Companies fall short on that topic.

Those of you following us actively might notice that we strongly advocate for individuals to rely on themselves rather than on the company they work for.

It doesn't mean that your development solely relies on you.

Your company should invest in you to positively impact its business. The funding team, people partners and managers might feel morally responsible for your success and development. Many actually care and genuinely enable you.

But they kind of don't have any legal obligation.

It's also easy to be caught up on the day-to-day and deprioritize this topic.

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It has been estimated that more than 60% of companies don't have standard competency mapping for their talents.

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So, salespeople, how do you know where to focus on?

-If you don't know where you stand?

-If you don't know what's expected from you?

-And, more broadly, if you don't know what does the next step look like?

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It's about projecting yourself into your future self.

See a competency framework as a recipe for success.

It refers to the skills, attitudes, industry knowledge and process understanding required for the job.

It is generally composed of various levels of expectations, from junior to senior, from individual contributor to leader, from core skills to soft skills, from must-have to nice-to-have.

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Here's a template for Account Managers.

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There are many benefits in mapping your competencies:

• Rank and assess yourself,
• Identify your training needs,
• Lead factual conversations with your manager,
• Select side projects that fulfil your path,
• Network with professionals that could help you step up on particular aspects,
• Watch webinars, and listen to podcasts that tackle your specific needs.

In other words, it allows you to stay focused.

Having a competency framework is beneficial not only in your current role or even within your current company but also in preparing yourself to land your next big role.

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You could even supercharge your competency framework with the Sailboat exercise (link).

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A competency framework is not that hard to build.

If you're lucky and have a sales enablement team:

• A sales enabler can liaise with some Managers, People partners and a few Individual contributors. A collective approach is preferable.

If you don't have an enablement team:

• A Manager can build it from scratch and bulletproof it with their team and HR.
• An Individual contributor can make it and improve it with the manager. I would even argue that even if it's not an official one, at least, as a sales professional, you've created a map for your development and career.

No, what's really hard is that it doesn't have a direct and measurable impact on performance, at least on the short term.

It also requires allocating time and having various stakeholders agree on something.

But more importantly, communication with the teams might be scary for any organisation at first glance. As an employee, ticking all the competency framework boxes doesn't mean that you'll necessarily get a salary increase or a promotion. Every company has its respective budgets and politics on that matter.

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Lastly, mapping the competencies ease-up some of the most challenging aspects of being a manager or leading an org.

Here are a few practical benefits of having a competency framework from a manager's standpoint:

1. To assess your team competencies at desk,
2. To improve accountability and self-learning,
3. To guide and coach your talents accordingly,
4. To identify training needs, having specific goals in mind,
5. To build hiring scorecards, specific questions at each step of the hiring process
6. To hire the right talents based on missing skills,
7. To allocate the right talents to suitable projects,
8. To increase your employee satisfaction and tenure,
9. To improve your overall team performance.

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