A VP of Sales breaks down what actually gets tech sales candidates noticed: clear career momentum through promotions, performance numbers with context instead of just quota percentages, and a honest story about learning from setbacks. Stack-ranking your results and showing growth from failures matters more than raw stats.
I've hired well over 100 account executives in my career, which means I have viewed thousands of resumes and LinkedIn profiles. I want to walk you through today the three things I'm looking for on your LinkedIn profile or resume to determine if there might be a fit in my org. The first thing I'm looking for is trajectory. Now, I'm fully aware that not everybody starts in the same place. You may have heard the phrase born on third base and thinks he hit a triple. I'm looking for progress over perfection. I'm much more impressed by somebody that started their career and not great companies and worked their way up to better companies and maximized their circumstances than I am the person that had a connection, landed a great job at a great company to begin with, and then has done very little with their circumstances since then. So to measure trajectory, I'm looking for either internal promotions showing that you're excelling in your environment, or moving to better companies over time. When people ask me, what does a better company mean? It's most definitely subjective. It depends on what your ultimate goal is. For a lot of sellers, it might mean moving into more technical type of sales roles, getting closer to the infrastructure aspect, which can be a trickier, more complex sell. It might mean bigger companies with more supporting resources to allow you to go close bigger deals. But regardless of what you want to do in your career, make sure that the companies you're choosing get you closer to your end goal. Because if I'm looking at a profile and I'm seeing somebody going to better companies or promoting within those companies, it's a great sign that they have momentum in their career. The second thing I'm looking for is stats and specificity matters. If I don't see details about your performance on your LinkedIn profile or especially in your resume, I assume you didn't think the work you did was worth sharing the performance. Now, to be super clear, the stats don't have to show that you're over quota. I am fully aware that times have been very hard in tech sales and at a lot of companies, very few sellers are even hitting quota. So what I'm less worried about is the absolute data percentage of quota. What I'm more interested in is comparative data. How did you do compared to other people on the same team within the same role, even with similar tenure? Because it's more impressive to have a seller that is at 85, 90% of quota at a company where maybe very few people are hitting so number two on their team at a 20 than somebody who's at 120% equota, but they're middle of the pack, they just ended up at a really great company or quotas were lower or it was an easier time. That comparative data is really helpful for me to understand how you're doing compared to other people in the similar space, because it's really hard to compare quoted performance across different companies. So again, comparative data very helpful. Stack ranking very helpful. And calling out your performance relative to other people in a similar situation gives me a true idea of how you're performing relative to the environment that you're in. The final aspect is story Careers are never linear. No one, no matter what you see on YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, wherever, no one is always having success. Not all the companies you join are going to be a good decision. You're going to have bad quarters, bad years, wrong companies, but where things went wrong. I want to hear what you learned and how you move forward. If you get laid off, put that on LinkedIn, explain what happened, explain that the downsizing that happened, and maybe even reflect on what you could have noticed about a company before joining to flag that risk. But the key here is to embrace the fact that careers are never going to be perfect. But I'm reviewing your profile, your resume. I'm wanting to understand across those more negative parts of the career, how you learned, how you progressed, and how you got through it to round out your profile. So as you're looking to stand out in a tough hiring market, focus on these areas. And I'm confident you'll sit in front of more hiring managers for interviews because they'll notice your trajectory, your stats, and your story. If you found this video helpful, let me know. I'm going the right direction by leaving a like on this video. Then if there are any questions or topics you want to make sure I cover in a future video, leave me a comment. I read all comments and I love recommendations that will help me help you sell more. Finally, don't forget to subscribe. Subscribe. That way you won't miss any of my upcoming content that I'm creating to help you improve the way that you sell.
