Nerves of steel help you handle even the most demanding stakeholders with composure. On top of that, you’re a strategic maestro, navigating your way through marketing campaigns and managing diverse teams with finesse.
Your work experience is enviable, but it takes more than a long list of past roles to create a cover letter and resume that impress recruiters.
We’ve got the resume advice to help you make yours almost as impressive as your leadership skills. Our director of business development resume templates are helping folks land six-figure jobs—here’s what you can do to score yours.
What Matters Most: Your Skills & Business Development Expertise
Your skills and work experience are two of the most important sections on your resume. With your extensive business development expertise, you’ve got a lot of ground to cover.
Your skills section is highly effective when executed correctly. Ask yourself: what are the most critical aspects of your job as a director of business development? The skills that directly aid you in those things are the ones that should end up on your resume.
Being generic doesn’t help, so avoid it like the plague. Skip the obvious “project management;” instead, specify things like financial projections, risk management, and market analysis.
9 best director of business development skills
- CRM Software
- Proposal Development
- Data Analysis
- Microsoft Excel
- Sales Projections
- Market Research
- Financial Forecasting
- Stakeholder Relations
- Customer Acquisition
Sample director of business development work experience bullet points
You’ve earned bragging rights when it comes to business development. From assembling and overseeing cross-functional teams to conducting complex analyses, the company’s financial success often rests on your shoulders.
You should have no problem filling out your work experience section on your professional resume template. In the same way you rely on data to help guide your financial and marketing decisions, leverage metrics to make your resume stand out.
Talk about your biggest wins. Mention revenue increases, surpassed sales targets, and strategic partnerships that advanced your company’s market presence.
Here’s how to do this:
- Led, developed, and executed marketing strategies to generate new business worth over $2M in revenue
- Managed cross-functional teams to streamline sales efforts across the company, improving operational efficiency by 37%
- Performed extensive market analysis to identify potential business risks, decreasing potential revenue loss by 13%
- Initiated partnership with a competing business, gaining over 20,000 new customers and increasing market share by 9%
Top 5 Tips for Your Director of Business Development Resume
- Match the industry
- Emphasize the right skill set and experience based on the industry you’re applying to and the business development job ad. If you want to work in banking, highlight your financial acumen and regulatory compliance; for a role in e-commerce, showcase your digital marketing skills.
- Demonstrate your leadership
- You’re a natural-born leader, and that’s part of what makes you a successful director of business development. Show off the success of the teams you’ve led by talking about the way you used Lean Six Sigma to streamline operations or developed a new training program that increased client acquisition by 15%.
- Don’t forget to include software
- After years of experience in business development, you’ve amassed an impressive list of software you’re familiar with. Drop some in your skills section and mention the rest throughout the resume. Some noteworthy tools include Salesforce, HubSpot, Tableau, QlikView, SurveyMonkey, Asana, and Google Workspace.
- Flaunt your financial gains
- The sum of your work usually comes down to this—financial gains and an increase in market influence for your company. Don’t be afraid to use specific figures as you talk about your monetary outcomes. Securing $500K in revenue will always sound impressive, and that’s what you want to achieve.
- Save your soft skills for the cover letter
- Did you know recruiters only skim a resume for around six seconds before moving on? This is why it’s best to save your soft skills, such as negotiation techniques or client retention, for later. Select eye-catching skills for your resume and then elaborate on them in the cover letter.
In a senior management role such as this, you can extend your resume to two pages if you have enough relevant experience to fill it out. However, we still recommend sticking to one page as you’ll see in all our sample resumes.
If you’re shorter on the experience side, then stick to adjacent roles, such as a project manager, financial analyst, or sales director.
Skills, work experience, education, and certifications are all important. It’s optional to add a career summary, highlighting your greatest achievements in business development and your plans for the future with your new company.
Your education is key, with most employers looking for bachelor’s or even master’s degrees, especially with an MBA. Certifications are helpful, too: add your CBDP, PMP, CBAP, PCM, and CSLP in a dedicated section.
