Bids Manager

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. 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.

• 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.
• 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.

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.

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.
• Track pipeline health, win/loss performance, and bid effectiveness, providing insight to senior leadership.
• Contribute to the development of a high-impact content library, including credentials, case studies, and reusable bid assets.

Significant experience leading strategic, high-value bids and proposals, ideally within a marketing, creative, brand, or communications agency environment.

Advanced project leadership and stakeholder-management capability.

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.

Collaborative, inspirational, and driven to raise the bar for the quality of our work.