Bids Manager

Colliers has an exciting opportunity for a Bid Manager to join our London HQ based award-winning Bid team. This London-based role involves bid management on behalf of the Colliers UK business to win new business and retain business. The candidate must have a proven track record in timely management of competitive tenders, informal proposals and presentations through all bid stages, facilitating inputs from business lines. The successful candidate will provide expert support and advice to ensure high quality, competitive and consistent delivery is achieved by Colliers when tendering for business.

We are looking for an experienced Bid Manager, whose role will be responsible for providing strategic oversight and support to major new business pursuits and pitches.

Working with senior leaders across our business, the role is to strategically support the conversion of major new business opportunities - from strategic pre-positioning to major pitch strategy and execution. The role will help continuously elevate the broader business’ pitching skillset through best practice training and collaboration.

The overall objective of the role is to preposition our team, create best-in-class pitches contributing to increasing revenue and win-rate for the UK business. This role enables working with senior leaders across the business in a fast-paced and dynamic environment and is encouraged and empowered to bring news ideas, creativity, innovation, and process improvements.

The role reports to the Head of UK Bid Team and enjoys close collaboration with experts across our Marketing and Communications Team, Client Engagement, Research, and Business Development teams to help support any strategic bids.

Purpose

• Manage Competitive Tenders (professional services and transactional for public and private sectors) through all bid stages (from pre-qualification to debrief feedback), and compliance requirements, facilitating inputs from multiple business lines nationally and globally.
• Provide expert strategic bid advisory support to teams pitching for business ensuring quality and consistent delivery of deadlines on time, to meet Bid team’s financial targets and win-rate.
• Manage and develop client relationships in a proactive and professional manner.

• Manage the bid process through all pitch stages for key bids, including compliance and content delivery through collaboration with fee-earning teams, ensuring the bid is compelling, well-written, attractive and accurate.
• Bid writing expertise (content and formatting of documents) and strong attention to detail and compliance requirements, excellent English, writing and numerical skills in pricing mechanisms are essential.
• Coach business lines through all stages of the bid, providing them with tools and guidance.
• Use project management techniques to ensure a well-planned, organised, and controlled process, taking personal responsibility to drive the process forward.
• Ensure a clear win strategy for each bid (based on solid commercial awareness) and articulating it to the team in a convincing way.
• Partner with business lines to position key content messages and form a client-centric compelling story for qualified opportunities.
• Formulating effective relationships with clients (internal and external) at all levels; so that challenge and direction can be given ensuring the company’s approach is benefit-driven and client-focused.
• Excellent presentation skills and facilitating presentation rehearsals.
• Undertaking projects to develop tools, templates and commercial best practice.
• Share new and innovative ways of working to help improve Colliers’ approach to pitching and disseminating bid best practice, ensuring compliance.
• OJEU monitoring and Pursuits Tracker.
• Managing bid strategy meetings confidently.
• Collaborate with internal & external partners on client engagement events.
• Collaborate and align with the creative and design teams on design development.
• Manage pursuit tracker and OJEUs.

• 5+ years of commercial bids, business development, and/or marketing experience within the commercial real estate services industry.
• Results orientated: proven track record of delivering timely bids through all stages in both the private and public sectors ensuring compliance requirements.
• Strong leadership skills with the ability to inspire, motivate and influence key stakeholders to perform well in a pitch environment and maintain positive relationships with clients.

Exceptional project management skills and an ability to deal with several projects concurrently while successfully working to time-critical deadlines – not a strictly nine to five role – an understanding the deadline must be met and this requires some flexibility to hours worked