INDUSTRY STATS
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Wholesale & Manufacturing Sales positions are at a 5% growth rate, which is slower than average. With that said, there are currently 1,625,700 jobs in the market right now. The total number of jobs is expected to increase by 77,600 to 1,703,300 in the period of 2020-30.
What’s more, the median annual wage for the Wholesale & Manufacturing Sales jobs was $65,420 in May 2020. The lowest 10% earned less than $31,950, and the highest 10% more than $129,200.
Our conclusion? The Wholesale & Manufacturing Sales job market is wide open for candidates.
Top sales development representative sections that make the best resume
- Header
- Professional summary
- Experience (with numbers and results)
- Relevant skills
- Education
- Certifications
A Sales Development Representative resume experience section to be proud of
Writing a strong experience section for your sales development representative resume:
- List your previous jobs in chronological or reverse-chronological format;
- Use no more than 4-6 bullets per position;
- Mention only relevant work experience;
- Describe the tasks you were responsible for and how you managed to exceed expectations;
- Show you’re able to take charge by choosing action verbs over buzzwords.
Looking for real-life examples of what a strong experience section looks like? Check out our suggestions below!
- Top 2 performer in current fiscal period
- Plan creative events with marketing to drive attendance of prospects
- Highlight advantages of offerings to prospects
- Qualify leads for local sales teams to open discussions
- Qualify leads from marketing campaigns as sales opportunities
- Collaborate and lead discovery with Account Executives and prospective clients
- Leverage Salesforce to accurately track relative customer data, business insights and record of interaction
- Source territory using LinkedIn, SalesNavigator, 10-K reports and Salesforce
- Identify client needs and recommend appropriate products and services
- Articulate to customers the business and technical benefits of Rapid 7 solutions
- Experience presenting to end-users and up to C-Suite level executives
- Drive new business and engage with potential clients through inbound and outbound activities
- Qualify leads, discover projects, understand about budget, authority, need and timeline, and turn them into pipeline opportunities
- Develop and implement strategies with account executives, and sales directors, to land into new accounts, and to expand already existing businesses
- Keep track on the activities on SFDC and develop knowledge about data management space (Big Data, Hadoop, Cloud solutions, Cybersecurity, etc.)
- Established key business relationships such as Toshiba, and Sony to increase product inventory
- Secured business relationships in Bogota, Colombia to increase sales and distribution
- Sold over 100k USD within first year of operation
- effectively prospect and qualify leads
- hit and exceed a quota of 80 dials per day, 2 appointments per day
- schedule demos for prospective customers
- Executed Individual Sale of Automotive Advertising up to 300K in contract value for eBay
- Sourced over $1.2M in pipeline deals
- Partnered with Vice Presidents and Directors in the eBay Motors Division to develop and execute outreach strategies to find net new business
- Executed Individual sale of Automotive Advertising up to 216K in contract value for CloudOne
- Sourced over $200K in pipeline value for CloudOne
- Maintain a high volume of outbound calls to cold and warm prospects
- Provide a consultative sales experience by teaching for differentiation and tailoring for resonance
- Assess the quality of a prospect to determine viability of sales opportunity before booking demo
- Build a pipeline of qualified leads
- Nurturing long term revenue streams and client relationships
- Completing 60-80 warm/cold calls a day to prospective and current customers.
- Providing inbound and outbound lead management solutions via chat, email, phone.
- Managing multiple CRMs for key accounts. Creating various forms of CRM reporting so to better understand client data and communicate results.
- Implementing effective processes to obtain updates on leads sent to clients ensuring ROI goals are met.
- Building rapport with high-level decision makers to generate new business opportunities.
- Overseeing a wide variety of customer service tasks to satisfy customer inquiries and requests.
- Consistently communicating with team members and clients to meet set expectations.
- Achieving bell ringer and hitting commission goals from 2014 to present.
- Lead team of five SDRs throughout Europe and APAC.
- Onboard team for production and provide continuous guidance.
- Achieved 140% of yearly personal quota - $200K in closed pipeline.
- Achieved 130% of yearly team quota.
- Prospect, approach and qualify new sales opportunities.
- Identify high-potential prospective customers and generate interest to expand client lists.
- Provide support to Account Executives
- Contact new and existing prospects from Iberia, Italy, UK region,finding new potential needs and organizing demo/presentations withthe extended team
- Manage the stages of the opportunities, pipeline, accurate forecast,reports, contacts, analyzing key accounts/clients creating cold callingcampaigns from CRM Salesforce
- Work closely with the Marketing team to develop, establish, anddirect supportive channel strategies and programs including demandgeneration programs for the field sales team, in support of newinitiatives and strategies
- Create marketing campaigns, identifying sales opportunities for a defined set of solutions and services.
- Work closely with partners, resellers and distributors promoting incentive partner programs/marketing campaigns.
- Engage directly with customers via cold calling, email and social media promoting/positioning software solutions.
- Identified, qualified, and pursued sales leads and opportunities that totaled 15% of company wide new revenue growth
- Mentored and co-trained a team of 5 sales development representatives responsible for over 60% of company's total pipeline
- Devised a sales strategy for a new service line (Legal AI Training) and helped winning 7 new clients
- Supported marketing activities such as Google Adwords, LinkedIn sponsored ads and social media marketing
- #4 overall SDR out of 30 during second month on the job
- Sets demos for AE's by utilizing Sales Navigator and Outreach.io, logging daily activity in Salesforce
- #1 in pipeline for deals set to close in Q3
- Top activity in day to day metrics across all SDR's
- Contact new and existing prospects from Iberia, Italy, UK region, finding new potential needs and organizing demo/presentations with the extended team.
- Manage the stages of the opportunities, pipeline, accurate forecast, reports, contacts, analyzing key accounts/clients creating cold calling campaigns from CRM Salesforce.
- Work closely with the Marketing team to develop, establish, and direct supportive channel strategies and programs including demand generation programs for the field sales team, in support of new initiatives and strategies.
- Maintain accurate forecast and activities for assigned region in the CRM (SalesForce).
- Provide product knowledge to prospective customers in the EMEA region.
- Handle internal and external partners and maintain networks to up-sell and cross-sell between different business units.
- Promotes and positions key strategic product and service offerings
- Responsible for identifying sales opportunities for a defined set of products and services within Data Protection.
- Accurately update Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software with customer data, sales activities, quote creation, forecast & pipeline.
- Identify customer needs/ requirements, and recommend the appropriate products and solutions using BANT questioning. Budget, Authority, Need, Timescales
- Communicate with customers via live chat
- Ask discovery questions to identify interest and platform compatibility
- Generate leads for Account Executives
- Maintain high level of customer service
- Research and develop new business leads from inbound inquiries (marketing campaigns) and outbound lead generation of active customers and prospects (LinkedIn sales navigator)
- Qualified and Identified a total of 72 leads per week as prospects via personalised email, phone (80-120 cold calls/day), and LinkedIn
- Worked closely with Account Executives to schedule demos, fill pipeline and grow your skills
- Remained in regular contact to over 325 potential sales opportunities while mentoring their entire sales pipeline of prospective customers
- Organise, log activity, and categorise sales lead information on to Salesforce to identify Key Personas
- Achieved between 110% and 120% of projected quarterly sales quotas
- focus on outbound prospecting: lead generation using a big variety of tools (searching for emails and contacts of ICP); searching for leads and information about their companies in the specified regions and niches (worked 22 niches, outreached 11 thousand leads)
- preparing and writing email templates (value points, follow-ups); launching and handling email campaigns sequences
- handling inbound inquiries: searching for additional information about the companies, managing CRM database, maintaining corporate online chat, helping to solve sales issues
- lead qualification – understanding the customer’s needs. Identifying: the needs and pains of the prospect; availability of a suitable project in which our product can solve the problem; allocated budget for the project
- arranging primary demos with qualified prospects for solution consultants and preparing answers to clients' questions; participating in demo presentations; achieved leadership in the number of assigned qualified demo presentations among SDRs in the group of projects (179 assigned and delivered demo presentations)
- use a variety of instruments (Email, phone, social media) to engage leads and convert them to prospects, users and decision makers
- partial mentoring for new SDRs
- following the results of 2020 received an award for "Self-improvement"
- Developed and implemented sales process ,
- Closed sales with 163 clients leading to 75% more customer engagement and 100% sales volume increase in assigned territory
- Built pipeline of new customers and partners, which increased sales by 50% on a global scale
- Created outomated sales funnel on Hubspot
- Closed over 75 new deals past 3 month during pandemic
- Developed and implemented successful email marketing and sales campaign templates for our portfolio of 6+ annual events
- Developed strategic and operations sales which result in 25% increase in overall sales
- Developed and executed efficient sales strategies leading to the achievement of 82% sales conversion rate
- Helped in building processes since the SDR function was newly introduced.
- Being the first SDR in the team, tried and tested various tools to create a robust lead qualification process.
- Qualified organic, webinar, and marketing leads (MQLs) and took them to a demo stage (SQL) fulfilling the monthly quota.
- Worked closely with the product team in developing new features and with the CS team to reduce the churn rate and retain existing clients.
- In cases where there was an urgency from the client's end, closed deals after adequate rapport building without involving an AE to shorten the closure period.
- Helped in onboarding new SDRs in the team by defining the basic lead generation process, having regular mock calls and setting up of followup cadence.
- Selected to receive 1:1 mentoring and coaching by leaders at LeadiQ, Snowflake, and Google as a top 1% applicant.
- Qualified opportunities and practiced new methodologies to lead effective conversations and move appointments to close.
- Proficient in the modern tech stack including Salesforce, Hubspot, LeadIQ, Slack, and Outplay to effectively deliver weekly activity and appointment reports.
- Inbound:- inbound lead qualification; initial contact- data enrichment and consistent follow-ups in order to book anappointment- outreach customization (personalization based on personas) - keeping track of a CRM records/deals- stats analysis to uncover patterns and trends- reporting based on the outcomes- keeping track of a CRM records/deals- stats analysis to uncover patterns and trends- reporting based on the outcomes
- Online ads:- started as a first SDR who took care of the online ads leads- built a new process of our feedback loop regarding the quality of the paid leads - sequence creation from scrtatch- onboarded 2 new team members- performed screening calls to identify a fit between our company and a prospect's company- performed high level demo of our AutoML product - cold calls
- Content:- all of the above
PRO TIP
Don't make the same mistake everyone else does. What we mean is, don't list your Sales Development Representative job responsibilities instead of your achievements. Recruiters know what you do. They want to know what kind of difference you can bring to their company. Focus on what you've accomplished.
Action verbs for your sales development representative resume
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Taking Control of Your Sales Development Representative Resume’s Skills Section
A skills section that shows what you’re capable of includes:
- Keywords from the job advert to help you pass ATS;
- Both hard and soft skills, incl. technical skills and people skills;
- Skills that are relevant to the position you’re applying for;
- No more than 15 skills – to keep your resume readable.
Top skills for your Sales Development Representative resume
Salesforce
MS Office
CRM
Forecasting
Cold Calling
Business Development
Customer Service
Project Management
Relationship Building
Time Management
Storytelling
Research / Information Gathering.
Critical Thinking
Problem Solving.
Tech Savvy
Networking
PRO TIP
Add a Talent Section to your resume, where you can pick your top 3 soft skills and describe how you used them to complete a project or balance departmental communication.
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Sales development representative resume header: Tips, red flags, and best practices
Checklist for your sales development representative resume header
- Your name and surname in a legible and larger resume font
- The job title you’re applying for or your current job title as a subheading to your name
- Link to your portfolio or online profile, such as LinkedIn
- Address (City and State for the US; just your city for rest of the world)
- Email address
- Headshot (required or welcomed in the EU; not required and sometimes frowned upon in the US)
Stick to popular email providers such as Gmail or Outlook. And use these professional formats to create your username:
- first.last@gmail.com
- last.first@gmail.com
- firstlast@gmail.com
- f.last@gmail.com
- first.l@gmail.com
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PRO TIP
Some companies, states, and countries have non-discrimination policies about what kind of information can be included on your Sales Development Representative resume. This might include a photo (which is often included in a resume header and might be on personal web pages you link to). You can always email the company’s HR department to ask about their policies before you apply.
A sales development representative resume summary that spotlights your achievements
Checklist: a strong sales development representative resume summary:
- Use adjectives that highlight the character traits you’re most proud of;
- Mention 1-2 of your biggest achievements;
- Add keywords from the job advert to increase your chances of passing ATS;
- Keep the recruiter’s attention by going for short sentences.
Resume summary formula:
PRO TIP
Highlight specific past projects that you’re most proud of in your summary. It sets an excellent tone for the rest of your resume. You can talk about all of your former jobs in your work experience section later on.
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Creating an impressive education section for your sales development representative resume
The education section: checklist
- List your degrees in reverse-chronological order;
- Include your degree subject, place of study, name of institution, and year of graduation;
- Add a line or two about your relevant certifications;
- Mention some classes and projects that have helped you gain additional skills.
Top certifications for your sales development representative resume
Business Development & B2B Sales for Startups- Sales Valley
The Complete Startup Playbook for Business Development & B2B Sales to learn Lead Generation, Pitching, & Closing Deals.
Sales Representative - From Beginner to Advanced
An external sales course for sales representatives calling on outlets such as retailers & wholesalers
Sales Fire: B2B Sales & Business Development for Startups
The Ultimate Sales Methodology for Business Development & B2B Sales to Learn Sales Strategy, Sales Skills & Deal Closing
Sales Training: Practical Sales Techniques
Sales Hacking: Essential sales skills, sales strategies and sales techniques to sell just about anything!
Sales Machine: The Sales Training B2B Master Course
Learn Sales Strategies & Sales Techniques to Sell ANYTHING for Entrepreneurs, Startup, B2B Sales, & Business Development
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PRO TIP
There are dozens of certifications that you can claim as a Sales Development Representative. But, some are more effective than others. That’s why you mustn’t include every certificate other applicants might have. Try instead to earn and list a few of the difficult ones.
A professional format for your sales development representative resume
There are some aspects worth taking into consideration when choosing the format of your Sales Development Representative resume. These include the position and company you’re applying for, your total years of experience, whether you’ve been through some employment gaps, and so on.
Generally speaking, there are three basic resume formats for you to choose from:
- Reverse-chronological resume format;
- Functional skills-based resume format;
- Combination (or Hybrid) resume format.
The reverse-chronological resume format is just that: all your jobs listed in a reverse-chronological way, starting from the most recent and moving backward. It’s great for highly experienced professionals with over 10 years in the industry behind their backs. The reason for this: it’s almost entirely focused on experience and achievements.
The functional skills-based resume format, on the other hand, is just the opposite. It’s based on your skills, personality, and expertise. It highlights what you’re capable of even when you don’t have sufficient work experience. This makes it great for students, recent graduates, or people with larger career gaps.
If neither of these sounds like you, go for the combination resume format. It’s a combination of the best characteristics of other formats, which makes it great for showcasing different aspects of your career and education. It also gives you plenty of options to choose from – in terms of colors, structure, and sections.
Check out our additional tips on perfecting your Sales Development Representative resume’s style and layout:
- Choose traditional 1-inch resume margins;
- Go for a serif or sans serif resume font that’s easy to read yet looks professional (e.g. Arial, Verdana, or Calibri);
- Keep your Sales Development Representative resume short: one-page template are preferable, but if you have over 10 years of experience, you can also go for a two-page format;
- Save your resume as PDF and choose a suitable name, e.g. NameSurnameResume;
Tired of looking for ways to make your resume stand out? Read this article!
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PRO TIP
If you feel that you don’t have high chances in a particular company, due to lack of relevant experience, then you can still consider using a creative layout. That might help you get noticed and invited for an interview, as most of the other applicants will have boring resume designs.
Additional sections for your sales development representative resume
After drafting the required sections of your Sales Development Representative resume, it’s now time to move to something a bit more fun. There are a number of sections you can add to your resume depending on the company, the position, and how you’re feeling in general:
Adding the Right Kind of Creativity to Your Sales Development Representative Resume
It is through creativity that we express ourselves. And trust us, it’s important to show at least a bit of your personality if you want to leave a strong first impression.
But what are the ways to add creativity to your Sales Development Representative resume? Well, you can either go for a colorful and engaging template, or you could add some out-of-the-box sections, such as ‘life philosophy’ or ‘what my typical day looks like’.
It’s up to you! Just make sure that the level of creativity matches the position, the company, and the industry you’re applying for.
What makes a great sales development representative resume: key takeaways
- Choose a resume layout that sends the right message across and fits your current career situation;
- Create a resume header that shows your desired job title, and easy to find contact numbers;
- Be specific about your experience, accomplishments and future goals in your summary;
- Feature detailed metrics and specific examples that show the impact you made in your previous roles when describing your experience;
- List soft skills backed by examples;
- Add all of your technical skills and certifications that you have and match the job description;
- Show off a dash of personality in your resume that will demonstrate your culture fit and the right mix of hard and soft skills.
