Onboarding & management of Business Managers
Boost your Business Managers' success by making them love their job.
Hiring a good Business Manager isn't enough. You must also create conditions for them to learn their trade, progress, perform, and want to stay.
CoAct supports IT service companies, consulting firms, and engineering firms in the integration and management of their Business Managers.
25 questions · 5 dimensions · a score out of 100
Recruiting is just the beginning.
A junior may have potential, undertake several days of training, and perfectly understand the objectives expected of them.
This doesn't yet mean they know how to perform the job.
Can they independently prepare a prospecting session? Analyze an unsuccessful call? Qualify an opportunity? Prepare a candidate? Debrief a meeting? Understand why an action worked and decide what to do differently next time?
And above all: does their manager know how to help them improve in these situations?
Training imparts knowledge. Growing a Business Manager involves gradually transforming this knowledge into skills.
The 5 conditions of onboarding that foster progress.
We have structured our approach around five dimensions that evaluate an organization's real capacity to help junior Business Managers progress.
Structure the system
Define where you want to take the junior, prepare their path, clarify responsibilities, and prevent onboarding quality from depending solely on the manager to whom they report.
Build progression
Organize a true professionalization trajectory with stages, prerequisites, levels of autonomy, and a consistent pace.
Learn through experience
Observe, train, practice, repeat and gradually increase the complexity of situations encountered.
Organize managerial support
Provide the manager with the time, stance, and methods needed to observe, understand, and help progress.
Pilot progression and ownership
Make progress visible and enable the junior to gradually become an actor in their own 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 doesn't always come from the candidates.
It can come from how the company prepares for 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 a detailed maturity level for each of the five dimensions. You can then complete some information about your organization to receive a personalized analysis of your setup.
Onboarding sometimes starts before the first day.
The success of onboarding also depends on what you're looking for at the time of recruitment. CoAct can intervene from candidate selection to the first months on the job.
Assessment
Test the candidate's curiosity and coachability through exercises, situational scenarios, and debriefings.
Diagnosis
Evaluate the maturity of the current system and identify priorities.
Pathway
Define what the junior will need to be capable of and build the trajectory to achieve it.
Practical implementation
Transform knowledge into skills through experience.
Support
Help the manager fully play their role in the progress.
Progression
Measure achievements and steadily develop learning autonomy.
Managing a Business Manager doesn't consist of commenting on their KPIs.
An indicator might show that a result isn't meeting expectations. It rarely explains why.
If a Business Manager gets few meetings, it could be due to the volume of calls. But it could also be due to their targets, preparation, pitch, timing, ability to obtain a recommendation, or handling initial objections.
The manager's role is first to understand.
CoAct supports Business Managers' managers in observing practices, diagnosing difficulties, developing their colleagues' reasoning, and gradually adjusting their level of intervention.
Build. Do together. Temporarily take control.
Not all situations require the same level of involvement.
Build
Step back, diagnose a situation and design with the company a setup or new practices.
Ex. Rethink an integration path around expected skills and levels of autonomy.
Do together
Support managers and teams over several weeks or months to transform daily practices.
Ex. Observe real situations, work on debriefings, and gradually evolve managerial practices.
Temporarily take control
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. One must take responsibility and act.
CoAct also intervenes in management of transition in operational roles of Commercial Management, Business Unit Management, Operations Management, or Branch Management.
Situations can vary: a manager's departure, transformation period, rapid growth, reorganization, creation of an activity, or temporary need to secure a team.
These missions also allow CoAct to remain directly confronted with current operational realities of the fields we support.
BM-Coach
Extend support in daily life.
A commercial or managerial question rarely arises when training is scheduled.
BM-Coach provides Business Managers with training, resources, and an AI mentor directly usable against the situations they encounter.
BM-Coach can be used independently or extend CoAct's support.
An approach designed in the field and that remains there.
CoAct was founded by Frédéric Le Pennec after over twenty years in the consulting and services professions: Business Manager, sales team management, Commercial Management, Business Unit Management, and Branch Management.
He continues today to intervene directly in organizations, both to support their managers and teams and to temporarily assume operational responsibilities within the framework of management of transition missions.
This permanent connection with the field nourishes CoAct's 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 around onboarding and management of Business Managers. Some problems can already be solved with a good question, a clear method, or a directly usable grid.
Guide
IT service companies, stop hiring juniors… if you don't give them the conditions to succeed.
A guide dedicated to integrating junior Business Managers and the conditions that truly allow them to progress.
Let's talk about your Business Managers.
Do you want to challenge your onboarding, evolve your managers’ practices, or simply compare your situation with an external viewpoint?
A first 30-minute exchange is enough to understand the context and determine if CoAct can truly contribute something.
We start with your situation, not a sales presentation.