Strategic Bid Manager
Location: UK (Global remit)
Reports to: Divisional Director, Sales Enablement
Dotted line: Regional Head of Strategic Growth
The role
The Strategic Bid Manager is a senior leadership role at the heart of Paragon’s growth agenda. This individual sets the vision for how we pursue, shape, and win high-value opportunities — leading world-class proposals that combine strategic clarity, creative excellence, and commercial rigour.
Owning the end-to-end bid and capture process, the role defines standards, leads major pursuits, and elevates the quality and effectiveness of every submission we put into market. It is both strategic and hands-on: guiding win strategy at the highest level while personally shaping the most significant and complex proposals.
This is a global-facing role. While supporting growth across the UK region, the focus is on large-scale, international and strategically critical opportunities as part of Paragon’s divisional sales excellence framework. Working closely with senior leadership, client services, strategy and proposition teams, solution design, and commercial leaders, the Strategic Bid Manager plays a critical role in securing the partnerships that fuel Paragon’s future.
What you’ll be responsible for
Strategic leadership & bid governance
- Set and lead bid strategy aligned to Paragon’s growth objectives and market ambitions.
- Own and evolve best-practice bid processes, templates, tools, and quality standards across the organisation.
- Lead bid / no-bid decision-making, balancing commercial viability, strategic fit, and resource capacity.
- Provide senior-level oversight on major pursuits, ensuring our creative vision, messaging, and commercial positioning are consistently best-in-class.
High-value proposal ownership
- Direct — and personally contribute to — the development of priority, high-value proposals.
- Shape compelling win strategies, value propositions, and narratives that clearly differentiate Paragon.
- Oversee the creation of persuasive executive summaries, case studies, and client-centric storytelling.
Cross-business leadership
- Lead complex, multi-disciplinary bids spanning strategy, insight, technology, production, operations, and commercial teams.
- Mentor and develop bid managers, writers, and contributors, building capability and a culture of excellence.
- Drive collaboration, clarity, and momentum across diverse stakeholder groups.
Commercial oversight
- Partner with commercial and senior leadership to develop pricing strategies, revenue models, and deal structures for large-scale opportunities.
- Review contractual terms, identify commercial and delivery risks, and support negotiations when required.
- Ensure every submission is commercially robust while remaining competitive and compelling.
Quality assurance & creative standards
- Own quality control across your submissions — and provide senior oversight of peer work when required — ensuring accuracy, compliance, and impact.
- Champion design excellence, working closely with creative teams to deliver visually powerful, strategically aligned proposals and pitches.
- Ensure all bids fully comply with client requirements, procurement frameworks, and submission rules.
Reporting, insight & continuous improvement
- Track pipeline health, win/loss performance, and bid effectiveness, providing insight to senior leadership.
- Lead structured debriefs and embed learnings to continuously strengthen our propositions and approach.
- Contribute to the development of a high-impact content library, including credentials, case studies, and reusable bid assets.
What you’ll bring
- Significant experience leading strategic, high-value bids and proposals, ideally within a marketing, creative, brand, or communications agency environment.
- A proven track record of winning complex, large-scale, and strategically important opportunities.
- Advanced project leadership and stakeholder-management capability.
- Strong strategic thinking, with the ability to define clear win strategies and articulate compelling value propositions.
- Confidence influencing at senior levels, including C-suite clients and internal executives.
- Formal APMP or Shipley training, with experience managing content libraries and bid assets.
- Deep understanding of brand strategy, creative development, digital marketing, and integrated communications.
- Experience with public-sector procurement frameworks and/or global brand environments.
- Exceptional persuasive writing, editing, and storytelling skills.
- Strong commercial acumen, including experience with complex pricing models and contractual negotiations.
Personal attributes
- Strategic, visionary, and commercially minded.
- A confident leader with strong negotiation and influence skills.
- Creatively ambitious yet disciplined — able to balance storytelling with rigorous compliance.
- Calm under pressure, resilient, and comfortable managing multiple high-stakes priorities.
- Collaborative, inspirational, and driven to raise the bar for the quality of our work.
Devonshire is an equal-opportunity employer, and we encourage job applications from people of all backgrounds. All qualified applicants will receive consideration regardless of gender, race, religion, age, disability, sexual orientation or marital status.
We recognise how challenging this current job market is for candidates, and Paragon Talent Solutions are therefore striving to provide the best candidate experience we can.
If you are interested in this opportunity, we kindly request that you apply via this LinkedIn advert, as opposed to sending us an email or LinkedIn direct message.
We are eager to ensure that each candidate application is considered fairly, and receives a consistent experience. Unfortunately, we cannot ensure this standard if you enquire about a role via email or LinkedIn message, as it falls outside of our established process