Bid Manager

The following criteria are the desirable Bid Manager skills and experience, coupled with relevant knowledge, the right attitude and potential.

• Experience of successfully delivering bids, from early inception and client information capture, through PQQ and ITT stage, onto client interviews, feedback and lessons learnt.

• Experience of structured bid processes, for example the Shipley bid process, and using these to produce high quality bid submissions.

• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills with the ability to communicate well at all levels and in all forums from one-to-ones to group workshops and facilitation.

• Ability to maximise the use of tools such as Office365, MS Project, CRM, and industry recognised sales techniques such as Miller Heiman.

• Experience liaising with external and internal contacts at a range of levels.

• Commercial awareness/understanding.

• Commitment to quality and attention to detail.

For Internal Reference: Generic Job Description - Bid Manager.pdf

• Leads the Bid: Leads and manages all members of the bid team to work together to achieve a successful outcome (win).

• Win Strategy Articulation: Understands the win strategy and through analysis, articulates this to the bid team to develop a solution that aligns to Costain’s overall strategy and in turn maximises our chance of success.

• Informs Qualification: Supports the Opportunity Owner in the qualification of each opportunity using professionally facilitated lessons learnt, competitive analysis and win strategy development events.

• Capture Planning: Scheduling and co-ordinating activities necessary to identify client issues, hot buttons, win themes, price to win and proposed solution identifying any technical design, commercial and/or programme constraints.

• Bid Budgeting: Develops a bid budget for the lifecycle of the opportunity and thereafter monitoring/controlling expenditure against approved budget on an ongoing basis to remain within approved limits.

• Bid Planning: Develops a bid plan that supports the timely completion of all activities necessary to produce a compelling, assured and governed proposition and associated response documentation.

• Bid Resourcing: Identifies, organises and controls resources required to support bid production ensuring the delivery of quality contributions from all team members.

• Bid Initiation: Initiates the bid alongside the Opportunity Owner; through a formal kick-off event that engages all bid team members and supporting stakeholders and delivers a consistent understanding of who the client is, what the opportunity is, who we are competing against, how we are going to win, challenges faced, team roles and responsibilities, the plan to execute the win strategy and behaviours that all bid team members and supporting stakeholders are to exhibit.

• Proposition Development: Manages the bid team to ensure the proposition and underpinning solution is developed to comply with the client’s requirements and is aligned to the overall win strategy. Ensure the production of all relevant assurance and governance collateral in a timely, engaging manner to support review and subsequent approval.

• Response Development: Ensures the creation of exceptional client response documents through the holding of professionally facilitated storyboard events that both provide response structure and supports the articulation of win themes. Monitors the development of the response to support the timely completion of quality review events.

• Risk Management: Works with the Programme Lead to identify, analyse, respond and manage bid risks, assumptions and dependencies throughout the lifecycle of the bid enabling the informed completion of due diligence as necessary to support client engagement and subsequent contract negotiation.

• Contract Finalisation: Co-ordinates the negotiation and contract finalisation process, ensuring all activities are completed in a timely manner and in turn enabling the company to enter into an understood contractual agreement.

• Bid Closure & Handover: Manages the formal post contract handover to operations/assigned account team and ensures that a formal lessons learnt event is completed to improve future performance.

• Continuous Improvement: Ensures continuous improvement of bidding function through sharing of best practice, knowledge, experience and collateral.

Knowledge, Skills, and Experience

Essential

• Bid managers are quick on their feet and assertive, yet tactful, in motivating other members of the bid team to produce a successful submission. Time management, efficiency, the ability to meet deadlines and work with minimal supervision are all important. So are great leadership and teamwork skills – no one can produce a bid single-handedly.
• We’d like you to have proven capability in delivering winning consultancy or complex services opportunities. You’ll have plenty of bid campaign management experience, from opportunity identification through to project delivery, and will be able to provide valuable input into opportunity qualification, win strategies, commercial discussions, and solution design.
• You can cope with a substantial amount of responsibility and be comfortable working at director level, both internally and with clients. You’ll be fully conversant with the competitive marketplace, have sound commercial understanding, be able to manage complex, multi-workstream opportunities and have solid understanding of governance procedures.

Desirable

• Degree in relevant field or qualification equivalent