You may include your best “guesstimate” of metrics if you’re comfortable doing so and you can support your claims in interview discussions about your actions, methods, and processes. You could also include a range of numbers, particularly if addressing multiple quarters or years. Going forward, keep careful records of your achievements so that the best of them can be communicated with confidence!

While numbers are important, you can still communicate your value by sharing qualitative results, like saving time or improving a process. Another approach is to use approximate numbers (indicate this clearly) or speak in general terms, such as “generated millions of dollars in sales.” As a recommended practice, maintain your own records of accomplishments and regularly update your materials.

There will be a little math involved to this solution – go off of the numbers you know. You should be given the details of your commission plan and the breakdown of your wages. Were you steady? Do you see an increase in your commission – meaning an increase in your productivity with the group? There will be some quantifying numbers that you would be able to use in your resume.

Sales group numbers are not the only numbers that one can add to a résumé to prove their value. Job seekers can also include the number of team members they may have managed, the number of phone calls per day they made to clients or prospective clients. Think of all daily tasks you performed for your last employer and see what can be converted to a number that proves your commitment.

If you don’t have access to your sales numbers, some tactics to consider for getting numbers on your resume are: conservatively extrapolate what sales you created/contributed to, focus on activity numbers you performed to move sales forward, outline how you measurably contributed to the sales process.

Bulleted accomplishments on a resume should have 3 parts to the story – situation, action, and result. That result can be quantitative or qualitative as long as you show impact. Did you increase sales/pipeline/area? How? Did you land a large/difficult account? Consider other numbers you can add (number of clients, size of territory/region) or use an estimate instead of an exact number.

In these situations, make do with what you have – did you save time, did you save money, did you improve a process, did you keep a major client that represented a certain percentage of their book of business? Did you land a certain number of accounts a month, even if you don’t know their value, well…how many accounts? How many customers do you interact with? How many cold calls do you do daily?