As a sales director, you’re the sales team go-to: You keep morale up while designing and implementing better sales strategies than ever. You even handle the planning and launch of new products to ensure customer satisfaction and employee success.
But you may still have questions about your resume. How do you finesse each detail of your resume to perfection?
No sweat–I’ve helped plenty of people in your position before! Check out these 3 sales director resumes and tips for inspiration to get the ball rolling.
Related resume examples
What Matters Most: Your Skills & Professional Experience
As a sales director, it’s important for you to show a well-rounded set of skills on your resume. Demonstrate that you handle everything from the complete sales process to drafting data reports.
That means including technical and interpersonal abilities like negotiation and presentation skills–and make sure you stay specific instead of flattening your prowess into just “people skills”.
You should be just as specific about the software you use behind the scenes, too. Pull in names throughout both your skills and your experience sections.
Check out some examples:
9 Most Popular Sales Director Skills
- Negotiation
- Sales Planning
- Client Relations
- Financial Management
- Market Knowledge
- Data Analysis
- Google Suite
- Hubspot
- Pipedrive
Sample Sales Director Work Experience Bullet Points
Your experience section is the perfect stage for you to show how your skills have come into play within your job role. Look at your list of abilities and refer back to the job description to find the best matches.
Remember to use your professional journey to show increasing complexity in how you apply your skills, too. Recruiters want to see that you have strong roots in a hands-on sales background along with a steady trend of career advancement.
And never forget to back up your claims with data! You can think of your resume sort of like a financial report: Quantify your points clearly with metrics of your success, such as improvement rates.
Here are some good samples:
- Developed a new paid search strategy, resulting in a 106% improvement in paid search traffic and 143% improvement in conversion rates
- Drove consensus on customer demand and resource allocation with 97 cross-departmental executive managers, reducing forecast bias by 14%
- Advertised new products on social media, resulting in 8% more online customer engagement and a 21% increase in sales revenue
- Utilized A/B testing and multivariate analysis to improve website conversion rates by 23%
Top 5 Tips For Your Sales Director Resume
- Demonstrate leadership
- As a sales director, you’ve gotten plenty of experience that you can use to guide others, and it should show! Exhibit strong leadership values by featuring experience points that highlight your ability to take strategic ownership of each project.
- Always crunch your numbers
- Metrics really are important for your resume–I’m not just saying it! Sales is a highly numbers-focused career area, so you’re bound to sell yourself short if you don’t set off your experience points with metrics.
- Keep it simple
- (I’m talking about your layout.) Your resume should emphasize readability, organization, and a strong sense of hierarchy. Use your template choice to show that you understand priorities, and stick with simple, readable fonts.
- Keep it brief, too
- Just like your sales reports and proposals, your resume should cut right to the point. Keep your resume to only one page, or even less.
- Be specific about your skills
- I know, I already mentioned it, but it’s a big deal: Go beyond broad skills and really hone your selling points based on your profession. Don’t say “communication”–what kind of communication? Negotiation? Client relations? Quarterly presentations?
Frequently Asked Questions
- Don’t I have to customize my resume?
- Yes, definitely! And you can accomplish with an easier set of steps than you might think:
1. Refer back to the job description.
2. Pull keywords, skills, and values that you share.
3. Work those into each new resume to make it unique.
- Yes, definitely! And you can accomplish with an easier set of steps than you might think:
- How should I balance my experience chronologically?
- I know I’ve talked a lot about demonstrating career growth. But even though you want to include your best achievements from each stage of your work history, you want to give more page space to more recent and complex accomplishments.
- How do I narrow my skills down?
- It can be tough to figure out which of your abilities to emphasize, especially while working with such limited space. It’s always a great idea to start brainstorming in a separate, fresh document. Once you’ve jotted down everything that sounds good, circle any highlights and then pare your way up from the bottom!
