Pursuits Manager, Client Operations - Remote

Make a difference. Be happy. Grow your career.

The Pursuits Manager, Client Operations operates in a leadership role, partnering with client partnerships, business lines, finance, and operations teams to lead the development of complete, compliant, compelling, and winning pursuit deliverables. This individual is required to bring the right balance of leadership, project management, technical ability and sales acumen to successfully lead high quality pursuits. Pursuit management begins prior to request for proposal and continues until the contract is awarded with support for proposal development, orals presentations, responses to client questions, and best/revised offers.

• Manage the pursuit team in articulating the win strategy. Help capture and distribute customer/competitor intelligence, customer hot buttons, anticipated cost threshold, preferred solution and other background information.
• Create the pursuit development plan and monitor tasks to completion
• Skillfully interpret client requests for proposals or similar (RFx) and develop the proposal response strategy and approaches on individual opportunities
• Assess the RFx or other pursuit requirements to determine the appropriate proposal resources, process, and schedule to meet customer and internal standards
• Decompose and translate RFx requirements into the compliance matrix, proposal outline, and content plans. Annotate proposal outlines with the win strategy, themes, discriminators, source content, graphic concepts, and other writer guidance
• Establish, communicate, and manage the pursuit development and proposal production schedules; maintain and publish to the pursuit team an updated schedule as adjustments are made
• Assign pursuit responsibilities to pursuit support team members, including writing and reviewing assignments.
• Direct the use of various tools, work products, and techniques to direct the pursuit team to create documents, presentations, and other pursuit deliverables that fully execute the win strategy
• Lead pursuit phases, activities, and milestones (including, but not limited to, the kickoff meetings, data calls, storyboarding sessions, solution freeze, informal deliverable reviews, and collaborative writing sessions).
• Review active pursuit deliverables daily and coach contributors to meet their deadlines
• Conduct milestone readiness and color team reviews for pursuit deliverables. Develop the review recovery plan, communicate to contributors, and adjust the schedule accordingly to accommodate corrective actions
• Matrix-manage the pursuit team, including relationship leaders, content contributors, pricers, SMEs, legal reviewers, and approvers.
• Write and edit pursuit deliverable content. Update existing content when needed. Create standard pursuit content and templates for new solutions.
• Create and deliver writing and presentation training for pursuit team content contributors
• Conduct detailed white glove reviews of pursuit deliverable content, graphics, and formatting to prepare for production and delivery. Ensure adherence to any evaluation factors, comprehensiveness, and branding

• Manage and maintain pursuit content libraries, internal toolkit documents, and base pursuit templates

• Identify pursuit operations improvement opportunities and recommend solutions
• Serve other pursuit roles as required
• During proposal development, act on behalf of the opportunity owner or account owner in his or her absence

• Develop onboarding programs, prepare learning materials, and lead training courses for employees across the organization as needed for sales pursuits

Leadership

• Demonstrate Nordic's maxims with enthusiasm, optimism, and courage
• Effectively lead diverse teams of senior and junior personnel, provide constructive and appropriate performance assessments, and resolve disputes
• Foster a team-oriented culture rooted in respect, high ethics and integrity, camaraderie, collaboration and effective communication
• Create a team and culture of empowerment to support effective matrixed working relationships and complete high-quality client deliverables
• Manage rapid growth in a high-performance, relationship-oriented culture
• Motivate others to achieve results by modeling strong ability to successfully execute
• Convey a sense of urgency, acting quickly to seize opportunities and capitalize on trends, while changing tactics quickly in midstream to optimize results

Skills and Experience

• Bachelor's degree in marketing, communications, advertising or related field

• 8-10 years of experience in pursuit management, preferably leading proposals, orals, BAFOs, questionnaires, and other pursuit deliverables for both healthcare and IT to public sector and B2B clients.
• 5 years of experience as a pursuit manager.
• At least three years of experience leading complex, multi-service-line proposals and large (>$10m) proposals/RFx responses.

• Outstanding written and verbal communication skills. Advanced ability to write and edit documents and presentations.
• Experience leading proposal teams effectively, fairly, and respectfully to meet schedules and deadlines
• Ability to work often unpredictable schedules, including overtime, evenings, and weekends, and often over holidays
• Ability to conduct oneself with confidence and professionalism, including making sound decisions regarding pursuit strategies
• Understanding of industry-wide best practices in proposal management. Formal proposal management and project management training/certification preferred.
• Strong organizational skills, with attention to details
• Proficient with Microsoft Office tools. Expert in Word.
• Must demonstrate and embody Nordic's maxims

Additional Details

• Position may be located in Nordic's Home Office in Madison, WI or in a professional, home office setting
• Willingness to travel up to 10% of the time
• Must be accessible and available to perform work-related functions at any time, including nights and weekends, as needed