Listing your mastery of cold calling on your resume is a great way to stand out when applying for new jobs in an admittedly crowded marketplace.
Recruiters and hiring managers can see hundreds of resumes per day for a single position, and that’s after the resumes are scanned by internal applicant tracking software, which rejects poor-fit resumes.
When it comes to a role in sales or telemarketing, listing your cold calling skills will be one of the most important things to include on your resume if you want to get past the tracking software and in front of recruiters. How you write and format your resume is key—thankfully, listing cold calling skills on your resume isn't nearly as difficult as some may fear.
To help make this process even easier, we’ve put together two free cold calling resume templates & a cover letter template that you can download (in Google Doc format) to customize and use in your application process.
Why Highlight Cold Calling Skills on a Sales Representative Resume?
The job you’re applying for probably requires cold calling, so it makes sense to list your related experience. But beyond that, listing your cold calling skills on your sales representative resume does more than show that you know how to pick up and dial a phone. Being a great cold caller tells hiring managers a lot about you.
- You’re confident: It takes confidence to be a successful cold caller! With every call, you put yourself out there and do your best to generate interest despite lots of “no thank yous” and “stop callings,” Not everybody has the credence necessary to do it.
- You persevere: Cold callers can persevere through hundreds of calls daily without being discouraged or giving up. It takes a special person to keep going under these conditions, no matter what.
- You’re detail-oriented: Being able to look at potential leads and quickly separate ideal-fit prospects from bad leads is a heck of a talent, and it’s a skill that’s transferrable to other tasks. The ability to identify which tasks are high-value can be a complex skill to teach.
- You’re a great communicator: Selling over the phone requires you to convey what your product is and why it should matter to your prospect clearly and concisely, which engages your prospect from the start. Your resume listing your cold-calling experience provides evidence of solid communication skills.
Overall, recruiters and hiring managers find all these skills vital because they represent the entirety of the sales process distilled down into one role. Cold calling starts with a single, unsolicited interaction and requires follow-up phone calls that usher prospects from one end of the sales funnel to the other.
Handling a start-to-finish role throughout the sales cycle requires a level of finesse that not everybody has—and sales reps who have all of the qualities listed above will undoubtedly be at the top of the applicant pool.
What to Include on Your Sales Rep or Telemarketing Resume
First things first—you’ll need to include the standard elements that appear on any resume, like your full name, email address, phone number, and potentially your LinkedIn URL (if you have a complete profile, that is).
Beyond that, some areas of your resume should be highlighted for the best results moving forward.
Cold Calling Experience & Achievements
Remember, you're not just creating a general resume—this is one emphasizing cold calling in particular. Therefore, list position-specific experience and any achievements you've received whenever possible. Do this by listing any experience with the following elements of cold calling towards the top of the job responsibilities listed for each prior position.
Lead Generation
Describe your experience in identifying quality leads for your offering. Be sure to include statistics on how many potential customers were identified in what amount of time and how you achieved them. For example:
Identified 362 leads (92 percent qualified prospects) over two weeks by searching LinkedIn for job titles and responsibilities matching those of our ideal customers.
Inside Sales
Having progressive experience with inside sales shows your comfort and capability in selling remotely from an office-based environment instead of using in-person tactics. An example bullet point to include in your resume could be:
Achieved a close rate of 14 percent in Q3 of 2023 by using cold calling, email, and various online channels to target customers by demographic.
Sales Goal Achievements
Setting realistic sales goals is always essential, whether personal goals or sales targets provided by a supervisor. Showing your proficiency in tackling and achieving those goals on time and in full will show your potential as a great new hire. Examples include:
- Averaged 116 daily sales calls, exceeding 80 required daily calls.
- Maintained an average sold contract value of roughly seven percent higher than average sales peers.
- Met or exceeded sales targets for 6 consecutive quarters, Q1 2023 through Q2 2024.
Skill Sets Related to Cold Calling
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In addition to those skills that directly relate to cold calling, several other related skill sets should also be on your resume. Remember: you're trying to present yourself as a well-rounded candidate with experience in several areas.
While a company may be looking for someone to fill a cold calling position today, a different position may be open six weeks from now. A hiring manager would never know that you’re a good fit if related skills aren’t on your resume.
The following skills and job functions can be included on your resume as applicable to your experience. Within each context, try to lean on the details of your personal experience and achievements.
- B2B & B2C Sales: Eleven years of experience in consumer sales and six years of experience in B2B sales, with a 94 percent average success rate in hitting annual sales goals.
- CRM Familiarity: Thirteen years of experience with CRMs, including Close, Salesforce, and Zoho CRM.
- Sales Management: Proven track record of success in leading outbound sales teams to reach goals and improve warm and cold outreach skills.
- Communication Skills: Four years of experience collaborating externally with clients and internally with team members.
- Product Knowledge: Successful in quickly memorizing the fine details of a product and its many features to answer prospect questions authoritatively.
- Lead Generation: Identified a more streamlined lead generation process, allowing my peers and me to generate 15 percent more leads simultaneously.
- New Business Development: Built up my book of business with ten clients and $150,000 in annual revenue.
- Lead Qualification: Saved the business time and money by passing only the highest quality leads to the sales department.
- Account Mapping: Successfully mapped the buyer's journey to create a better and more efficient experience on behalf of clients.
- Account Management: Five years of progressive experience in account management, ultimately serving 14 client accounts entirely myself.
- Customer Service: Provided excellent customer service while handling day-to-day customer concerns and achieving a resolution rate of 98 percent.
- Customer Relationships: Five years experience creating and maintaining relationships with customers, improving their customer lifetime value by ten percent.
- Direct Sales: Three years of experience leading a B2B sales team, setting and meeting sales quotas, and mentoring others.
- Email Marketing: Optimized email marketing templates to increase click-through rates by 43 percent in six months.
- Negotiation: Two years of experience negotiating with vendors to secure better prices on behalf of the employer, saving more than $110,000.
- Sales Operations: Mentored and advised new sales team members, ultimately helping them close 20 percent more deals at a rate 40 percent faster than before.
- Sales Analysis: Three years of experience using business intelligence and data analytics to compare sales team performance to goals.
- Marketing Strategy: Spearheaded successful marketing strategies for three distinct products, including lead generation and prospect outreach strategies.
- Microsoft Office Suite: Proficient in Microsoft Windows and MacOS versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.
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Education & Certifications
You should also be sure to include your education and any relevant certifications you have received. They, too, can help your sales representative and/or cold calling resume stand out in a crowd.
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High School Diploma or GED
Provide a short, simple mention of this achievement. All that is required in this section is a mention of the institution you attended and the specific type of diploma you received.
Higher Education
When referencing your time at a higher education institution like a college or university, be sure to mention the institution you attended, your core area of study, and the degree you received (Associate, Bachelor, or graduate level). Beyond that, nothing more is required.
Related Certifications
It's important to list any related sales certification courses, sales training programs, CRM training, CPA courses, and continuing education classes that you may have attended over the years—primarily if they were related to sales, customer relationship building, lead generation, accounting management, public speaking, or similar concepts.
This shows that you are a well-rounded individual and prioritize continuing education. You're always looking for opportunities to improve your skills, and hiring managers notice that.
When listing these related certifications, you'll want to make sure that you're using a unified format, such as the one here:
- “Certificate Title,” Awarding Institution (Dates Attended/Earned - Unique Certificate Number If Applicable)
In practice, this format would look like this:
- “Advanced Sales Strategies on Social Media,” American Marketing Association (September 2021 - Certificate #0038712)
Resume Writing Tips to Stand out from the Competition
All told every job seeker is unique to themselves, meaning everyone's professional resume will and should look a bit different from the next. Having said that, there are a few best practices that you can follow to help your resume stand out from the rest of the pile.
First, as outlined above, ensure you include any relevant experience for the position you are applying for. Read the job description carefully and look at the requirements listed. Two companies may define something seemingly simple as a "Sales Representative" in slightly different ways, so a skill relevant to one position may not be to the other.
This may require you to modify your resume for every different job you apply for, but the effort pays off when you continue landing interviews. Work the keywords from the job description into your resume naturally. This will help you surpass any pre-screening software and allow the hiring manager to quickly see that you’re an ideal fit for the job.
In addition, when listing your past achievements in sales and cold calling, try to use statistics whenever possible. Don't just say that you increased your close rate through cold calling. Say that you increased it by 20 percent over five months. Including statistics turns a bland resume into a much more impressive one that’s easier for a hiring manager to quantify.
Sales Representative Resume Examples
Once your resume is fully written or updated, you'll want to ensure it’s appropriately formatted before you send it out. Hiring managers are busy, so you’ll need to rely on formatting measures to help the critical content get seen first.
To ensure your formatting is on point, use a resume builder or template to help you avoid the types of unprofessional mistakes that could cost you the job.
Standard resume formatting includes your name on top, followed by your contact information. Next will come your goals/intent, followed by a list of recently held positions and their responsibilities. You'll follow that up with your education and your related skills.
Check out these cover letter and resume samples for ideas on formatting your resume:
Roles that Benefit from Cold Calling Experience
A wide range of roles require or would benefit from cold calling experience, spanning every type of sales professional (sales managers, business development reps, account managers, etc.).
But beyond this, the experience you’ve gained from cold calling goes far beyond sales roles. Being able to confidently introduce a product to a stranger and create excitement for it is a skill that can be utilized in all positions–even those as high as the executive level and C-Suite.
The sad reality is that many people incorrectly write off cold calling as some "lesser" job responsibility when it’s a skill that should be promoted with pride. A salesperson who excels in cold calling is worth their weight in gold to the hiring company.
Want to add cold calling skills to your resume? Get your resume and cover letter templates:
