Business Development Manager Resume Sample

The first step toward your next job as a business development manager is writing a clear and cohesive resume that showcases your best management, sales, and marketing experience.

Follow these four tips to write a business development manager resume that starts things off well with a potential employer and earns you an interview.

1. Highlight your business and business development-related skills

Business development managers accumulate a range of skills over the course of their careers. Expanding sales opportunities requires creativity and a lot of hard work, so it’s normal for business developers to have a strong set of technical skills and soft skills.

Putting together a concise yet informative skills section is crucial if you want your business development resume to stand out to recruiters and employers. Communicate your strongest relevant skill-set in this section, and they’ll quickly know you’ve got the right background for the job.

Here are a few top skills for qualified business development managers to include in a resume skills section:

• Resource allocation
• Product demonstration
• Event planning
• Performance monitoring
• Organizational skills
• Strategic planning
• Data analysis
• Database management
• CRM software (Oracle Eloqua, Salesforce)
• Project management software (Confluence, Microsoft SharePoint, Oracle Primavera)
• Leadership skills
• Active listening
• Web development tools (Drupal, CSS, HTML)

2. Open with a resume summary highlighting your business development experience

A resume summary tells the recruiter, in a few sentences, the top achievements from your business development career. When written well, resume summaries provide a strong start to your resume by quickly establishing you as an accomplished and qualified candidate.

In business development, you must show employers your ability to connect with others (both clients and business partners), as well as how you’re able to communicate the worth of a potential business deal. The resume summary gives you a chance to highlight those abilities before the reader even dives into your actual experience section.

Here’s an example of a resume summary that quickly and effectively communicates qualifications to the employer:

Innovative business development manager with 6+ years of experience in home appliances and cosmetics environments. Expanded partnerships to 10+ new regions, improving overall sales targets by 24%. Directed launch of 12 new product lines, with total annual revenue of $1.3 billion.

3. Include strong business development manager action verbs

Adding action verbs at the start of a sentence captures the attention of the hiring manager with more engaging language. Use strong active verbs when describing your past achievements as a business development manager in both the experience section and resume summary to make the greatest impact on the reader.

Just be wary: redundant and passive verbs make your resume difficult to read (and boring). To avoid this problem, use language that’s easy to understand. Simple sentences and strong action verbs will present information in a clear and catchy way.

Here are some examples of strong resume action verbs relevant for a business development manager resume:

4. Add hard numbers to your achievements

As a business development manager, you’ll have to prove you can grow a client base and ultimately boost sales. The best way to prove you can create measurable success is by mixing hard data into your resume.

By putting your accomplishments into numeric terms, you’re providing facts to back up your claims and showing hiring managers exactly what you’re capable of bringing to their team.

Here’s one way to use numbers in your business development manager experience section:

Successfully developed 50+ profitable accounts, which improved client satisfaction, retention, and loyalty while increasing revenue by 25%