Stop Listing Your Job History. Start Selling Your Results.
If you're in sales or marketing and still writing your CV as a list of companies, job titles, and duties, you're making the job search harder than it needs to be - especially right now.
The market has changed
The UK job market in 2026 is tighter than it's been in years. Vacancies are down, unemployment is up, and there are now roughly 2.6 candidates for every open role. Hiring managers aren't short of applicants, they're short of time. When a recruiter or hiring manager is looking at 150 applications for one role, "responsible for managing client accounts and driving new business" tells them nothing. It could be twenty different people.
For sales and marketing roles specifically, the bar has risen further. Employers now expect to see measurable commercial impact such as pipeline growth, revenue influenced, cost of acquisition, retention… Not just a description of what the role involved. A CV built around duties reads like a job description. A CV built around results reads like proof.
Duties vs. results - the actual difference
Duty-led: "Responsible for managing a portfolio of key accounts and identifying new business opportunities."
Result-led: "Grew a portfolio of 40 key accounts by 22% YoY, and generated £380k in new business through targeted prospecting."
Same job. Completely different impression. The second version answers the only question a hiring manager actually has: if I hire this person, what will happen to my numbers?
Why this matters more for sales and marketing than most sectors
Sales and marketing are results disciplines by nature, commission, pipeline, ROI, conversion. If your CV doesn't reflect that, it undersells you before you've even had a conversation. It also puts you at a disadvantage against candidates who have taken the time to quantify their impact, and in a market with this many applicants per role, that gap is what gets you shortlisted or filtered out.
There's a practical reason too: a growing number of applications are screened by AI tools before a human ever sees them. Specific numbers, outcomes, and commercial language perform better in this kind of filtering than vague responsibility statements, another reason results-focused CVs are winning out over list-style ones.
How to make the shift
Quantify everything you can. Revenue, percentage growth, deal size, campaign performance, retention rate, team size managed. If a number exists, use it.
Lead with outcome, not activity. Start each bullet with what happened, not what you were "responsible for."
Be specific about your role in the result. "Contributed to a 15% increase in qualified leads through a rebuilt outbound sequence" is more credible than a vague team claim.
Cut anything that's just a description of the job. If a bullet could apply to anyone in that role, it's not doing any work for you.
The bigger picture
This isn't just a CV-writing tip, it reflects a genuine shift in how employers are hiring. In a more cautious, more competitive market, businesses are being more deliberate about who they bring in, and they're looking for evidence of commercial impact before they'll invest the time in an interview. A results-focused CV isn't about better formatting. It's about giving employers exactly the evidence they're now looking for, faster than the next candidate can.
If you're a sales or marketing professional putting a CV together in this market, the companies you're competing against are already making this shift. The safest move is to make it too.