Director, Bid Management

Job Description

Location: EMEA (Flexible / Hybrid)

Reports To: VP Commercial Ops EMEA

Direct Reports: 5-8 (Senior Bid Managers, Bid Coordinators, Content/Knowledge Manager)

Grade: Director Level

Lead the transformation of EMEA Bid Management from a fragmented, KAM-dependent function into a centralized, disciplined Command Center that drives measurable improvements in win rates, resource allocation, and governance for large-scale critical infrastructure projects (>$10M). Own the end-to-end bid lifecycle — from Go/No-Go qualification through proposal submission and mobilization handover — ensuring Vertiv competes only on winnable opportunities with the right resources, at the right time, and transitions seamlessly into execution.

• Bid/No-Bid methodology:
  Own and enforce the Go/No-Go Evaluation Tool (T0 Gate) and Bid/No-Bid Scoring Mechanism (T1 Gate) to filter opportunities with rigor and consistency.
• Steer Co governance:
  Establish and chair the Steer Co governance process for large projects (>$10M), ensuring President, VP Sales, VP Ops, and CFO have clear, structured decision inputs at every gate.
• Hard Gates enforcement:
  Define and enforce Hard Gates — including insufficient time, critical unmitigated risk, legal/compliance issues, and margin floor breaches — to protect Vertiv from uncommercial commitments.
• Risk and resource discipline:
  Implement structured decision gates to control risk exposure, prioritize resources across competing bids, and focus pursuit investment on genuinely winnable opportunities.
• Red Team Review process:
  Drive a rigorous Red Team Review — assembling senior leaders and SMEs not involved in day-to-day bid drafting to challenge and stress-test the winning strategy before submission.

• Storyboard methodology:
  Own and enforce the Bid Storyboard framework, ensuring every major proposal tells a compelling, customer-centric story rather than a disjointed collection of technical responses.
• Framework design:
  Define the standard storyboard structure: articulate the customer's problem, Vertiv's unique value proposition, proof points (case studies, references, differentiators), and a clear "why us / why now" narrative.
• Early-cycle development:
  Ensure the storyboard is developed in the pre-writing phase and serves as the strategic blueprint aligning all contributors around a single, coherent winning theme before any content is drafted.
• Message consistency:
  Use the storyboard to drive alignment across all proposal volumes — Technical, Commercial, Delivery, and Services — so that every section reinforces the same win themes.
• Red Team integration:
  Leverage the storyboard in Red Team Reviews as the benchmark for assessing proposal quality:
  Does the narrative land? Is the differentiation clear? Would the customer choose Vertiv based on this story?
• Template library:
  Build a library of reusable storyboard templates by customer segment (Hyperscaler, Colo, Enterprise, Sovereign) to accelerate future bids and capture institutional knowledge.
• Cultural shift:
  Train Bid Managers and contributing SMEs on storyboarding techniques, shifting the culture from answering questions to winning hearts and minds with a differentiated narrative.

• Mobilization ownership:
  Own the Mobilization Phase as a critical bridge between bid award and project execution — ensuring no project starts without a signed-off, credible mobilization plan that has survived rigorous functional scrutiny.
• Functional sign-off governance:
  Drive a Functional Sign-Off process requiring each function (Engineering, Operations, Supply Chain, Finance, Legal, Services) to formally sign off on their scope, resource commitment, delivery assumptions, and risk acceptance before mobilization is approved.
• Stress-testing assumptions:
  Ensure the mobilization plan is validated against actual capacity constraints and supply chain realities — not built on the optimistic assumptions that may have underpinned the bid phase.
• Mobilization Gate:
  Establish a Mobilization Gate (post-award, pre-execution) where the Steer Co…