Bid Manager (UK Public Sector)

Job Description:

At DXC Technology, we’re people first. Why? Because it’s people that get the job done.

We have a flexible, autonomous, and open work culture. It’s successful because we have character: we’re proactive, collaborative, and ambitious; we find solutions, set standards, and make things happen. We’re focused on the future, so we keep our employees at the cutting-edge of their fields with personalized training programs. At DXC, you’ll find opportunities that match your efforts, and a team of good people to inspire you and recognize the important work you do.

We are currently looking for a UK Public Sector experienced Bid Manager to join our growing team.

The Bid Manager plays a crucial role in the pursuit process, aiming to achieve a successful outcome by utilizing project management techniques, specialized skills, and various approaches and tools.

The Bid Manager contributes to deal qualification and shaping activities, and engagement with the client. Performs an active role in the definition, communication, and execution of the sales strategy and the opportunity close plan. Provides leadership by applying internal DXC best practices and guiding the bid team and other stakeholders throughout the pursuit lifecycle.  Strikes a balance between the goals of increasing sales, safeguarding DXC’s business interests, and meeting the needs of both internal and external stakeholders.

Scope of work and responsibilities

Deal Qualification, Shaping and Strategy Development

Objective: To help ensure the company can quickly but properly understand, assess, and qualify the sales opportunity.

• Where engaged in the early sales stages, Bid Manager works with Sales and the initial bid team to facilitate deal shaping.
• Supports the development and messaging of the sales strategy.
• Research competitive landscape, analyses information to help refine and inform sales and solution strategy.
• Helps organise sales and solution strategy, deal qualification and best practice sessions, facilitating these as required.
• Supports the opportunity owner in synthesizing information and preparing relevant materials.
• Supports the opportunity owner in ensuring SFDC data quality, and that the key sections, including the Sales Tools, are populated, adequately representing the deal.
• Supports socialisation and positioning in support of a qualification decision.
• Has focus on deal construct and qualification parameters in support of continual qualification.

Pursuit Management

Objective: To successfully manage the pursuit process in compliance with company policies and processes, effectively using the available resources.

• Accountable for the detailed bid plan, its estimation, communication, replanning, progress tracking, achievement of milestones. In cooperation with the opportunity owner, develops and executes the close plan.
• Responsible for the identification of staffing required to deliver to plan to include estimation of effort, requests for engagement using appropriate processes and tools.
• Takes responsibility for flagging any resourcing gaps and seeking support to resolve.
• Initiates and oversees the engagement of Supply Chain, HR, Legal, Pricing and other functional support. Adapts bid plan to resource availability as necessary, rearranging tasks and priorities to achieve the best outcome.
• Accountable for identification, management and mitigation of pursuit risks. Resolves issues, removes barriers, takes prioritisation decisions. Escalates issues within the organisation as appropriate.
• Responsible for managing the pursuit through the sales process, ensuring end-to-end compliance with the current company processes and corporate policies, and engaging stakeholders and securing their support for this purpose.
• Responsible for identification, assignment and tracking of bid team actions and managing them to closure.
• Engages with partner companies and subcontractors, facilitates communication with bid team members.
• Provides direction and perspective across all workstreams.

Team Leadership

Objective: To build and lead a coherent pursuit team to achieve common objectives.

• Builds and manages multi-disciplined, geographically disperse, high-performing bid teams.
• Undertakes effective onboarding of new team members.
• Defines and drives the priorities and activities of team members. Maintains regular cadence of calls and reviews, checks progress, provides updates to the team.
• Leads team members to a common set of goals and deliverables.
• Challenges and coaches the team members in support of quality outcomes.

Management of Response Documents

Objective: To successfully manage the process of drafting, reviewing, finalising, and submitting quality proposal documents to clients.

• Closely works with Proposal Manager and, where a Proposal Manager has not been assigned to the opportunity, executes that role. Co-ordinates work of Graphic Designer and Proposal Writer.
• Coordinates activities related to clarifications (CQs) and their responses, to the client and from the client.
• Ensures completion of the qualification sections of response documents.
• Ensures that roles and responsibilities are understood for response development and that content development milestones are communicated and achieved.
• Supports drafting, reviews and submission of the proposal to the client, and for the compliance of the proposal to customer’s procurement requirements.
• Has an active and direct impact on the overall response quality.
• Facilitates best practice events in support of response production and quality.

Engagement with Clients

Objective: To effectively engage with potential clients in the sales process.

• Takes part in building and maintaining relationship between DXC and the client, aligning the procurement objectives and timeline with the client, and supports sales in this process.
• Research client to understand business objectives and challenges.
• Owns formal communication channels with the client.
• Owns the exchange and repository of documents and information received from or sent to clients.
• Supports the bid team in organising, preparing for, and running the events with the client.

Negotiations and Close Down Activities

Objective: To successfully manage the final stages of the sales process, leading to contract signature and start-up of the service delivery.

• Supports the bid team during pre-contract stages (negotiations) in preparing documents, organising events and resourcing the team as required.
• Supports negotiation sessions with clients with responsibility for tracking actions and agreements.
• Engages account start-up resources as part of bid team in readiness for post contract activities.
• Owns and organises the handover to the account and delivery teams.
• Submits proposal material and other reusable content to knowledge management repositories.
• Facilitates and drives team and individual recognition activities and performance feedback.
• Ensures proper records management for audit purposes.
• Participates in win/loss assessment and takes the lead in running a "lessons learned" session for the bid team and stakeholders.

Key competencies

Leadership: Possesses a set of hard and soft skills required to build and lead geographically dispersed, multi-disciplined bid teams, using and fostering the talents of each team member. Can demonstrate flexibility and resilience, adapting quickly to changing circumstances while keeping the team focused on the goals and deliverables. Rises to the challenges of roadblocks and red tape and shows leadership in navigating such issues. Effectively manages specific situations and requirements of bid team members and other stakeholders. Works well under pressure, to very tight deadlines but leads the team with empathy and understanding of each team member's situation.

Customer focus: Demonstrates focus on the customer. Understands business and technical objectives of the customer; can understand and articulate customer problems, objectives, and requirements. Builds customer trust and engagement.

Business acumen: Applies business acumen and commercial awareness to, demonstrates strategic thinking. Applies industry or regional knowledge and experience to help strategy development, procurement engagement and response development.

Governance, tools, processes, and methodologies: Has detailed understanding of governance requirements.  Has relevant engagement and response experience and knowledge of the tools to be used by the pursuit team, relevant company processes and practices. Applies detailed knowledge of project management and bid management disciplines.

Communication: Strong communicator, orally and in writing, tailoring the methods and means to the audience. Able to persuade and convince. Has the ability to facilitate sessions including best practice events. Is a single point of contact for the bid for all stakeholders and customers.

Functional and technical competence: Possesses and applies broad knowledge of the technical, solution (offerings), legal, commercial, and financial aspects of a pursuit. Able to identify the required team member competences and address any gaps.

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