Bid Manager

Role Overview

Due to continued growth, we have a fantastic opportunity for a Bid Manager to join our established pre-sales team to drive the growth and delivery of our formal bid management function.

The Bid Manager will take tactical ownership of the bid management function within Comms-care by harnessing their relevant service, product and industry knowledge to champion the creation of winning bid responses. The Bid Manager will be responsible for managing a bid response, supported by the wider team, through the entire life cycle from qualification to contract award, including value proposition / strategy development, solution development, commercial considerations, partner identification and risk management. Responsibilities include owning, maturing and ensuring compliance to the bid management governance framework and workflow. This is a highly networked role that requires an ability to work under pressure and to challenging deadlines, whilst also requiring strong people management and commercial skills.

Responsibilities
The principal responsibilities of the role include, but not limited to, the following:

Bid Management Governance

• Day-to-day ownership of the formal bid management governance framework and workflow
• Evolve and mature the bid management workflow and process
• Maintain the list of Service Owners and responsibilities for bid responses
• Ownership of the bid response library
• Ensure Service Owners maintain up-to-date model bid response inputs for their area of responsibility / expertise
• Evolve and maintain the organisations formal bid management tool
• Track all live bids through the formal bid response workflow
• Generate and issue bid response statistics to the management team (i.e. win rate and revenue)

Bid Response Workflow

• Validate new bid requests to confirm commercial viability for providing a bid response, along with ensuring availability of required bid response team
• Represent the Bid Management team on Opportunity Review sessions with the Bid Panel
• Create and manage virtual bid response team and inputs from a variety of stakeholders, typically involving contributions from pre-sales, sales, marketing, technical services, service delivery and finance
• Contribute to the written response - both in terms of content and presentation (such as preparation of a management summary and company overview)
• Work with the Bid Sponsor and Commercial team to prepare and review the commercial aspects of the bid, ensuring all services are included in the final price to the channel-partner
• Risk tracking and management throughout the bid response process
• Ensure timely delivery of compliant and commercially sound bid responses
• Ultimate responsibility for the quality of bid responses, ensuring they are commercially sound and aesthetically excellent
• Ensure bid responses are signed-off by the Bid Panel and submitted to the channel-partner in a timely manner and within agreed timescales
• Be involved in post bid reviews with channel-partner and end-customers to identify and action lessons learnt

Experience and Qualifications

Proven experience and capability in delivering winning IT services opportunities in the channel.  With experience in solutions and services and experience of bid management from opportunity identification through to project delivery handover, whilst providing invaluable input into opportunity qualification, win strategies, commercial discussions and solution design.

The ideal candidate will be familiar with break / fix maintenance, managed services and professional services that form a typical IT solution.

Must be comfortable working at CEO / Director level (internal and external customers). Will be fully conversant with the competitive marketplace, with a sound commercial understanding, P&L and risk management skills. Have the ability to manage complex, multi-workstream opportunities, with a solid understanding and implementation of internal governance procedures.

Knowledge, Skills and Characteristics

• Experience in a bid manager type role
• Commercially astute
• Excellent communicator both verbally and written
• Experienced, mature, influential, assertive and diplomatic
• Able to operate independently or as part of a larger team
• Able to network with industry peers and customers
• A flexible approach to work and prepared 'go the extra mile' to exceed expectations
• Applies knowledge and skills through handling complex problems