Head of Pursuits and Proposals

Ideas | People | Trust

We're BDO. An accountancy and business advisory firm, providing the advice and solutions entrepreneurial organisations need to navigate today's changing world.

We'll broaden your horizons

Our Sales and Marketing team is being reshaped to directly support BDO's growth ambitions.

We're building a high‐performing function that is proud of its technical skills, reliable in delivery, and outcome‐led in how we prioritise and execute.

You'll join a team big enough to offer diverse roles and opportunities, big priorities and commercial challenges, yet personal enough to ensure you're supported and empowered from day one.

Here, we think beyond activity.

You'll bring ideas, fresh thinking and help shape how we deliver campaigns, insights and engagement across the business.

Working closely with internal clients, you'll deepen your understanding of our sectors and add value in your role.

From strategic storytelling to capability building and smarter ways of working, you'll grow your skills while working with people who care about doing the right thing and doing it well.

We'll help you succeed

Leading organisations trust us because of the quality of our advice.

That quality grows from a thorough understanding of their business, and that understanding comes from working closely with them and building long‐lasting relationships.

You'll be someone who is both comfortable working pro‐actively and managing your own tasks, as well as confident collaborating with others and communicating regularly with senior managers, directors, and BDO's partners to help businesses effectively.

You'll be encouraged to identify and draw attention to opportunities for enhancing our delivery and providing additional services to organisations we work with.

The Sales and marketing team are recruiting for a Head of Pursuits and Proposals.

Role purpose

The Head of Pursuits & Proposals leads the Pursuits & Proposals sub‐capability to drive best practice on winning work through formal tenders and strategic pursuits, with a focus on improving win performance and the quality of the firm's most important opportunities, aligned to growth and market priorities.

The role is accountable for establishing and embedding pursuit and proposal best practice on major bids, ensuring opportunities are shaped, governed and converted effectively in line with the firm's sales methodology.

This role is a member of the Wider Leadership team responsible for the end‐to‐end pursuit approach: qualification discipline, go/no‐go coaching, probability‐to‐win decisioning, win strategy, value proposition shaping, proposal governance, and presentation readiness.

The role works closely with GTM leaders to understand demand and capacity constraints, leads a specialist team of Pursuit & Proposal Senior Managers and Managers, and has oversight of the Bid Hub Knowledge Senior Manager (asset ownership).

Delivery is predominantly coaching‐led, with execution and production support provided through the proposals hub and associated delivery routes.

A key component of the role is ensuring proposal production is delivered at scale and to a consistent standard through the right delivery model, including effective management of BDO Wave (offshore bid production support).

This includes ensuring offshore resources are appropriately trained, fully briefed, governed through clear processes, and that quality review (QR) checkpoints are strong—so output quality is high and rework is reduced.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and operate a clear approach for which opportunities receive pursuit/proposal support, driven by growth and market priorities and capacity.
• Lead go/no-go coaching for priority opportunities, ensuring decisions are evidence‐led and aligned to strategic fit and deliverability.
• Run probability‐to‐win sessions to challenge assumptions, identify gaps, and focus teams on actions that increase win likelihood.
• Escalate resourcing, quality and risk issues and influence opportunity owners and senior stakeholders to take disciplined decisions.
• Establish consistent pursuit governance: kick‐offs, milestones, review gates, and decision moments for major opportunities.
• Ensure compliance with tender requirements, quality standards and brand standards, and that reviews are completed to schedule.
• Maintain visibility of pursuit progress and intervene early where deadlines, quality or inputs are at risk.
• Lead a coaching‐led model: support opportunity owners and pursuit teams to shape win strategies and execute effectively.
• Provide presentation and pitch coaching, including story, structure, rehearsal discipline and Q&A preparation.
• Design and deliver upskilling for practice and Sales & Marketing colleagues on "what good looks like" in pursuits, including qualification discipline and pitch readiness.
• Partner with opportunity owners and subject matter teams to shape differentiating value propositions and solution narratives.
• Work with Content and Markets Activation to align messaging, proof points and proposition materials for priority pursuits.
• Work with Marketing, GTM and Operations to ensure pursuit priorities are joined up with broader market activity and reporting rhythms.
• Ensure learning from pursuits (buyer feedback, objections, competitor signals) is fed back into GTM plans and proposition development.
• Own and continuously improve the Pursuits & Proposals methodology covering qualification, go/no‐go, probability‐to‐win, win planning, review discipline and post‐outcome learning.
• Maintain a clear "how to engage" service guide: required inputs, outputs, timelines, definitions of done and what a good brief looks like.
• Build and refresh practical tools and templates to improve consistency and reduce rework.
• Provide direction to the Bid Hub Knowledge Senior Manager on asset priorities, ensuring libraries, credentials and templates meet pursuit needs and reduce rework.
• Ensure document production and execution support routes are coordinated through the bid hub, enabling a coaching‐led model at scale.
• Define when and how BDO Wave is used to support bid production, ensuring it is applied where appropriate and scaled commercially.
• Ensure BDO Wave resources are trained, briefed and aligned to standards (brand, templates, compliance, tone, tender requirements).
• Run feedback loops with BDO Wave and internal teams so recurring issues are addressed through improved briefs, templates, training and governance.
• Run post‐outcome debriefs and embed learnings into methodology, templates, coaching and asset improvements.
• Lead and develop the Pursuits & Proposals team: role clarity, coaching approach, recruitment input, onboarding, performance management and progression.
• You'll be someone with
• Significant experience leading complex pursuits, bids and proposals in a professional services or similarly complex B2B environment.
• Proven track record improving win performance through disciplined qualification, probability‐to‐win assessment and coaching.
• Strong ability to influence senior stakeholders and challenge constructively to drive better decisions and outcomes.
• Strong proposition and story shaping capability and high editorial judgement.
• Strong programme governance capability across multiple contributors and deadlines.
• Experience operating scaled proposal production delivery routes (including offshore/alternative delivery models) with strong quality control and training discipline.
• People leadership experience managing senior practitioners and embedding standards at scale.

At BDO, we'll help you achieve your personal goals and career ambitions, and we have programmes, resources, and frameworks that provide clarity and structure around career development.

We're in it together

Mutual support and respect is one of BDO's core values and we're proud of our distinctive, people‐centred culture.

From informal success conversations to formal mentoring and coaching, we'll support you at every stage in your career, whatever your personal and professional needs.

Our agile working framework helps us stay connected, bringing teams together where and when it counts so they can share ideas and help one another.

At BDO, you'll always have access to the people and resources you need to do your best work.

We know that collaboration is the key to creating value for the companies we work with and satisfying experiences for our colleagues, so we've invested in state‐of‐the‐art collaboration spaces in our offices.

BDO's people represent a wealth of knowledge and expertise, and we'll encourage you to build your network, work alongside others, and share your skills and experiences.

With a range of multidisciplinary events and dedicated resources, you'll never stop learning at BDO.

We're looking forward to the future

At BDO, we help entrepreneurial businesses to succeed, fuelling the UK economy.

Our success is powered by our people, which is why we're always finding new ways to invest in you.

Across the UK thousands of unique minds continue to come together to help companies we work with to achieve their ambitions.

We've got a clear purpose, and we're confident in our future, because we're adapting and evolving to build on our strengths, ensuring we continue to find the right combination of global reach, integrity and expertise.

We shape the future together with openness and clarity, because we believe in empowering people to think creatively about how we can do things better.

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