Bid Manager

3Pillar Global, we build breakthrough software products that power digital businesses. We are an innovative product development partner whose solutions drive rapid revenue, market share, and customer growth for industry leaders in Software and SaaS, Media and Publishing, Information Services, and Retail.

Our key differentiator is our Product Mindset. Our development teams focus on building for outcomes and all of our team members around the globe are trained on the Product Mindset’s core values – Minimize Time to Value, Solve For Need, and Excel at Change. Our teams apply this mindset to build digital products that are customer-facing and revenue-generating. Our business-minded approach to agile development ensures that we align to client goals from the earliest conceptual stages through market launch and beyond.

We are looking for a Bid Manager who drives the bid team and the business to develop compelling winning propositions that comply with our customers’ requirement yet do not compromise our high standards of corporate integrity. Manages all bidding activities in accordance with Winning Business Best Practices from initial customer contact through to contract signature including the development of bid strategy, plan and budget to enable submission of bid responses to requisite time, cost and quality standards.

In addition, manages the timely creation of compelling bid documentation utilizing storyboard and quality review events. These roles support and co-ordinate the preparation, planning, research and management of the proposal deliverables and authoring activities. Supports the overall Sales community by independently completing early bid phase (i.e. RFI/EOI/PQQ) submission documentation.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• 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 3Pillar's overall strategy and in turn maximizes our chances of success.
• Informs Qualification: Supports the Opportunity Owner in the qualification of each opportunity through the use of professionally facilitated lessons learnt, competitive analysis and win strategy development events.
• 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, organizes 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 behaviors 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 customer’s requirements and is aligned to the overall win strategy. Ensures 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 customer 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 to achieve scores of 4 or more when assessed against the Shipley best practice model or equivalent standard.
• Knowledge Management: Create and maintain knowledge base of articles to support the production of best in class proposal responses.
• Storyboard Development: Ensures the creation of exceptional customer response documents through the development of storyboards 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.
• Proposal Development: Manages the completion of proposal deliverables and authoring activities to achieve the milestones specified within the bid plan. Provides guidance, support and coaching to authors, resolves problems and ensures that the deadlines defined by the Bid Manager are met. Escalates or resolves any issues that affect progress to the Bid Manager as soon as they become apparent.
• Visuality: Manages the visual design of the proposal and ensures that all proposal graphics are designed to a common format.
• Risk Management: Works with the Program Lead to identify, analyze, 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 customer engagement and subsequent contract negotiation.
• Contract Finalization: Co-ordinates the negotiation and contract finalization 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: Ensure continuous improvement of bidding function through sharing of best practice, knowledge, experience and collateral.

KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS

• Proposal Quality- The quality of submitted proposals is assessed based on several critical factors, including their completeness, clarity, adherence to compliance standards, and alignment with client requirements.
• Internal Client Satisfaction - Feedback gathered from internal clients, including Sales Executives (SEs), Solutions Architects (SAs), and Subject Matter Experts (SMEs).
• Proposal Submission Rate - The combination of achieving a 100% on-time submission rate for bids and the total number of completed bids.
• Commitment to Team Development - Guiding and mentoring team members, sharing innovative strategies for proposal development, and introducing new techniques or technologies to enhance the bidding process collaboratively. Active participation in projects aimed at improving processes and tools.

REQUIREMENTS

• 5+ years in IT services industry
• 5+ years in bid and proposal management - focused on IT Outsourcing business
• 5+ years of managing and successfully winning large pursuits, $1-5M +
• Bachelor's degree a plus
• Excellent written and communications skills (English Native speaker). Ability to write new original proposal and sales content
• Deep knowledge of Bid and Proposal Management best practices (APMP and Shipley)
• Proficiency in project management (PMP training or certification), management of matrixed resource teams
• Excellent facilitator to Executive leadership and client leadership - articulate, professional, calm

COMPETENCIES

• Competent in using MS PowerPoint, MS Excel, MS Project, Adobe PDF, Graphics Packages
• Expert level MS Word
• Winning Business Best Practices
• Communication Skills
• IT Industry Knowledge
• Knowledge Management
• Managing Tasks
• Marketing Communications
• Preparing Bids and Tenders
• Proposal Content Production
• Proposal Management Techniques
• Proposal Tools Mastery

BENEFITS

• Team Building.
• End of the year party.
• Wellness Program (Medical service, Psychologist, gymnastics agreements, outdoor activities, financial talks and Soft Skills development).
• Family-friendly benefits and vacation time
• The flexibility of a software consulting environment; project variety, adapting to new business domains, and building complex applications
• Ability to flex your creativity muscle, and have your opinions heard
• A work culture where you'll look forward
• Free food and beverages during events like Thursday Night Socials
• Downtown Toronto location (easily accessible by public transit)