Breaking through the sales growth barrier can be tricky for any business that is ready to grow. To prepare yourself for the growth of your business, you need to ensure that your sales team is fully trained in the sales process so that they are prepared to handle growth. The following are some of the steps that you need to take in order to ensure that an effective sales process is in place and that your sales team is ready to handle the potential growth of your company.

• Continued Education: The sales landscape is constantly changing, which means that you need to adapt to keep up. Your sales personnel can only do so if they are continually learning. Encourage your sales team to stay up-to-date by at least reading one or two newly published books a year that are relevant to buyer behavior.
  
  
• Listen to Your Sales Team: Don't just lecture your sales team. Allow them to speak as well. People generally want to be heard before they will listen, and if you are willing to listen you are more likely to open up lines of communication between yourself and your sales personnel, which in turn can help to build trust, create a more positive environment, and help in the resolution of small problems.
  
  
• Educate via Storytelling: Storytelling is the most effective way to lead, sell, and communicate. Your sales team should learn how to communicate through storytelling. They can develop stories from customer experiences in order to help them engage with potential customers more effectively.
  
  
• Add Value: Your sales personnel need to learn how to show potential customers how products or services are of value to customers by relating how they can solve their specific issues. Basically, instead of harping on what a product or service can do, they need to focus on what a product or service can do to help the customer.
  
  
• Emphasize Proficiency: One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to focus on selling activities. If the sale conversions of a sales rep are low, doing more of the wrong activity isn't going to help boost those numbers. Instead, your sales reps need to be trained in how to become more proficient in asking questions and focusing on adding value in order to have a more positive effect on the customer decision-making process.
  
  
• Maintain Senior Management Involvement: By keeping senior management involved in the sales process, you'll provide more credibility, motivation, and accountability to your sales team.
  
  
• Use Multiple Teaching Methods: Not everybody learns the same way. When training your sales team, make use of several types of teaching methods. Some people are visual learners, some are auditory learners, and some require hands-on activity – such as roleplaying – to learn. Combine all of these styles of learning to ensure company-wide understanding.
  
  
• Use Repetition to Enforce Learning: When teaching certain sales concepts, repeat your key points so that your sales reps will not only remember them, but also take actions that are driven by these concepts.
  
  
• Hold Sales Reps Accountable: Your sales reps need to be held accountable for implementing new methodology and sales skills. Otherwise, the training was ineffective. To ensure accountability, you need to follow up on their training and provide continuous feedback.
  
  
• Be Customer-Aligned: Your sales team should focus on how customers want to buy and not on how they want to sell in order to better serve customers and more effectively meet sales goals.

Using these tips to train your sales team is an important part of establishing an effective sales process to handle the growth of your company.