Whether you literally started by selling on the frontlines, or took a more strategic business-focused path, your Director of Sales resume must showcase how you inspire teams to relentlessly follow the game plan and increase revenues.
Quantifiable sales figures should take centre stage. But your planning, leadership and coaching skills shouldn’t be too far behind if you want to impress.
Discover how to craft a resume that convinces recruiters you’re the Sales Director they need captaining the engine room of business growth.
(Related: Top-Rated Resume Writing Service For Executives).
Structure Of A Sales Director Resume: A Real Example.
Every aspect on your Sales Director resume should work in harmony to highlight your commercial savvy.
What To Include In A Head Of Sales Resume?
To give recruiters what they need to make a decision, your Sales Director resume will typically include:
- A focused header with your name, contacts, and title describing your expertise.
- A summary of your unique attributes, experiences and qualifications.
- Your professional experience, how you grew profits and major results/deals won.
- Your skills in team leadership, relationship-building, and business development.
- Pertinent education, certifications and awards.
How To Write Your Sales Director Resume.
Becoming the undeniable top pick for Sales Director in a new company requires proving your ability to drive revenue based on the company’s specific market, product, size and industry.
After all, how can you grow the pipeline or expedite the purchasing process unless you understand the customer base, buying cycle and channels? Researching the company’s business model and sales process also helps you weave in relevant skills and examples of your deal-making abilities throughout your Head of Sales resume.
Demonstrate that you’re addicted to meeting targets. Put a real figure on profits, percentage of market share or customer satisfaction ratings you’ve gained.
Being a superstar salesperson in your own right is attractive—but you’ll truly impress if you showcase how you can lift the entire sales function.
Consider the capacity-building and systematic improvements you’ve made in past roles to consistently convert more prospects to customers in ways that reduce waste, or how you positioned products and services to increase competitiveness.
With those insights in hand, follow these steps to sell yourself in every section of your Sales Director resume:
1. Focus On A Contemporary Format And Design.
Nearly all resumes present work history in reverse chronological order—and you should too, because it’s what recruiter’s expect and it draws attention to your most recent experience, which is often the most relevant.
The exception is when you’ve had an unusual journey to the Sales Director level.
If recent job titles won’t convey your suitability well, consider a ‘functional’ resume format that focuses on skills and achievements rather than listing previous positions.
Regardless of how content flows, adhere to these formatting and design guidelines:
- Start with a template with a fresh feel, prominent headings and lots of white space.
- Keep it simple and avoid fancy features like columns, boxes, tables and graphics.
- Choose a modern typeface like Arial, Calibri or Helvetica.
- Sparingly apply emphasis with bullet points, bolding, lines and minimal colour.
Important! It’s preferable to save your resume as a PDF to maintain its formatting, but choose a template that still looks good as a Word file as some recruiters will specifically request that.
2. Create Impact In Your Resume Header.
Don’t neglect your header as a space to stand apart as a Sales Director. While your name will be the most prominent text, you can begin to convey your unique value proposition in how you word your job title or headline.
For instance you can:
- Mirror terms used in the job ad or job description, e.g., commercial, marketing, operations.
- Add relevant keywords, e.g., Solution Selling | B2B | Tender Management
Include only the most essential contact information: your phone number, email address, and the link to your LinkedIn profile is adequate.
3. Write A Resume Summary That Wows.
We prefer the more sophisticated title of Professional Profile. But even if you call it a ‘Summary’ or ‘Objective Statement’, the purpose remains the same—to describe why you’re the best person to drive sales at this company, and compel the recruiter to read on with enthusiasm.
Characterise your experience, core skills and attitudinal approach—self-starters with high energy are valued in sales leadership. You might mention an impressive profit-generating achievement.
Also, offer high-level insight into how you’ve built motivated and empowered sales forces capable of multiplying growth for the long-term. Are there specific sales methodologies you excel at implementing and training others in?
4. Show How You Smashed Targets In Your Work Experience.
This is where your track record of success needs to shine brightest. For each role, include examples of your performance against targets and best deals, contracts, partnerships, campaigns, and product or branding initiatives.
Use hard data and numbers to quantify your achievements.
A number or dollar amount can fall flat without context—you may need explain why the result was impressive and how it contributed to the company’s broader success.
For instance, maybe you:
- Won a high-profile account that had been with the incumbent competitor for 10 years, cementing your company’s standing as a viable alternative.
- Leveraged existing and new relationships with partners to streamline go-to-market activations to enhance margins by 10% across low-value customers.
Important! Proactive, powerful language adds weight to your achievements. Lead sentences with the action you took using verbs like: delivered, influenced, elevated, deployed, transitioned.
List work experiences from most to least recent, but don’t feel the need to include every job—positions held within the past 15 years is fine. Include more examples of the outcomes you delivered for recent roles.
Format your Sales Director work experience to cover:
- Your position title,
- The name of the company you worked for,
- The date range of when you were employed,
- A brief summary of the company’s operations.
Expert Tip. Your personal desire to succeed is highly relevant in a Sales Director role, so you could highlight internal awards or competitive rankings you earned at a company in your achievements.
5. Cover Your Sales Director Skills.
Strength of will, a genuine hunger for results, and a winning communication style defines the most sought after Sales Directors. Illustrate each skills in a brief sentence that justifies why you excel at it, or the specific way you excel.
For instance, anyone can claim to be an ‘excellent communicator’. It would be better to put it this way:
- Persuasive public speaker and trainer, having developed and delivered national training to more than 300 sales team members, with an 80% positive feedback rating.
6. Include A Section For Education.
Professional development shows you’ve got a growth mindset and value learning.
Include any formal qualifications as well as any activities, short courses, memberships or volunteering you’ve done that indicates you’ll strive to stay abreast of current sales trends and leadership best practices.
Include the following details when you list your education:
- Title of certification.
- Title of educational body.
- Date range or period of study.
Top It Off With A Superb Sales Director Cover Letter.
When you invest time and effort into getting them right, your resume and cover letter work in tandem to portray you as a distinctive and frankly un-ignorable candidate for a specific Sales Director role.
In your one-page cover letter, avoid too much repetition of resume details.
Go deeper into your individual outlook and soft skills you possess that are required to lead sales teams.
Important! Inconsistency can be jarring for recruiters. Make certain the title, dates and data used in your resume are the same as details you mention in your cover letter.
Frequently Asked Questions About Sales Director Resumes.
It’s useful to know this information before writing your Sales Director resume.
What’s The Right Length For A Sales Director Resume?
The ideal length of a Sales Director resume is 2-4 pages long.
If you haven’t switched jobs or companies much, your career history might only span two pages—but typically a senior sales leader would need 3-4 pages to include all relevant details.
What Separates The Best Sales Director Resumes?
Imbuing your Sales Director resume with your unique selling point across every section ensures it stands out in a sea of sameness—because focusing on what makes you special requires adding specificity and flair to how you write.
Tangible evidence of how you met or exceeded sales targets, the changes or leadership skills you used to inspire a tenacious sales team, and how you drew on your industry or competitor knowledge to crack into new markets combine to build a strong impression of your value—that can’t be easily replicated.
Impress With Your Sales Director Resume.
Sales Directors have a breadth of responsibilities and contribute to a company’s bottom line and dominance in the market in diverse ways.
Not every experience or outcome can be fully fleshed out in your resume, but some may be more or less relevant depending on the role requirements. Tailor your resume before each application to ensure it’s as targeted and gripping as possible.
If you need professional help to write your Sales Director resume or cover letter, reach out to us at Arielle.
Irene
