Onboarding & management of Business Managers
Boost your Business Managers' success by making them love their job.
Recruiting a good Business Manager is not enough. It's also necessary to create the conditions for them to learn their job, progress, perform, and want to stay.
CoAct assists consulting and engineering companies in integrating and managing their Business Managers.
25 questions · 5 dimensions · a score out of 100
Recruiting is just the beginning.
A junior may have potential, go through several days of training, and perfectly understand the objectives they are asked to achieve.
This does not yet mean they know how to do the job.
Do they know how to prepare a prospecting session alone? Analyze a call that didn't work out? Qualify an opportunity? Prepare a candidate? Debrief a meeting? Understand why an action worked and decide what they will do differently next time?
And most importantly: does their manager know how to help them progress in these situations?
Training transfers knowledge. Growing a Business Manager involves progressively transforming that knowledge into skills.
The 5 conditions of onboarding that fosters progress.
We structured our approach around five dimensions that allow evaluating an organization's real capacity to advance their junior Business Managers.
Structure the system
Define where you want to take the junior, plan their journey, clarify responsibilities, and avoid the quality of onboarding depending solely on their assigned manager.
Build the progression
Organize a genuine professionalization path with stages, prerequisites, levels of autonomy, and a coherent pace.
Facilitate learning through experience
Observe, train, practice, repeat, and gradually increase the complexity of encountered situations.
Organize managerial support
Provide the manager with the time, posture, and necessary methods to observe, understand, and foster progress.
Monitor the progression and ownership
Make progression visible and allow the junior to gradually become an active participant in their own development.
Does your company truly give juniors the conditions to succeed?
Two companies recruiting the same profiles can achieve very different results.
The difference doesn't always come from the candidates.
It can stem from how the company prepares their arrival, builds their learning experiences, exposes them to the field, involves their managers, and tracks their progress.
At the end of the questionnaire, you immediately get your overall score and the details of your maturity level on each of the five dimensions. You can then complete some information about your organization to receive a customized analysis of your system.
Onboarding sometimes starts before the first day.
The success of onboarding also depends on what we aim for during recruitment. CoAct can be involved from candidate selection to the first months of job practice.
Assessment
Test, in particular, the candidate's curiosity and coachability through exercises, scenarios, and debriefings.
Diagnostic
Evaluate the current system's maturity and identify priorities.
Path
Define what the junior should be capable of and build the path to get there.
Practical application
Transform knowledge into skills through experience.
Support
Help the manager fully play their role in the progress.
Progression
Measure the achievements and gradually develop learning autonomy.
Managing a Business Manager is not about commenting on their KPIs.
An indicator can show that a result is not achieved. It rarely explains why.
If a Business Manager secures few meetings, the issue might be the call volume. But it could also be their targets, preparation, pitch, chosen time slots, ability to get a recommendation, or how they handle initial objections.
The manager's role is first to understand.
CoAct assists Business Manager managers in observing practices, diagnosing difficulties, developing their team's reasoning, and gradually adjusting their level of intervention.
Build. Do together. Temporarily take the lead.
Not all situations require the same level of involvement.
Build
Step back, diagnose a situation, and design a system or new practices with the company.
Ex. Reimagine an integration path around expected skills and levels of autonomy.
Do together
Support managers and teams for several weeks or months to transform daily practices.
Ex. Observe real situations, work on debriefings, and gradually evolve managerial practices.
Temporarily take the lead
Take on direct operational responsibility when the company temporarily needs an experienced manager.
Ex. Lead an activity during a transitional period.
Sometimes, supporting isn't enough. It's necessary to take responsibility for doing.
CoAct also intervenes in transitional management for operational roles like Commercial Director, Business Unit Director, Operations Director, or Subsidiary Director.
Situations can vary: a manager's departure, transformation phase, rapid growth, reorganization, business creation, or a temporary need to secure a team.
These missions also allow CoAct to stay directly confronted with the current operational realities of the professions we support.
BM-Coach
Extend daily support.
A commercial or managerial question rarely arises when a training session is scheduled.
BM-Coach provides Business Managers with training, resources, and an AI mentor readily available for the situations they encounter.
BM-Coach can be used independently or extend a CoAct support.
An approach designed on the ground and sustained there.
CoAct was founded by Frédéric Le Pennec after more than twenty years in consulting and services: Business Manager, commercial team management, Commercial Director, Business Unit Director, and Subsidiary Director.
He continues today to intervene directly in organizations, both to support their managers and teams and to temporarily assume operational responsibilities in transitional management missions.
This constant proximity to the field informs the CoAct approach: a method is only valuable if it works in the company's reality.
Also share what can be used without us.
We regularly publish analyses, methods, and tools about the onboarding and management of Business Managers. Some problems can be solved with a good question, a clear method, or a directly usable grid.
Guide
Consulting firms, don't hire juniors anymore… if you don't give them the conditions to succeed.
A guide dedicated to the integration of junior Business Managers and the conditions that genuinely enable them to progress.
Let's talk about your Business Managers.
Do you want to challenge your onboarding, evolve your managers' practices, or just confront your situation to an external perspective?
A first 30-minute exchange is enough to understand the context and determine if CoAct can genuinely add value.
We start with your situation, not a commercial presentation.