Commercial Manager

Canadian Bearings Ltd.; Mississauga; On-site; CAD 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Canadian Bearings Ltd. is seeking an experienced Bid Desk Leader to own end-to-end RFQ/RFP processes and drive pricing governance. You will lead gate reviews, build cost-to-serve models, and ensure compliant, high-quality proposals for multi-year agreements across product categories.

The role emphasizes leadership, data-driven pricing, and cross-functional collaboration. The role requires building capabilities, maintaining service levels, and advancing automation in the bidding process to

Qualifications

• Seven or more years in commercial, pricing, bid management, contract or business development roles.
• At least three years in a leadership or process-ownership capacity.
• Experience building cost models and pricing decisions from them.
• Proven track record with multi-year agreements combining product supply and services.
• ERP/CRM experience, preferably NetSuite; BI and pricing systems knowledge.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end RFQ/RFP process from intake to outcome capture and escalation paths.
• Guarantee published response service levels by tier and manage backlog.
• Lead Gate 1-3 reviews with sponsor, win themes and resourced plans.
• Develop segmented pricing guidance with Finance and Pricing Analyst.
• Build and maintain activity-based cost-to-serve models for programs.
• Create defensible customer value cases and price within cost-to-serve corridors.
• Own proposal content library and ensure full tender compliance.
• Deliver monthly commercial performance reviews and quarterly competitive briefings.
• Lead, coach and develop the bid desk team; drive automation roadmap.

Skills

Bid management

Pricing strategy

Leadership

Data analysis

Financial modelling

ERP/CRM familiarity

AI tooling usage

Education

Bachelor's degree in business/engineering/supply chain

MBA or equivalent asset (not substitute for distribution experience)

APMP/PSM/CPSM/SCMP/PMP certification (Willing to obtain APMP)

Tools

NetSuite

HubSpot

BI dashboards

Job description

Own the end-to-end RFQ and RFP process from intake to outcome capture, including the tier routing rules, service levels and escalation paths.

Guarantee published response service levels by tier, and manage capacity, workload allocation and backlog to sustain them.

Maintain the process, capability and data-flow model in Blue Dolphin so the capability is documented, auditable and improvable.

Apply and enforce bid/no-bid qualification, protecting CB's pursuit capacity from work it cannot win or should not want.

Lead Gate 1, 2 and 3 reviews for RFP pursuits and Tier 3 bids, ensuring each pursuit has a named sponsor, win themes and a resourced plan.

Pricing and margin governance

Develop and maintain segmented pricing guidance by product category, velocity class, customer tier and competitive exposure, in partnership with Finance and the Pricing Analyst.

Enforce price floors and the delegation of authority; investigate and reduce margin leakage between quoted and realized margin.

Work with Supplier & Brand Management to improve cost position on competitive bids through Special Pricing Agreements and volume aggregation before conceding margin.

Service and program commercialization

Build and maintain activity-based cost-to-serve models for each CB program and MRO solution, with Finance.

Build defensible customer value cases from customer baseline data, and set service pricing within the corridor between cost-to-serve and quantified value.

Design commercial structures for multi-year agreements — term, escalation, tariff pass-through, rebates, gainshare, performance regimes, scope-change mechanisms and exit provisions.

Proposal quality and compliance

Own the proposal content library covering all CB programs, MRO solutions and technical support offerings, keeping it current and evidence-backed.

Ensure every formal submission is fully compliant with tender requirements; zero disqualifications on technicalities is the standard.

Run colour-team reviews on significant pursuits and hold the quality bar on what leaves the building.

Intelligence and learning

Own the win/loss repository, including data completeness, reason code integrity and competitive price observation capture.

Pursue customer debriefs on significant losses and wins, and convert them into coded, comparable records.

Deliver the monthly commercial performance review and the quarterly competitive landscape briefing to the executive.

Leadership and capability building

Lead, coach and develop the bid desk team; build depth so the capability does not depend on any individual.

Establish and maintain internal service levels with SBM, Account Managers, program owners and Finance, and manage those interlocks actively.

Drive the technology and automation roadmap for the capability in partnership with IT, sequencing process discipline ahead of automation.

Handover and realization

Ensure structured handover of won contracts to program delivery and order management, with the value baseline, obligations and price books intact.

Track realized revenue and margin against what was quoted, and feed the variance back into pricing guidance.

Performance measures for the role

Quote turnaround time against SLA by tier — median and 90th percentile

Win rate on bid opportunities, by count and by value, RFQ and RFP tracked separately

Contract value won and service attach rate on multi-year agreements

Cost per quote and quotes processed per analyst

Win/loss data completeness and reason code integrity

Line automation rate — proportion of lines resolved without manual intervention

Qualifications

Education

Bachelor's degree in business, engineering, supply chain or a related discipline. An MBA or equivalent is an asset but not a substitute for distribution experience.

Professional certification in one or more of: APMP (proposal management), pricing management, CPSM/SCMP, Lean Six Sigma, or PMP. Willingness to obtain APMP within the first year is expected if not already held.

Experience — required

Seven or more years in commercial, pricing, bid management, contract or business development roles, with at least three in a leadership or process-ownership capacity.

Demonstrated ownership of a bid or proposal function in industrial distribution, MRO, manufacturing, engineered products or industrial services.

Proven track record constructing and winning multi-year agreements combining product supply with services, including their commercial structures.

Hands-on experience building cost models and pricing decisions from them — not merely applying a margin percentage supplied by someone else.

Experience operating within an ERP-based quoting environment and improving it.

Evidence of having improved a measurable commercial outcome: cycle time, win rate, margin, or cost per bid.

Experience — preferred

Familiarity with bearings, mechanical power transmission, motors and drives, fluid power, or adjacent industrial product categories.

Experience with public sector, mining, utility or large-enterprise formal tender processes.

Exposure to value-based or gainshare service pricing and the measurement discipline it requires.

Experience implementing pricing or CPQ technology.

Bilingual English/French, given CB's national footprint.

Technical skills

Advanced financial modelling: margin architecture, activity-based cost-to-serve, multi-year contract economics, sensitivity analysis.

Strong data fluency — able to interrogate large item and transaction datasets directly rather than waiting for reports.

ERP and CRM competence, ideally NetSuite; CRM/marketing automation exposure, ideally HubSpot.

Business intelligence and dashboard construction.

Process modelling and improvement methodology; comfort working within an enterprise architecture discipline.

Practical fluency with AI-assisted tooling for document handling, matching and drafting, alongside sound judgement about where it must not be trusted.