I meant coming from an academic job to a non-academic one. I'm doing well on the grant front, but I don't think that'll help me in getting a "normal" job.
There are three main ways for people to show their business value:
1. Absolute ability to add $ to the bottom line
2. Relative ability compared to others
3. Absolute technical skills
Academics transitioning to business do well focusing on 2 and 3, especially 2. If you show me that you were the top 1% of the top 1%, I'm going to be impressed.
One quick concrete example: a friend of mine got the top scholarship for graduate students at her school. This was worth maybe $7,000-not a huge amount in business terms. But it marked her as one of the two best out of 10,000 graduate students.
Most people would just put the name of the grant, but what's impressive is the fact that only .05% of applicants got the grant. Once she put that as the first line on her resume, she got significantly more call-backs.
Vis-a-vis the funding agencies, they generally have a set of concerns which are non-monetary, too, so meet them where they are.