resume to each company’s needs to give yourself the best opportunity to stand out. For instance, if a company wants to focus on cold calling, you could focus on skills like sales call scripting and solution selling that will be beneficial in that process.
