Sales Manager Resume Example & Guide

Learning how to write a good sales manager resume is as important as achieving your sales numbers – it’s how you market yourself to potential employers.

A professional resume highlights your skills, experience and achievements with well-written bullet points. Your resume template should grab recruiter’s attention immediately and make you stand out.

Writing a basic resume is not enough, your resume has to have what hiring manager is looking for and it should be well understood by ATS software. In this guide, you will learn how to write a sales manager resume that shows you as a strong candidate and get you hired faster.

Popular resume guides

Experienced Professional Guide to write a resume	How to use AI to write your resume
Guide to create resume with No Experience	Convert your LinkedIn profile into Resume

What is Sales Manager Role

A Sales Manager is responsible for leading a sales team, developing sales strategies, and achieving sales targets. They play a crucial role in driving revenue and ensuring customer satisfaction. Their responsibilities often include setting sales goals, analyzing data, training sales staff, and coordinating with other departments.

A Sales manager is manages team of sales representatives, review their sales reports and target achievements. Sales manager has view of day to day sales activities, they are in a unique position to identify gaps in the process and make action plan to improve those process.

Sales Manager Resume Example

Breakdown of Sales Manager Resume Example

Your sales manager resume should include the following sections:

1. Contact Information: Ensure your name, phone number, email, and LinkedIn profile are up-to-date so that recruiter can contact you.
2. Resume Headline : This goes right after your name. In resume headline you can add the target role and your key areas of expertise.
3. Summary: A brief overview of your professional background and key qualifications should be mentioned on top of your resume.
4. Experience: Detailed descriptions of your previous roles, focusing on responsibilities and achievements.
5. Skills: A list of relevant skills, both hard and soft.
6. Education: Information about your academic background.

These are must have sections for a sales manager resume. To make your resume stand out and get hired faster, you should consider adding sections like Achievements & Awards, and certifications.

1. Certifications: Any additional certifications that are relevant to the Sales Manager role.
2. Achievements & Awards Section: Recall appreciation, awards or even praise for management for outperforming your sales targets or executing the impossible. Write them down in bullet points and each point should say about – the achievement, the problem that you solved and how you solved it. Of course, your bullet points need to be concise and save a detailed version for the interview.

Sales manager resume format

A sales manager should have leadership and management, training and communication skills that should be clearly visible in their resume. Formatting is the first thing we all notice, so it should be clean, well-spaced and well-organised.

Few things to keep in mind when formatting your sales manager resume

• Reverse chronological order – This resume format keeps the focus on work experience as a reverse timeline. You will start with your most recent job and go all the way back to your last job. How far should you go? this I will answer towards the end. So your work experience clearly shows your career path and that is why recruiters love it.
• Header – Top of your resume will start with your name. Header will have your contact information (email, phone and address) and headline (introductory job title). In this example, headline is “Territory Sales Manager”.
• ATS compatibility – This is most important to land interviews. ATS-friendly resume means, it should be software readable and it should have relevant skills and responsibilities (keywords) that employer has asked for in the job description. You should not use graphics or tables and should only use simple fonts like – Arial, Calibri, Helvetica, Verdana, Cambria, Times New Roman, Garamond, Roboto etc.
• One page resume- Ideally sales resume should be one page long. That means you need to sharpen your bullet points and remove irrelevant work experiences. For senior professionals, it can go up to 2 pages.
• PDF Download – you should download your resume in PDF format to preserve ats compatible formatting. PDF ensures your resume looks same across Windows, mac or other software.

Best practices to write an engaging Resume Summary

Why Resume summary is so important? Well summary is mentioned on top of your resume so this is the first thing that recruiter and interviewer reads. This gives hiring manager a short version of your expereince, achievements and skills which helps them decide if your profile can be a good fit. If your summary ticks their boxes then they will read further in your resume.

You can follow these guidelines to write an engaging summary

1. Resume summary should be focused on your sales manager role and not on your company.
2. You can write resume summary as 3-5 bullet points or paragraph. We recommend paragraph because it has better readability.
3. Start by writing first line about your total experience, current role and top responsibilities.
4. Write next one point about your overall experience in that and previour roles.
5. Make next 2 points about experiences that are relevant to sales manager role (target role).
6. Dedicate a point to your recent and impactful achievement.
7. Finally write one point about your key skills and expertise that is relevant to sales manager role.

That is how you can easily write 5 point resume summary. Here is an example

5 Skills to include in Sales manager resume

1. Sales – This is the primary skill you are working for. Sales can be corporate sales, B2B sales, SAAS sales etc which change from company to company.
2. Leadership – Working as a sales manager you are expected to lead sales teams and drive sales targets. This involves providing guidance, motivation, and support to team members while also setting a clear direction for the team
3. Strategic Thinking – Sales Managers should analyse market trends and competitors and set realistic team goals. You will develop and implement new sales plans and form strategies to drive growth and expand market share.
4. Training & Development – As sales lead or manager, you are responsible for training and coaching junior sales representatives. This is where your sales experience and people management skills are tested.
5. Relationship Building – You will be building and maintaining strong relationships with clients, partners, and stakeholders to drive sales and long-term business success. You will be leveraging available channels like online speaking engagements and networking events to connect with new partners and opportunities.

Common skills, action Verbs and Certifications for sales manager

You can pick suitable skills and certifications and include them in your resume. Action verbs will be used to add impact to your experience and summary bullet points. These are important and can make your resume stand out.

Finding keywords in sales manager job description: Making ATS friendly Resume

Your resume should be a good match for the job you are applying for. This means your resume should have all the key skills that the job requires. This is the primary criteria recruiters and hiring managers apply to shortlist candidates from a huge pile of applicants.

This is the part where you make your resume ATS compatible by finding skills and keywords from job description and add to your resume. Every job description will have slightly different requirements so you need to look at 3-4 job description to find common skills they all need for sales manager.

But how will you find skills mentioned in job description? You can do this by reading it. Let’s see this in action with below example, here skills are highlighted with color

In below example, you can see the right and wrong ways of adding skills to sales manager resume

Highlighting Your Professional Experience

When detailing your professional experience, focus on structuring it in a way that is easy to read and understand. Use bullet points to list your responsibilities and accomplishments. Start each bullet point with a strong action verb and quantify your achievements when possible.

To make your bullet point impactful, add more context ot it. Rather than simply saying “Reducing lead response time by 30%” add how you did it and what was the result. Use C-A-R (Challenge Action Result) or STAR (Situation Task Action Result) method to make your bullet points interesting.

Here is an example

How to quantify sales resume example bullet points

You should make your resume bullet points more crisp, to the point and impactful. By quantifying bullet points we mean, adding financial, size or percentage base metrics where you can. Each and everything can’t be quantified but doing this for experience and achievements bullet points can make your resume impressive. Let’s see an example of quantifying work experience

Emphasizing Achievements and Metrics

You can include your achievements in separate section or mix them with Work Experience after description, a lot of flexibility is there. Now, if there are more than 2 achievements then better to add them in a separate “Achievements” section.

You will be writing about times when you overachieved your sales target, when you overcome impossible change and recheved appriciation, a formal award or kudos from team members. This underscores your key performances and how management and team respond to it.

Writing achievements is simple – use bullet points and add your sales related metrics where ever possible. Remeber we just talked about importance of quantifying your bullet points, it will be useful here as well.

How to pick the best sales manager resume template

A resume template defines the structure and provides eye pleasing look for your resume. A good resume template for sales management role should be ATS compatible to provide the best results when applying online. It could be single-column resume template like Glacier Chill or a modern resume template that is one page. Let’s see these an example below –

Modern One page Resume Template

Frequently Asked Questions: Sales manager resume examples and tips

How far back should you go on resume?

For senior sales professionals with more than 10 Years of experience, a question can come – How far back they should go while listing work experience?

We recommend you only include the past 10 years of work experience in your resume. Your resume doesn’t have to be your entire life history. Your future employer is not interested in knowing what you did 10 years before, they will be more keen on knowing your last 1-2 experiences.

Should a Resume be in PDF or Word?

We recommend using PDF file because its formatting remains consistent across Windows, mac and software. Maintaining ATS formatting in MS Word is difficult, especially if you are using modern resume templates. A small formatting mistake in Word can ruin your chance of getting a job.

Difference between Sales representative and Sales Manager

A sales representative is a junior-level role where you talk to clients, prospects, leads and convert them into sales. Generating sales and revenue is your primary focus. You will have individual sales targets and your performance will be measured by meeting those.

On the other end, the Sales manager manages individual sales reps, defines targets and sets sales goals. He leads and manages sales team by training, driving KPIs, tracking overall sales performance and being responsible for business growth.

Key takeaways

In this example of sales resume, you have learnt –

1. Resume format – You should use reverse chronological resume format and it needs to be ATS compatible. You should use simple fonts and avoid using complex graphics in your resume.
2. Resume example – You have seen software sales manager resume example which you can use as a reference while creating your resume.
3. Making your resume stand out – You learnt, how to write skills in resume, pick skills from job description and make your resume quantifiable. You can add more sections like Achievements, Awards and certifications in your sales resume to make it stand out and get hired faster.
4. Resume Template – You have seen an example of the best sales resume template that is ATS friendly and Modern single page template. You can use them while making your resume with our resume builder.

Check out other resume examples

Car Sales Resume Example	Software Intern – Canada Resume Example
Content Strategist Resume Example	Amazon Software Engineer Resume Example

Thank You 👍