cvharbor editorial

Sales CV: numbers that survive an interview

Every sales CV claims to be results-driven. The ones that get interviews carry figures with enough context that a sales director can picture the job — and knows the candidate will not fall apart when asked about them.

A hiring sales manager is answering one question: can this person hit the number here? They will look for quota and attainment, what you sold, who you sold it to, and how big the deals were. A CV that supplies those four things is doing its job. One that offers "consistently exceeded targets" is not, because it says the same as a CV from someone who did not.

A number without context is not a number

"Achieved £1.2m in revenue" is unreadable on its own. Against a £900k quota it is excellent; against £2m it is a story about missing. The figure needs its denominator, its period, and ideally where it placed you among peers.

• Quota and attainment as a percentage, per year. Two or three years shows a pattern rather than one lucky quarter.
• Average deal size and sales cycle length. These tell a manager whether you have sold at their price point and pace.
• What you sold and to whom: product category, buyer persona, company size, sector.
• Territory or segment, and whether it was new or inherited. Building a patch from nothing is different work from taking over a mature one.
• Ranking among peers if it flatters you, with the denominator — "3rd of 22", not "top performer".

If your numbers are not flattering

Nobody hits quota every year, and sales managers know the reasons: a territory restructure, a product withdrawn, a year of maternity or long-term sick leave, a market that fell out. Naming the context is stronger than omitting the year, because omission reads as concealment in a field where everyone expects to see the record.

Show the parts of the job that are not closing

Depending on the role, a manager may care as much about pipeline generation, retention or expansion as about new logos. Say which you did. A candidate who self-sources pipeline is a different hire from one who works inbound leads, and neither is better — they are suited to different teams.

• Self-sourced versus inbound: what proportion of your pipeline you generated yourself.
• New business versus account management: the split, honestly stated.
• Renewals and expansion: gross and net retention if you owned a book.
• Sales methodology used — MEDDIC, Challenger, SPIN — if the employer runs one.
• CRM and tooling: Salesforce, HubSpot, Outreach, Gong. Named, because they are searched for.
• Anything you did beyond your own quota: onboarding new reps, running the forecast, building a playbook.

The summary, which is where most sales CVs fail

Three or four lines. Segment, product category, deal size, and the shape of role you want. Adjectives about being hungry, driven and passionate are what everyone writes; they cost you the four lines a reader was willing to give you.

The layout above keeps quota, attainment and deal size in the top third, where a sales manager scans first. Build your CV

Before you send it

• Does every sales role show quota, attainment and a period?
• Is average deal size and cycle length stated somewhere?
• Is it clear what you sold and to which kind of buyer?
• Can you talk for ten minutes about every number on the page?
• Have you named any year that went badly rather than leaving a hole?
• Does the summary contain a fact in its first line?