Bid Manager

Role

• The Bid Manager will assemble and lead a virtual bid team to include the relevant product, service pre-sales, sales and other business functions to define, create and deliver winning Bids.
• The Bid Manager is responsible for developing and implementing bid procedures and processes which are fit for purpose for the business’s needs.
• This is a highly networked role that requires an ability to work under pressure and to challenging deadlines. It will require strong people management and influencing skills in a dynamic sales environment.

Core Responsibilities

• The Bid Manager owns the end-to-end bid process, including
• Pre-Bid Phase:
• The Bid manager will review requirements with stakeholders from Presales, Sales, consulting and Domain expertise according to a defined process set by the Bid manager and collect initial feedback.
• The bid manager will thereafter reconcile risks, opportunities and resource constraints to communicate a bid / no bid decision.
• The Bid Manager works with business stakeholders from Sales, Presales and Consulting to define and get buy-in on a bid win strategy.

Bid Preparation Phase:

• The Bid manager will define and communicate win themes based on the agreed upon bid rationale and win strategy to all stakeholders
• The Bid manager will prepare a customer requirement and ownership responsibility matrix to distribute sections of the bid to the corresponding stakeholders and track progress milestones.
• The Bid Manager will review submissions made against this matrix to ensure project phasing, implementation approach pricing, contracting, and terms are coherent with the defined win strategy and themes.
• The Bid manager will be the single point of contact between SAS and partners if the bid requires external communication.
• The Bid manager will consolidate internal submissions, review overall bid for coherency, formatting consistency and generate the draft submission for legal and pricing review.
• The Bid manager will govern overall bid process from ensuring necessary approvals are taken for special terms and conditions, and pricing discounts in alignment with authority ladders. The Bid manager will maintain a database of special conditions and approvals for every bid.
• Key Relationships and Success criteria
• The Bid Manager will share many of the objectives of the Account Manager (AM) and Sales Management. The Bid Manager will succeed by instilling rigor in key bid decisions, ensuring Bids are aligned to SAS’ business objectives and best practices are applied to key bids with the result that win rates will rise, costs of sale will reduce, sales cycles will shorten and implementation risks be better managed.
• The AM will retain full responsibility for the client relationship. The BM is custodian of the approved bid rationale and business-approved commercial parameters for the opportunity. Together with the technical lead, the AM and BM constitute the opportunity management team, through which all bid-related matters pass.