Sales executive CV example

A sales CV is read for one thing first, and everyone in the room knows it. Did you hit the number, and how do you know? Everything else on the page is context for that answer. The trouble is that most sales CVs give the number without the context, so '120% of target' floats free of the target, the territory, the deal size and the length of the cycle. A hiring manager cannot tell whether that was a hard year or an easy one, and will usually assume the smaller reading. The example below puts the figures back into the setting that makes them readable, in four bullet points.

A sales manager is working out one thing: whether your last job resembles this one closely enough for your record to transfer.

Target against attainment, with the target stated. 'Exceeded target' is unreadable alone. £480,000 against a £400,000 quota is a fact, and it tells a reader the size of patch you were trusted with.

The motion. New business, account management, renewals, or a mix, and roughly what share of your week went to each. A closer and a farmer are different hires with different interview questions.

Average deal size and cycle length. Selling a £900 subscription in two calls is not the same skill as a £90,000 contract over nine months. One needs volume and consistency. The other needs stakeholder mapping and patience.

Pipeline discipline. How many qualified opportunities you carried, where they came from, and whether the CRM was current because you kept it current.

Where you sat in the deal. Self-sourced or passed over by marketing. Sole owner, or one of four names on a bid with a pre-sales engineer beside you. Both are respectable. Only one of them is what you did.

'£480,000 against a £400,000 quota' beats '120% of target' every time. Same fact, two more pieces of information. The reader learns the size of the patch, which is the figure a manager benchmarks you against when deciding whether you can carry theirs.

'21 closed-won deals at an average of £22,800' stops the total looking like one lucky contract. Deal count and average size together describe a working year, and they tell a reader whether you are used to their price point or a different one.

'Self-sourced about 60% of pipeline' answers the question everyone asks and nobody writes down. There is no shame in an inbound-fed role. Claiming a hunter's record on marketing's leads is a different matter, and it does not survive a reference call.

'Shared with one other executive' is the honest clause. It costs nothing and it buys the surrounding paragraph credibility, because a manager who has read inflated CVs is looking for exactly this kind of self-limiting detail.

The last bullet has no revenue in it at all. It is a process change that peers adopted, which is the evidence that moves a good executive towards a team lead role.

Open the CRM before you open a document. Pull the year rather than remembering it.

Numbers to recover: quota and closed revenue for each of the last three years, deal count, average deal value, win rate against qualified opportunities, cycle length, and the split between new logo and existing accounts. Your ranking in the team if there was one, and whether the team as a whole hit.

Context to record beside them: territory, sector, price point, whether the year contained a reorganisation, a product launch or a price rise, and whether quota moved mid-year.

Where the figures are commercially confidential, and in plenty of businesses they are, use ratios and shapes instead. 'Above quota in three of the last four years' and 'average deal in the low tens of thousands' say something real without publishing a client's spend or an employer's revenue.

Never round upwards into a number you cannot produce. A sales interview is the one conversation where someone will ask you to show the report.

Percentages with no denominator. '150% of target' with the target left out is the oldest move on a sales CV, and experienced managers read it downwards, not upwards.

One career-best year presented as the norm. If a year was exceptional, show three. A steady 95, 104 and 112 reads better than a single 180 with two blank years either side of it.

Claiming team revenue as personal revenue. 'Grew regional revenue by £2m' when you were one of nine is not a line you can defend when someone rings your old manager.

Listing the CRM as a skill and stopping. Everyone has used a CRM. Whether your pipeline was clean, forecast accurately and reviewed weekly is the part worth writing down.

Building the page on revenue that did not stick. If deals you won cancelled inside year one, that has shaped how you sell since. A CV cannot hold everything, but the headline should not rest on churn.

No buyer named. Who you sell to matters more than what you sold. Name the sector and the job title.

Sales adverts hide the important information inside ordinary sentences. Read for the motion, not the package.

'Developing a portfolio of existing accounts' is farming. '80% new logo' is hunting. 'Managing the full sales cycle from lead to close' means no pre-sales support. 'Working closely with our SDR team' means part of the pipeline is built for you. A stated average order value or named territory tells you which year to lead with.

Then rewrite the top third of your CV to match. If the role is enterprise and your record is transactional, lead with your longest cycle and your most complicated stakeholder map, and be straight about the scale.

Career Auntie's CV review reads your CV against that specific advert and quotes your own lines back in each finding. On a sales CV, the one to look for is a percentage sitting on the page with no target beside it.