Senior Proposal Manager

Collinson Group; Greater London; On-site; GBP 60,000 - GBP 80,000; Full time

Job summary

A global bid management firm in Greater London seeks a Senior Proposal Manager to lead and manage strategic bids across regions. The role requires expertise in bid management, team leadership, and collaboration with various stakeholders. The ideal candidate will possess a degree in business or a related field, extensive experience managing high-value proposals, and strong communication skills. This position offers an opportunity to drive impactful bid processes within a dynamic environment.

Qualifications

• Extensive experience in bid management, proposal development, or a related role in a global organization.
• Proven experience managing cross-functional and geographically distributed teams.
• Expertise in leading high-value, complex bids with significant strategic importance.

Responsibilities

• Lead, mentor, and manage a global team of Proposal Managers.
• Oversee the end-to-end bid management process, including planning and submission.
• Develop comprehensive bid plans with clear timelines and deliverables.

Skills

Leadership and Team Management

Strategic Thinking

Project Management

Sales and Commercial Acumen

Communication Skills

Stakeholder Management

Attention to Detail

Adaptability

Education

Bachelor’s degree in business, marketing, or communications

Tools

Salesforce

SharePoint

Job description

Purpose of the job

The Senior Proposal Manager within the Win Centre plays a pivotal role in managing and delivering high-value, strategic bids across all regions and industries. This role focuses on driving a globally consistent bid process from initiation to submission, ensuring alignment with client requirements, business goals, and win strategies.

Responsibilities

• Team Leadership and Management: Lead, mentor, and manage a global team of Proposal Managers and Regional Commercial Support Managers, fostering a high-performance culture.
• Workload Management: Allocate and manage workloads among the team to ensure timely and high-quality delivery of bids and proposals.
• Bid Leadership: Lead large, high-value, and complex strategic bids.
• Proposal Oversight: Keep an overview of all ongoing proposals, bid and related activities that are currently being managed by the Win Centre. Report to leadership as required.
• Performance and Development: Establish clear performance goals and provide ongoing guidance, coaching, and professional development opportunities.
• Escalation Point: Act as an escalation point for team members, providing solutions for complex challenges.

• Win Centre Operations: Support the establishment and operationalization of the Win Centre, including defining processes, sales enablement tools, and governance frameworks.
• Operational Excellence: Ensure efficient day-to-day operations of the Win Centre, aligning efforts with global business development and account management strategies.
• Collaboration: Foster collaboration across regional and functional teams to ensure alignment and consistency in processes and outputs.

• Bid Strategy and Planning: Oversee the end-to-end bid management process, including planning, development, and submission of global bids.
• Strategy and Differentiation: Collaborate with business development, business solutions, account teams and other cross-functional stakeholders to define the bid strategy, win themes, and competitive differentiators.
• Bid Plans: Develop comprehensive bid plans with clear timelines, deliverables, and responsibilities for all stakeholders.

• Stakeholder Management: Coordinate cross-functional teams, including BD, marketing, product, pricing, legal, operations, and subject matter experts (SMEs), to gather inputs for bids.
• Relationship Building: Build and maintain strong relationships with senior leadership and key stakeholders across the organization.

• Proposal Development: Oversee the creation of high-quality proposals that address client requirements, align with value propositions, and differentiate positioning from competitors.
• Content Quality: Ensure proposal content is compelling, accurate, and tailored to client needs and evaluation criteria.
• Content Management: Oversee content management, using templates and repositories to streamline future bid submissions.
• Quality Checks: Review and quality check bid documents to ensure clarity, accuracy, and adherence to the client’s specifications.

• Compliance and Risk Management: Ensure all bids comply with client requirements, regulatory standards, and internal governance processes.
• Risk Mitigation: Identify and mitigate risks associated with bids, such as pricing, legal, and operational risks.

• Sales Excellence and Documentation: Collaborate with the BD leadership team to implement tools, processes, and strategies that enhance sales efficiency and effectiveness.
• Documentation: Develop and maintain documentation to support sales processes, including best practices, playbooks, and templates.
• Enablement Initiatives: Support the Regional Commercial Support Managers in driving sales enablement initiatives tailored to specific regional requirements.
• Branding and Materials: Closely work with Marketing teams to maintain an up-to-date library of branded templates and product marketing materials.
• Compliance Library: Work with SMEs to maintain library of standardized compliance and audit responses.

• Commercial and Pricing Support: Work with commercial finance and business development teams to develop competitive, profitable, and compliant pricing models.
• Pricing Alignment: Ensure alignment of pricing strategies with the overall value proposition and client expectations.

• Process Improvement: Identify opportunities for improving bid management processes, tools, and best practices.
• Content Repository: Develop and maintain a repository of reusable content, case studies, templates, and lessons learned from previous bids.
• Technology Enablement: Leverage available platforms and AI-based solutions to optimize and accelerate processes.

• Post-Bid Activities: Coordinate post-submission activities, including presentations, clarifications, and negotiations.
• Debriefs and Improvements: Conduct debriefs with clients and internal teams to gather feedback and identify areas for improvement in future bids.
• Insights: Monitor trends and insights across the sales operations and proposal management to inform process optimizations.

Knowledge, skills and experience required

Essential Qualifications and Experience

• Bachelor’s degree in business, marketing, communications, or a related field (MBA preferred).
• Extensive experience in bid management, proposal development, or a related role in a global organization.
• Proven experience managing cross-functional and geographically distributed teams.
• Expertise in leading high-value, complex bids with significant strategic importance.
• Familiarity with tools and platforms used in bid management (e.g., Salesforce, SharePoint, or specialized bid tools). Experience with AI-based tools is a plus.
• Strong understanding of financial services and travel sector.
• Proposal Management Professional certification is a plus.

• Essential Skills
• Leadership and Team Management: Proven ability to manage, mentor, and inspire diverse teams across global regions.
• Strategic Thinking: Ability to craft winning strategies and align proposals with business objectives.
• Project Management: Expertise in managing complex, multi-stakeholder projects with tight deadlines.
• Hands-On Expertise: Capable of taking the lead on large, high-value bids with complex requirements.
• Sales and Commercial Acumen: Understanding of sales cycles, pricing strategies, and commercial processes.
• Communication Skills: Strong written and verbal communication skills to articulate value propositions effectively.
• Stakeholder Management: Skilled at collaborating with diverse teams and managing multiple priorities.
• Attention to Detail: Meticulous in reviewing documents and ensuring compliance with requirements.
• Adaptability: Agile in managing bids across different regions, industries, and time zones.

Collinson is an equal opportunity employer and welcomes differences in all their forms including: colour, race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, neurodivergence, family status, age, individuals with disabilities and people from all backgrounds, cultures and experiences as we strongly believe this contributes to our on-going success.

We are focused on continually evolving our purpose driven, high performing culture, providing an environment where our people have the opportunity to achieve their full potential and do interesting and meaningful work. Our company values are: Take Action, Do the right thing, One team and Be insight led. These help guide everything we do internally in terms of how we think, act and interact, right through to how we deliver value to our customers and clients.

In your application, please feel free to note which pronouns you use (For example - she/her/hers, he/him/his, they/them/theirs, etc).

If you need any extra support during the interview process, then please email [e-mail]