Job level: 11
As Bid Director, you’ll hold end-to-end accountability for the successful submission of winning tenders, liaising with colleagues in growth and delivery to develop and produce win themes, top-scoring content; and managing the bid process to minimise impact on our business.
Most of our clients are in the UK public sector, with stringent requirements around compliance, and we operate in a highly competitive market, where differentiation comes with the slimmest of margins. Most of our delivery teams are engaged in client-facing activity throughout the week. You’ll be adept at rapidly immersing yourself in often lengthy bid documentation; using your public-sector commissioning/procurement experience to flag areas of concern or clarification early; and synthesising key requirements to bring busy client-facing colleagues up to speed quickly and easily.
You’ll work at pace, and thrive in a busy digital consulting environment with pressing deadlines. You’ll oversee the production and submission of bids/tenders, collaborating with colleagues across the business to engage their expertise. You’ll work proactively to develop great content, model answers and also support the wider development of colleagues outside the bid team so we build a network of future contributors.
You’ll translate the growth team’s win strategies and business objectives into smart, compelling, consistent, client-focused, error-free documents and presentations, project managing activity through department bid plans and escalating risk where required.
Dimensions
Budget: Bid budgets range from £50k to £50m
Problem Solving Responsibility and Complexity: Sales and bidding situations can require bid teams to navigate both simple and extremely complex problems. You must be able to demonstrate experience of a variety of different tender types. Including but not limited to, helping to develop proactive but simple presentation style proposals, short, word or character limited responses in rapid timescales (DOS 6 Framework for example) all the way up to longer term competitive dialogue type procedures.
Change Management Requirements: We are improving our growth-related practices, and this includes refreshing our bid governance (colour hat review and other commercial sign off processes), templates and training materials. You must be comfortable, and experienced in, helping to design and deliver new people-centred bidding practices which supports developing team members.
Internal / External Interactions: You’ll be required to work with people from across the business as well as partners/subcontractors. You should be skilled in adapting your communication and coaching style to effectively engage and bring out the best in all stakeholders.
Responsibilities
- Responsible for planning and managing all aspects of bids from qualification to final submission (which may include a pitch stage) , delivering agreed fit for purpose proposals on time and to extremely high quality and winning standards.
- Support the business development function through proposals and shaping of solutions/approaches
- Organises the agreement of competitively positioned commercials, the technical solution and the corresponding solution delivery model.
- Oversees our commercial and pricing approach into all of our bids
- Takes responsibility for the completion of bid pricing schedules in accordance with the agreed commercially reviewed figures.
- Writes, edits and reviews bid responses, or sections of bid responses, drawing on contributions as well as collateral.
- Ensures our brand values and high standards are embedded across all bid activity, including visual collateral that simplifies our win theme/approach etc to our clients
- Continually seeks innovative ways to improve bid team productivity, enhancement of collateral and procurement success rates.