Onboarding & management of Business Managers
Boost the success of your Business Managers by making them love their job.
Recruiting a good Business Manager is not enough. You still need to create conditions for them to learn their job, progress, perform, and want to stay.
CoAct supports IT service companies, consulting firms, and engineering companies in integrating and managing their Business Managers.
25 questions · 5 dimensions · a score out of 100
Recruitment is just the beginning.
A junior may have potential, attend several days of training, and perfectly understand the objectives they are asked to achieve.
This does not yet mean they know how to perform the job.
Can they independently prepare a prospecting session? Analyze a failed call? Qualify an opportunity? Prepare a candidate? Debrief a meeting? Understand why an action worked and decide what to do differently next time?
And most importantly: does their manager know how to help them progress in these situations?
Training conveys knowledge. Growing a Business Manager means gradually transforming that knowledge into skills.
The 5 conditions of an onboarding that drives progress.
We structured our approach around five dimensions that allow evaluating an organization's actual capacity to progress its junior Business Managers.
Structure the system
Define where you want to take the junior, prepare their path, clarify responsibilities, and prevent the quality of onboarding from relying solely on the manager they are attached to.
Build progression
Organize a real professionalization trajectory with steps, prerequisites, autonomy levels, and a coherent rhythm.
Learn through experience
Observe, train, practice, repeat, and gradually increase the complexity of situations encountered.
Organize managerial support
Give the manager time, posture, and methods necessary to observe, understand, and foster progress.
Pilot progression and ownership
Make progression visible and enable the junior to gradually become an actor in their development.
Does your company truly provide juniors with the conditions to succeed?
Two companies recruiting the same profiles can achieve very different results.
The difference does not always come from the candidates.
It can come from how the company prepares their arrival, builds their learning, 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 get a personalized analysis of your system.
Onboarding sometimes starts before the first day.
The success of onboarding also depends on what you are looking for at the time of recruitment. CoAct can get involved from candidate selection to the first months of practicing the job.
Assessment
Test the candidate's curiosity and coachability through exercises, situations, and debriefings.
Diagnosis
Assess the maturity of the current system and identify priorities.
Path
Define what the junior should be capable of doing and build the trajectory to achieve it.
Practice
Transform knowledge into skills through experience.
Support
Help the manager fully play their role in the progression.
Progression
Measure acquisitions 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 there. It rarely explains why.
If a Business Manager gets few meetings, the issue might be the call volume. But it might also be from targets, preparation, pitch, chosen slots, ability to get a referral, or handling first objections.
The manager's role is first to understand.
CoAct supports Business Manager managers to help them observe practices, diagnose difficulties, develop their collaborators' reasoning, and gradually adjust their level of intervention.
Build. Do together. Temporarily take command.
Not all situations require the same level of involvement.
Build
Take a step back, diagnose a situation and design with the company a system or new practices.
Ex. Rethink an integration path around expected skills and levels of autonomy.
Do together
Support managers and teams for several weeks or months to change practices in daily life.
Ex. Observe real situations, work on debriefings, and gradually evolve managerial practices.
Temporarily take command
Directly assume operational responsibility when the company temporarily needs an experienced manager.
Ex. Lead an activity during a transition period.
Sometimes, support is not enough. We need to take the responsibility to do.
CoAct also intervenes in interim management in operational roles of Sales Direction, Business Unit Direction, Operations Direction, or Subsidiary Direction.
Situations can vary: manager departure, transformation period, rapid growth, reorganization, business creation, or temporary need to secure a team.
These missions also allow CoAct to stay directly confronted with current operational realities of the professions we support.
BM-Coach
Extend support in daily life.
A commercial or managerial question rarely arises when a training is scheduled.
BM-Coach provides Business Managers with training, resources, and an AI mentor that can be directly used in the situations they encounter.
BM-Coach can be used independently or extend a CoAct support.
An approach designed on the ground and that remains there.
CoAct was founded by Frédéric Le Pennec after more than twenty years in consulting and service professions: Business Manager, team management, Sales Direction, Business Unit Direction, and Subsidiary Direction.
He continues today to intervene directly in organizations, both to support their managers and teams and to temporarily take operational responsibilities as part of interim management missions.
This permanent proximity to the field feeds the CoAct approach: a method only matters if it works in the company's reality.
Also share what can be used without us.
We regularly publish analyses, methods, and tools around onboarding and management of Business Managers. Some problems can already be solved with a good question, a clear method, or a directly usable framework.
Guide
IT service companies, do not hire juniors anymore… if you do not provide them with the conditions to succeed.
A guide dedicated to integrating junior Business Managers and the conditions that truly enable them to progress.
Let's talk about your Business Managers.
Do you want to challenge your onboarding, evolve your managers' practices, or simply confront your situation with an external perspective?
A first 30-minute exchange is enough to understand the context and determine if CoAct can really bring something.
We start with your situation, not with a sales presentation.