How to List Cold Calling Skills on Your Resume (Free Templates)

Listing your mastery of cold calling on your resume is a great way to stand out in an admittedly crowded marketplace when applying for new jobs.

Recruiters and hiring managers can see hundreds of resumes per day for a single position, and that’s after the resumes get scanned by internal applicant tracking softwares that reject 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.

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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 simply 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” ... and not everybody has the credence necessary to do it.
• You persevere: Cold callers are able to persevere through hundreds of calls every day, without being discouraged or giving up. It takes a special kind of person to keep going under these conditions, no matter what. (Out of all the people in the world, a fruit vendor in Thailand once taught me a great lesson on the power of perseverance.)
• 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, as well. The ability to identify which tasks are high-value can be a hard 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 in a clear and concise way that engages your prospect from the start. By listing your cold calling experience on your resume, you provide evidence of solid communication skills.

Overall, recruiters and hiring managers find all of these skills important because they essentially 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 certainly be at the top of the applicant pool.

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What to Include on Your Sales Rep or Telemarketing Resume

First things first—you’ll need to include those standard elements that would appear on any resume, like your full name, your email address, your phone number, and potentially your LinkedIn URL (if you have a complete profile, that is).

Beyond that, what follows are some areas of your resume that should definitely be highlighted for the best results moving forward.

Cold Calling Experience & Achievements

Remember, you're not just creating a general resume—this is one with an emphasis on cold calling in particular. Therefore, list position-specific experience and any achievements that you've received whenever possible. Do this by listing any experience you have with each of 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 a statistic of how many potential customers were identified in what amount of time, and how you achieved it. For example:

Identified 362 leads (92% qualified prospects) over two weeks by searching LinkedIn for job titles and responsibilities matching those of our ideal customer.

Inside Sales

Having progressive experience with inside sales shows your comfort and capability in selling remotely from an office-based environment, as opposed to using in-person tactics. An example bullet point to include in your resume could be:

Achieved a close rate of 14% in Q3 of 2021 by using cold calling along with email and various online channels to target customers by demographic.

Sales Goal Achievements

Setting realistic sales goals is always important, whether they’re 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, above and beyond the 80 required daily calls.
• Maintained an average sold contract value of roughly 7% higher than average sales peers.
• Met or exceeded sales targets for 6 consecutive quarters, Q1 2021 through Q2 2022.

Skill Sets Related to Cold Calling

In addition to those skills that directly relate to cold calling, there are a number of other related skill sets that 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, there may be a different position 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 the context of each, try to lean on the details of your own personal experience and achievements.

• B2B & B2C Sales: 11 years experience in consumer sales, and 6 years experience in B2B sales, with a 94% average success rate in hitting annual sales goals.
• CRM Familiarity: 13 total years 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 both warm and cold outreach skills.
• Communication Skills: 4 years experience collaborating both externally with clients and internally with team members.
• Product Knowledge: Successful in quickly memorizing the fine details of a product and it’s many features in order to authoritatively answer prospect questions.
• Lead Generation: Identified a more streamlined lead generation process, allowing my peers and I to generate 15% more leads in the same amount of time.
• New Business Development: Built up my own book of business with 10 clients and $150,000 in annual revenue.
• Lead Qualification: Saved the business time and money by passing only the highest quality leads along 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: 5 years 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%.
• Customer Relationships: 5 years experience creating and maintaining relationships with customers, improving their customer lifetime value by 10%.
• Direct Sales: 3 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% in 6 months.
• Negotiation: 2 years of experience negotiating with vendors to secure better prices on behalf of employer, saving more than $110,000.
• Sales Operations: Mentored and provided advice to new members of the sales team, ultimately helping them close 20% more deals at a rate 40% faster than before.
• Sales Analysis: 3 years of experience using business intelligence and data analytics to compare sales team performance to goals.
• Marketing Strategy: Spearheaded successful marketing strategies, including lead generation and prospect outreach strategies, for three distinct products.
• Microsoft Office Suite: Proficient in both the Microsoft Windows and MacOS versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.

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Education & Certifications

You should also be sure to include not just your education, but also any relevant certifications that 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 that you attended and the specific type of diploma that you received.

Higher Education

When including reference to your time at a higher education institution like a college or university, be sure to mention not just the institution that you attended but also your core area of study and the degree you received (Associates, Bachelors, 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—especially if they were related to sales, customer relationship building, lead generation, accounting management, public speaking, or similar concepts.

The reason for doing this is that it shows not just that you are a well-rounded individual, but also that you prioritize continuing education. You're always looking for opportunities to improve upon your current skills and hiring managers absolutely take notice of 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 unto themselves, meaning that 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, make sure that you're including any relevant experience for the position that you are applying for. Read the job description carefully and look at the actual requirements that are listed. Two companies may define something as seemingly simple as "Sales Representative" in two 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 in a natural way. This will help you get past any pre-screening software, and will help the hiring manager quickly see that you’re an ideal fit for the job.

In addition, when listing your past achievements as they pertain to 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% over 5 months. Including statistics turns a bland resume into a much more impressive one, that’s easier to quantify for a hiring manager.

Sales Representative Resume Examples

Once your resume is fully written or updated, you'll want to make sure that it’s properly formatted before you send it out. Hiring managers are busy, so you’ll need to rely on formatting measures to help the important content get seen first.

To make sure your formatting is on point, use a resume builder or resume template for help avoiding 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 the these cover letter and resume samples for ideas on formatting your own resume:

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Roles That Benefit From Cold Calling Experience

There is a wide range of roles that either 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 types of positions–even those as high up as the executive level and C-Suite.

The sad reality is that many people incorrectly write off cold calling as some type of "lesser" job responsibility when in reality, it’s a skill that should be promoted with pride. A salesperson that 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:

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