I have reviewed thousands of CVs over the course of my career, first as a hiring manager at Oracle and now as the founder of Imoye Academy. The pattern I see in the majority of applications for tech sales roles , from Lagos to Nairobi to London , is consistent and consistently wrong. Candidates list what they were responsible for. They describe tasks. They write in passive constructions. They fill three pages with activity and leave no room for outcomes.
A hiring manager reviewing your CV for a tech sales role does not want to know that you "managed relationships with key accounts." They want to know that you grew those accounts by 40 percent over eighteen months. They do not want to know that you "participated in the sales process." They want to know that you closed twelve deals totalling 80 million naira in H2. The moment you understand that a tech sales CV is a commercial document , a record of proven commercial outcomes, not a list of job duties , your application transforms.
The Structure That Works
Before we get into language, let us talk about structure. For a tech sales role, I recommend the following layout: a concise professional summary (three to four lines, results-oriented), your core skills or methodology fluency, your work experience in reverse chronological order with quantified achievements for each role, and your education. That is it. Two pages maximum. One page if you have less than five years of experience.
The professional summary is where most candidates make their first mistake. They write something generic: "Results-driven sales professional with a passion for technology and a track record of success." That sentence tells me nothing. Every candidate writes some version of it. Replace it with something specific: "AE with four years in B2B SaaS, consistently 90 to 110 percent of quota, specialising in fintech and financial services verticals in West Africa." That sentence tells me who you are, what you sell, how well you sell it, and where you sell it. Now I want to keep reading.
For the skills section, list the methodologies you actually know and use. SPIN, MEDDIC, NEPQ, Challenger , whichever applies. List the CRM tools you are fluent in: Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho. List any relevant technical knowledge. But do not pad this section with soft skills , "excellent communicator," "team player," "self-motivated" , these phrases are meaningless on a sales CV. If you were not an excellent communicator, you would not be in sales. Leave the obvious unsaid and use the space for something specific.
“A tech sales CV is not a job description. It is a commercial document. Every line should answer the question: what did this person actually produce?”
Writing Bullet Points That Actually Land
Each bullet point under your work experience should follow a simple formula: Action verb + what you did + the quantified result. "Generated 45 qualified meetings per month through outbound sequences, contributing to 30 percent pipeline growth in Q3." "Closed six enterprise accounts across the banking vertical in H1 2025, totalling 120 million naira in ARR." "Reduced average sales cycle from 90 days to 65 days through improved discovery and earlier champion engagement."
If you do not have exact numbers , which is common, particularly in roles where access to data was limited , use ranges or relative measures. "Consistently ranked in the top 20 percent of the team by pipeline generated." "Increased account revenue by approximately 35 percent year-on-year." Approximations with honest qualifiers are far better than vague adjectives. Hiring managers understand that not everyone has access to precise CRM data, but they expect you to have some sense of your own impact.
For candidates who are transitioning into tech sales from another field, the same principle applies but the framing shifts slightly. You are not hiding that you have not had an explicit sales title , you are surfacing the commercial competencies embedded in roles that may not have been labelled as sales. Relationship management, pitching, revenue ownership, client acquisition , if you did any of these things in banking, consulting, or professional services, your experience is more transferable than you think. Write it that way.
What to Leave Off
Equal to knowing what to include is knowing what to omit. Do not include a photograph unless applying to a company in a market where it is specifically required , and in tech sales, it almost never is. Do not include references available on request, which takes up space and adds no information. Do not include hobbies unless they are genuinely relevant to the role (though "avid reader" almost never is). Do not include a full postal address , your city and country is sufficient.
More importantly: do not include roles that are not relevant and cannot be framed as relevant. If you worked in retail for six months before your first proper sales role, leave it off if it creates clutter. Every line on your CV should be there for a reason, and that reason should be visible to the hiring manager in thirty seconds. They are scanning, not reading, on the first pass. Make the scan rewarding.
Also omit the jargon that has been drained of meaning through overuse: "synergies," "stakeholder alignment," "value-added," "solutions-driven." These phrases make hiring managers' eyes glaze over. Replace them with specifics. "Aligned seven stakeholders across procurement, IT, and finance to close a 60 million naira deal in four months" is infinitely more compelling than "demonstrated stakeholder alignment skills." Specifics are credible. Generalisations are not.
Tailoring for the Role You Actually Want
The final step, and the one most candidates skip because it takes time, is tailoring your CV for each role you apply for. Not wholesale rewrites , smart, targeted adjustments. Read the job description carefully. Identify the two or three things they care about most (often buried in the "what you will bring" section rather than the headline). Make sure those things are visible in the first half of your CV.
If they are hiring for someone with fintech experience and you have it, lead with it. If they are hiring for someone who has worked with enterprise accounts and you have, say so explicitly in your summary. The more specific the match between what they are looking for and what they see on your first page, the more time they will spend reading the rest of it. A CV is a sales document, and like all sales documents, it needs to speak directly to the specific reader's specific problem, not to a hypothetical average reader.
For more on how to think about which role to target before you write your CV, start there. Your CV should be built around the specific role you are pursuing, and getting that targeting decision right is the prerequisite to writing a CV that works.
The LinkedIn Talent blog research on what recruiters look for in sales profiles consistently shows that quantified achievements, clear vertical focus, and methodology fluency are the three things that most reliably move a profile from the "maybe" pile to the "call" pile. Your CV and your LinkedIn profile should be aligned around these same signals.
“Your CV is not a history of where you have been. It is an argument for where you are going. Write it that way.”