Inside Sales Representative Must-Have Resume Skills and Keywords

Are you interested in improving your job outlook and increasing your salary? How can you demonstrate that you are the most qualified candidate for an Inside Sales Representative position? Of course continuing to gain experience working as an Inside Sales Representative may be your best qualification, but there are other ways you can also develop your skills, like continuing education or volunteer opportunities. More immediately, however, you can be ready for your next opportunity or promotion by educating yourself about the duties, responsibilities, and required skills of an Inside Sales Representative and making sure your resume reflects your experience properly.

In order to do so, you’ll want to know that both employers hiring for an Inside Sales Representative and those who list the position of Inside Sales Representative on their resumes predominantly feature Inside Sales and Customer Service as the most common and important terms, respectively. But the list quickly begins to diverge with resumes showing MS Office, Scheduling and CRM at positions three, four and five, while job listings show a different pattern. Do you know what you would list?

We designed the ZipRecruiter Career Keyword Mapper to help you solve this problem and hopefully improve your resume. Using machine learning tools paired with industry research, our Marketplace Research Team helped analyze millions of job postings and resumes to identify the most important keywords related to Inside Sales Representative jobs. Our goal is to help you discover opportunities to improve your resume or to help you understand what skills and qualifications you need to be an Inside Sales Representative or to advance your career into beyond this role.

The top three keywords employers use in Inside Sales Representative job descriptions are Inside Sales appearing in 29.38% of postings, Customer Service 14.19%, and Communication Skills appearing in 10.33%. 53.9% of Inside Sales Representative job postings have at least one of these terms indicating the value employers place commonly place on these experiences when hiring candidates. CRM, Sales Experience and MS Office are still quite important, but a smaller sliceof the employer Inside Sales Representative job postings with their combined total of 23.12%. At 22.97%, Collaboration, Innovation, Technical, and Detail Oriented appear far less frequently, but are still a significant portion of the 10 top Inside Sales Representative skills and requirements according to employers.

The top three keywords people who held Inside Sales Representative descriptions listed on their resumes are Inside Sales (appearing on 23.11%), Customer Service (appearing on 20.14%), and MS Office (appearing on 9.23%). 52.48% of resumes with Inside Sales Representative descriptions have at least one of these terms. The Resume Checklist will help you make sense of whether or not employers are also demanding these skills. Scheduling, CRM, and Communication Skills are still quite common, and a respectable share of skills found on resumes for Inside Sales Representative with 21.34% of the total. At 26.18%, Collaboration, Technical, Accountable, and Account Management appear far less frequently, but are still a significant portion of the 10 top Inside Sales Representative skills and qualifications found on resumes.

Here is a simple table of the top 10 skills and qualifications as listed by employers in Inside Sales Representative job postings since January of 2018, followed by the top 10 skills and qualifications most commonly listed by people who held the title of Inside Sales Representative on their resumes.

Our Resume Keyword Checklist is based upon an analysis of the most commonly found terms within both job descriptions and resumes for Inside Sales Representative roles. Our algorithm helps isolate phrases and patterns to identify the most frequently recurring and reused keywords from each data source, while correcting for uncommon and outlier results. Various heuristic methodologies are then applied to ultimately create two top 20 lists of the most important and significant skills, certificates and requirements found within Inside Sales Representative job postings and resumes. We then merge the two lists together and use a combination of statistics and rules-based scenarios to create a list that is audited by the Marketplace Research team, and finally turned into the checklist you see below. Our hope is that knowing this information can help you make your best impression with your next potential employer.

Employer job listings frequently list Flexibility, Build Rapport, Innovation or Sales Experience as requirements in Inside Sales Representative job descriptions; however, job seekers mention them far less frequently on their resumes. If you possess any or all of these experiences, including these keywords prominently on your resume when applying for an Inside Sales Representative role may help you stand out more to hiring managers.

Both employer job listings and resumes from people who’ve held the role of Inside Sales Representative tend to always include skills and requirements found in this list. Whether you’ve only got Communication Skills, Deal Closing, Outbound Calling, Inside Sales, Proactive, CRM, Multi Tasking, Auto Delivery, Relationship Management, Detail Oriented, Collaboration, Technical, MS Office, Database, Customer Service or Outlook in your background and experience, make sure to highlight the term prominently on your resume. As a job seeker you’ll be competing with many others who are bound to have as many as you (or more!) of these common resume keywords highlighted in their application for a job as an Inside Sales Representative.

Employer job listings rarely list Scheduling, Account Management or Vendor Management as important skills or qualifications in Inside Sales Representative job descriptions. Nevertheless, job seekers mention them much more commonly in their resumes. If you possess any or all of these experiences, including these keywords prominently on your resume when applying for an Inside Sales Representative role may go unnoticed or even discounted by hiring managers.

At ZipRecruiter, we understand better than anyone the importance of using the right keywords to describe your experience — it’s crucial to attracting the right employers! We built our business on the ability to effectively match job seekers with employers using AI-technology that understands your resume and how likely you are to be noticed by a potential future employer. Having a ZipRecruiter profile that showcases your most relevant skills and abilities can help you get recruited into a new role as an Inside Sales Representative. Get started on your journey with a new ZipRecruiter Profile today!