Bid Manager

Made Tech; Manchester; Hybrid; GBP 55,000 - 75,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

30 days Holiday

Flexible Working Hours

Flexible Parental Leave

Remote Working

Paid counselling

Job summary

Made Tech in Manchester is seeking an experienced Bid Manager to coordinate presales and proposal submissions. You’ll lead a bid leadership team with Client Partners and Industry Directors, ensuring responses align with our ethos while driving opportunities forward.

You’ll mentor junior colleagues, refine bid processes, facilitate workshops, and manage governance, content libraries, and social value integration.

Qualifications

• Experience in a bid or presales environment
• Direct experience of writing and reviewing proposals for new business
• Strong creative writing skills with an eye for detail
• Experience of coordinating teams
• An enthusiastic and effective communicator
• Empathy and the ability to build relationships quickly across teams and across the organisation.
• A proactive, roll-your-sleeves-up manner, with the ability to take ownership
• A passion to learn and develop yourself, alongside our wider processes

Responsibilities

• Work closely with Client Partners and Industry Directors, forming a bid leadership team to drive opportunities forward
• Ensure bids align with ethos, strengths and customer insight
• Coordinate teams, plan timelines, and hold team members accountable for their contributions to each bid
• Lead answer planning activities, including designing, running and facilitating bid workshops
• Manage bid governance coordination and qualification processes, including opportunity mailbox management
• Write, review, and provide constructive feedback throughout the bid process, supporting team members in producing high-quality written responses and presentations
• Engage with the commercial components of our submissions
• Take ownership of social value content and integration within bidding
• Maintain and continuously improve bid content libraries
• Manage smaller opportunities independently, with support from senior colleagues on more complex bids
• Actively contribute to our bid community of practice, participating in bid cop sessions and team meet-ups
• Drive continuous improvement through retrospectives, applying lessons learnt to enhance our bidding practices

Job description

Our aim at Made Tech is to use human-centred technology to improve our society. We believe putting people at the heart of designing, building and delivering public services leads to better outcomes for everyone.

About the role

Reporting to the Head of Bids and Frameworks, you'll manage bids from early presales to proposal submission, working as part of a dynamic, enthusiastic, and well-respected team that has a genuine passion for all things bids. As part of this exceptionally high-performing function, you’ll coordinate your teams to produce winning responses to multimillion-pound tenders, while developing your skills in an environment that champions continuous improvement and learning.

You’ll benefit from mentorship by our Senior and Lead Bid Managers, who will support you through increasingly complex opportunities as your experience grows. Beyond day-to-day bid delivery, you’ll contribute to our active bid community of practice, where you’ll find opportunities to practise and refine new skills: from process improvement and presenting, to peer reviewing and cross-team collaboration.

This is an exciting opportunity to join one of Made Tech's most critical functions, where you’ll be part of a collaborative team as committed to your development as we are to delivering winning bids.

Key responsibilities

• Work closely with our Client Partners and Industry Directors, forming a bid leadership team to drive opportunities forward.
• Ensure bids align with our ethos, strengths and customer insight.
• Coordinate teams, plan timelines, and hold team members accountable for their contributions to each bid.
• Lead answer planning activities, including designing, running and facilitating bid workshops.
• Manage bid governance coordination and qualification processes, including opportunity mailbox management.
• Write, review, and provide constructive feedback throughout the bid process, supporting team members in producing high-quality written responses and presentations.
• Engage with the commercial components of our submissions.
• Take ownership of social value content and integration within bidding.
• Maintain and continuously improve bid content libraries.
• Manage smaller opportunities independently, with support from senior colleagues on more complex bids.
• Actively contribute to our bid community of practice, participating in bid cop sessions and team meet-ups.
• Drive continuous improvement through retrospectives, applying lessons learnt to enhance our bidding practices.

Key measures

• Win rate
• Bid team and stakeholder feedback
• Client, peer, and partner feedback

Skills, knowledge and expertise

• Experience in a bid or presales environment, in any sector
• Direct experience of writing and reviewing proposals for new business
• Strong creative writing skills with an eye for detail
• Experience of coordinating teams
• An enthusiastic and effective communicator
• Empathy and the ability to build relationships quickly across teams and across the organisation.
• A proactive, roll-your-sleeves-up manner, with the ability to take ownership, where problems emerge.
• A passion to learn and develop yourself, alongside our wider processes

Desirable (not essential) skills and experience

• Experience in B2B technology services or business process outsourcing
• Experience working in the UK public sector
• An understanding of agile methodologies and digital transformation, including user-centred design principles.
• Experience in planning and delivering successful workshops
• An understanding of social value initiatives and an ability to create and articulate them.

If you need this job description in another format, or other support in applying, please email [e-mail].

We believe we can use tech to make public services better. We also believe this can happen best when our own team represents the society that actually uses the services we work on. We’re collectively continuing to grow a culture that is happy, healthy, safe and inspiring for people of all backgrounds and experiences, so we encourage people from underrepresented groups to apply for roles with us.

When you apply, we’ll put you in touch with a member of our talent team who can help with any needs or adjustments we may need to make to help with your application. We’ve put together this blog as a resource to share more about reasonable adjustments and some examples of what this could include. We also welcome any feedback on how we can improve the experience for future candidates.

We’re committed to building a happy, inclusive and diverse workforce. You can get a sense of what it’s like working here from our blog, where we talk about mental health, communities of practice and neurodiversity (as well as our client work and best practice).

Like many organisations, we use Slack to foster a sense of community and connection. As well as special interest groups such as music, food and pets, we also have 10+ Slack channels dedicated to specific communities, allies, and identities as well as dedicated learning spaces called communities of practice (COPs). If you’d like to speak to someone from one of these groups about their experience as an employee, please do let a member of the Made Tech talent team know.

We are always listening to our growing teams and evolving the benefits available to our people. As we scale, as do our benefits and we are scaling quickly. We've recently introduced a flexible benefit platform which includes a Smart Tech scheme, Cycle to work scheme, and an individual benefits allowance which you can invest in a Health care cash plan or Pension plan. We’re also big on connection and have an optional social and wellbeing calendar of events for all employees to join should they choose.

Here are some of our most popular benefits listed below:

• 30 days Holiday - we offer 30 days of paid annual leave plus bank holidays
• Flexible Working Hours - we are flexible with what hours you work
• Flexible Parental Leave - we offer flexible parental leave options
• Remote Working - we offer part time remote working for all our staff
• Paid counselling - we offer paid counselling as well as financial and legal advice