What are the most valuable skills for a car sales CV?
As a car salesperson, your CV offers a great chance to showcase your high sales figures, impressive results and the achievements you have brought to your previous employers. While lots of facts and figures are a huge benefit to your CV, recruiters will also want to know the skills you will bring with you, that will make you the perfect fit for their organisation.
So, what are the most valuable skills that you need to include for a car sales CV?
Relationship building
As you will already know as a salesperson, people buy from people. The ability to forge a strong relationship with a client so that they want to make a purchase with you shows your success in your career. Relationship building is not only the first impressions but continues long after the sale to make sure clients continue to buy from you in the future.
Demonstrating your skills in relationship building will require evidence of active listening, communication and the interpersonal skills that set you apart from others in the sales field. You can even include numbers relating to repeat buyers which can show your ability to build long-lasting relationships.
Product knowledge
As a successful salesperson, you will need an in-depth and intensive knowledge of the cars and services that your business offers. Deep product knowledge will prevent any awkward gaps in the sales process that can cause a client to change their mind. Instead, good product knowledge makes the whole sales process run smoothly, with clients seeing you as an expert, rather than a salesperson.
Extensive product knowledge shows your trustworthiness and experience; both are positive attributes that recruiters will want to see. Evidence your product knowledge skills by showing your past experience backed up with facts and figures. You can also impress by showing your product knowledge for the organisation you are applying for.
Persuasion
It is not always easy to ensure a client makes a purchase and your persuasion skills will be there to help secure as many sales as possible. Similarly, your sales CV will be there to persuade recruiters to interview you. With this in mind, treat your CV like a sales pitch, but for yourself.
Think about the key aspects you use when persuading clients, such as an in-depth knowledge of their requirements, the necessary language, convincing statistics and the personality you want your CV and cover letter to portray. Often you don’t have to state you have good persuasion skills. Instead, a persuasive CV can do the talking.
Negotiation
Straightaway, recruiters will be looking on your CV for evidence of your negotiation skills. With excellent negotiation skills, you offer an immediate benefit to the organisation, even if you are not let loose on sales immediately. With negotiation skills, you show your ability to secure sales and contract issues; you can also collaborate across the organisation and lead projects and teams.
Showing your ability to negotiate on your CV could be an example of securing a large order, making sales to a client who was having initial reservations, or offering discounts and incentives to make a sale.
Motivation
There will be times during any sales career where sales are difficult to make, whether that is an industry-wide problem or a run of bad luck. However, for any successful salesperson, the ability to stay motivated is crucial to ensure a drop in sales is a blip rather than a long-term problem that affects your confidence.
You can demonstrate your motivation by offering examples of what you have done to boost team morale in previous roles, different strategies you adopted to ensure the energy of the organisation remains high and tactics you have put in place when sales figures need a boost.
Andrew Fennell is the founder of CV writing advice website StandOut CV – he is a former recruitment consultant and contributes careers advice to websites like Business Insider, The Guardian and FastCompany.
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