The Cover Letter: Make or Break for Breaking Into Medical Sales

Hello!  Happy Valentine's Day!  Keeping with the theme of love, I think you'll love the sample cover letter that I'm going to share with you.  You can plug your information right into it and get it (and your skills assessment checklist we discussed last week) right into the hands of medical sales hiring managers.  As a reminder, the skills assessment checklist is the tool I used to break into medical sales after a 6-year career in public relations.  Now, let's discuss how to incorporate the skills comparison checklist into your cover letter...

Let's face it, sales managers are inundated with resumes for open sales positions, and that's with candidates who have actual sales experience.  Therefore, it is critical to get their attention quickly before your resume goes into the recycle bin after not seeing "3-5 years' sales experience."

You went to all the work of completing the skills assessment checklist, so it is imperative that you walk a prospective hiring manager through it in your cover letter.  You will be able to do this in much more detail during an interview, but the first step is to get the interview!  So, we need to give them enough information to see that you are a viable candidate, even without previous medical sales experience.  

Before I show you an example, I'm going to go over a few additional musts to include in your cover letter.  First, you must answer the following three questions.  1) Why me?  2) Why now? and 3) Why this position/company? (P.S. you want to make sure you answer these during an interview as well.)  Second, it is important to pull key words directly from the job posting because many companies use key word search engines to scan for candidates.  A few additional key words to include (if applicable) for medical sales positions could be "account manager," "territory manager," "award" and "quota."

Below is a cover letter template that you can use to incorporate your skills assessment checklist to tell your story.  This sample requires you to fill in your own personal information in several places, both from your current experience as well as the position you are applying for.  But the bones are there for you to take and run with.  

Boom!  Let me know what you think.  And if you need/want some 1-on-1 coaching, book a session under "coaching" on my website, www.primetimesellers.com.  I wish you the best of luck!  You've got this!  Until next week...

Cathy