The Bid Manager leads Defense bid assessments, manages proposal development, collaborates with stakeholders, ensures compliance, and improves processes.
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Position overview
The Bid Manager owns the assessment of all Defense bids, identifies those that are viable, and makes recommendations about participation based on potential success. This role leads the internal and external bid process from assessments, through to submission, presentation, negotiation and evaluation. The Bid Manager collaborates with Sales, Marketing and other key stakeholders to develop clear positioning and strategy, works with cross functional teams to aggregate information, and prepares the commercial aspects of each bid, assessing its feasibility, ensuring all products / services are included in the final price and aligning resources to the customer’s requirements. This position also owns quality control prior to submission, creating and maintaining a library of content, ensuring continuous process improvement, and managing bids win-loss analysis. The Bid Manager role is focused primarily on Defense bids but also provides support to Commercial proposals and bids as required.
Role and responsibilities
- Manage the entire proposal development process, from RFP receipt and evaluation through document production and submission.
- Review and negotiate Terms & Conditions, Non-Disclosure Agreements etc. and coordinate responses to vendor assessments and questionnaires.
- Work with Sales, Marketing and other relevant leaders, to evaluate bid opportunities/RFPs, and develop a response strategy (including value proposition and win themes)
- Create a full proposal development lifecycle schedule per opportunity to ensure adequate time for writing, reviews, document preparation, and delivery
- Engage internal subject matter experts (SMEs) in a timely manner to solicit content and feedback as needed, allowing adequate time to respond. Edit this content and ask follow-up questions as needed to ensure full compliance with the RFP.
- Coordinate assurance /governance, approvals and export controls across the business, to ensure the bid response is compliant with corporate guidelines, management policies and legal requirements
- Draft and submit clarifications to RFP issuers to better understand and, if possible, shape requirements away from competitors
- Maintain version control, manage deadlines, and ensure final proposals meet all submission requirements
- Create processes, playbooks and content libraries to enable Advanced Navigation to scale its capacity.
- Advise on proposal best practices, and lead continuous improvement efforts encompassing process, content management, and other team priorities
- Own and manage government, customer and vendor portals as needed
- Proactively engage with Government contracting counterparts, in order to be responsive to customer requirements.
- Resolve multi-faceted contractual/customer issues as they arise, identify risks and propose mitigation strategies, and interface with Executive Leadership on complex contractual issues.
- Develop and maintain excellent customer relationships.
- Provide support to Commercial proposals and bids when required
Qualification, skills and experience
- 8+ years experience with the Government solicitation process
- Deep experience managing and winning competitive US Defense bids
- Knowledge of Defense procurement with, ideally, a mix of prime and subcontract experience
- In depth knowledge of all contract types, and FAR / DFAR experience
- Excellent writing skills with the ability to generate large documents on short timeline
- Knowledge of INS, MEMS, FOG and other navigation technologies
- Superb written capabilities and attention to detail
- Project management skills with the ability to mobilise cross-functional teams around a shared goal
- Proven ability to solicit and process information and data to solve complex problems and make sound decisions
- Interpersonal, collaboration and team-working skills, and the ability work with a diverse range of stakeholders including, but not limited to, sales, marketing, legal, engineering, program management, finance and exec leaders
- Ability to know when to act, when to consult and when to escalate
- Candidate must be a US Citizen
What are some of the benefits you will have access to?
You'll have access to industry-leading products with diverse applications within some of the most interesting and exciting projects worldwide. We’re growing a team of inspired, smart, and driven individuals from all sorts of backgrounds. With great opportunities for growth and variety, we strive to help each employee carve out the path that’s right for them.
Top Skills
Project Management
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