After spending a couple of years jumping between different entry/junior level sales roles, as a sales professional, you will find yourself ready to step up in your career and start looking for a more senior-level role, like an Account Manager or similar. On that verge, you will find most of the job announcements have a requirement of a “proven record of success and achieving the targets”. Then you start asking yourself: well, how can I provide that exactly? Do I just send a cover letter with some success stories I had?
The answer is yes, you can do that. But most probably it will not be enough to convince the employer or the hiring manager since there is no proof for that story! In this article, I will present an idea to you on how you can prove your success stories in sales. But before that, let me tell you some of the advantages of having that proof of success or as we shall call it, your sales portfolio.
- You will need that portfolio especially if you are looking to step-up your career outside of the current organization where you are working. Most of the time it's much easier to get promoted to a senior-level in-house, because if you are looking for opportunities outside, the other organizations don’t know you and how good you are in sales. But if you have a portfolio in place, applying for a senior-level role outside your current organization will be as easy as getting promoted in-house, if not easier even!
- It will help you find your next job much faster and having a portfolio will give you a good shot to get to the interview for your next dream job where you can shine and close the deal!
- It will help you to evaluate your sales skills and understand the areas where you are really good, and what needs to be improved. Like do you have good success stories in building a strong long-lasting relationship with customers? If not, then you need to work on that to get some success stories and add them to your portfolio.
Now without further due, here is how to build a great portfolio:
First and the most important piece is that you need to continuously work and update your portfolio, because if you didn't, you will simply forget the success stories you had, and when the time comes, you will find your memory dry except for a couple of stories probably.
Second, you would need to have that portfolio online, so you can easily share it with anyone. You can create it with something as easy as a document on Google Docs or as an article on Medium, or if you have some skills and time, you can use online apps that can build customized online blogs, like WIX or Squarespace, to make it more compelling and engaging.
So, what are you going to add there exactly? Basically, you can add any success story you had, even if it’s a small one. Here are some ideas:
- Anytime you overachieve your sales target for a specific period. Share some numbers, like what was your target and what did you achieve. Also, you need to add some story on how you achieved that. Make the story compelling, you are a professional salesperson, so sell the story. But be careful to not oversell it!
- Anytime you manage to be a top performer in your team for a specific period, even if you didn’t achieve your targets for some reason. And remember to also add some numbers on how you are compared to the rest of the field and some short story on how you managed to do it.
- Anytime you get official recognition in your team or company for an achievement. You can share that by simply taking a screenshot or any other way, and also document more details around the achievement you had.
- Anytime you manage to build a good and lasting relationship with some customers. Share how did this impact your numbers and the business. Also, if you have some nice feedback from your customers, share it. Especially if you work in consultative selling.
Now imagine if every time you had a good achievement, you documented it down since your day one in sales! Your Portfolio and CV would be rock solid by now. I learned the importance of this the hard way, so that’s why I am sharing with you this article. Remember, it’s never too late, so start today!
Finally, here are some important notes to consider in your portfolio:
- Always make sure when you share any numbers, materials, or screenshots that you are not sharing something confidential! Usually, any revenue numbers are confidential, so use other matrices like conversion rates or something similar.
- Make sure you add a reference for every story you write, so it can be cross-validated by anyone and to make your stories trustworthy. The reference can be your manager for example. You can share his LinkedIn profile and it’s recommended that you inform him about doing that.
- Try to make your stories concise and have only 1 or 2 success stories in your portfolio that cover a specific sales skill or topic.
- Lastly, frequently update the portfolio and don’t be afraid to remove something from there if you got a better story or a bigger success that covers that same topic or sales skill.
Finally, I will leave you to it. Feel free to share some feedback about this with me, would love to hear from you. Good luck!?
