Sales Cover Letter Examples

Sales Cover Letter Template

Sales cover letter writing tips

Employers are always looking for sales professionals who understand how to close a deal while delivering an all-around exceptional customer experience.

If you want to impress a hiring manager and secure an interview, you’ll need to showcase that you have the right skills and experience to get the job done in your sales cover letter.

However, learning how to write a sales cover letter can be difficult. To help you get started writing and land your next job, we’ve included four professional writing tips and a sales cover letter template below.

1. Open your sales cover letter with a strong introduction

Show employers that you’re the perfect person to promote their products and services by starting your cover letter in a way that captures their attention.

A strong introduction on your sales cover letter will showcase your passion for the position, sales skill level, and knack for persuasive speaking.

Here are three tips for writing a strong sales cover letter introduction:

1. Prior to applying, research the company to learn about their brand and products. Demonstrating knowledge of the company’s available services in your cover letter shows employers you’re serious about the job and take initiative.
2. Lead with an impressive accomplishment so employers can visualize how your talents fit in with their business.
3. Write your sales cover letter in an active voice and use action verbs to make your achievements sound more impactful.

And here’s an example of a strong introduction for a sales cover letter:

As a frequent and longtime user of Greenplanet Software, I was thrilled to see an opening on LinkedIn for the Senior Sales Representative position at your Seattle headquarters. Having an excellent record for promoting products and services, and previously being awarded top sales associate of my region in 2020, I am confident that I would be a perfect fit for this role.

2. Draw your language directly from the job listing

You should ape the language used in the job ad to show employers you’ve tailored your cover letter specifically to the role they’re hiring for.

Take a close look at the job listing and highlight the exact words and phrases the company uses to describe what they’re looking for in a candidate.

Sales job ads often use common patterns of language. To help you out, we analyzed hundreds of real job listings for sales professionals to identify the most frequently used terms. Here’s what we found:

Use this table as a reference when writing your cover letter — incorporating these phrases (where relevant) can help you align your application with the employer’s expectations.

3. Highlight your sales skills

Employers rely heavily on their salespeople to communicate the value of their products or services to potential customers and bring in revenue. To convince them you’re the right person for the job, your cover letter needs to highlight your relevant sales skills.

Sales jobs are customer-centric, so to fully showcase your expertise, you should include a mix of hard and soft skills on your cover letter.

Here are some of the best sales skills to highlight in your cover letter:

However, you can’t simply list skills on a cover letter for a sales job. Instead, you’ll need to provide real-life examples in your cover letter that exhibit your skills, to give employers a clear sense of what you can contribute.

For example, in our sales cover letter, the application mentions that they “consistently gained respect from both staff and management through effective communication and liaison” and “exceeded targets while making strong efforts to foster profitable relationships with customers and strategic associates alike.”

Gaining respect from colleagues and management for effective communication shows that you possess great teamwork and communication skills, while exceeding targets and fostering relationships that are good for business communicates to the hiring manager that you take initiative and have great people skills.

Including details like these in your cover letter help illustrate how you put your sales skills to work to accomplish things at work.

4. Provide quantified examples of your achievements

The purpose of a cover letter is to support and provide further context for the information in your resume. An excellent way to do this is by listing examples of your previous accomplishments in the body paragraphs of your cover letter.

When listing accomplishments on your sales cover letter, you’ll want to show employers that you’re results-driven by using hard numbers to quantify your achievements.

Here’s an example of how to quantify your accomplishments on a sales cover letter:

For example, working as a Sales Assistant with TRP Insurance Inc., I ranked within the top 10 salespeople company-wide for 2 years in a row, and in my first year, I successfully expanded our customer account base by 18% through networking and client referrals. I was also awarded an “Outstanding Achievement’’ for increasing customer retention by 20% through developing and implementing a new customer loyalty program in 2020.

In the example paragraph above, the hiring will immediately notice these three quantified achievements:

Ranked within top 10 salespeople company-wide for 2 years

Expanded customer account base by 18% through networking and client referrals

Increased customer retention by 20% through developing and implementing a new customer loyalty program

Sales cover letter template

Finally, here’s a sales cover letter template that you can easily copy and paste into Microsoft Word or Google Docs: