Senior​/Proposals Manager

REPORTS TO:

Director of Strategic Accounts & Client Growth / VP of Commercial Operations

LOCATION:

Lexington, MA/moving to Waltham, MA Q1 2027 (on-site/hybrid/remote potential)
POSITION SUMMARY

The Proposals Manager owns CBSET’s proposal function end to end: people, process, and output. This role manages a team of Proposal Development Specialists, sets and enforces standards for accuracy, consistency, and turnaround time, and serves as the point of escalation for complex or non-standard scoping decisions. The Proposals Manager is CBSET’s first dedicated leader for this function (first-in-kind hire). As such, a key mandate is to establish the team’s operating rhythm, tools, and quality standards to maintain CBSET’s high-quality technical proposals, while evolving into the most efficient workflow to quickly delivery quotes to clients.

Range of Base Salary: $80,000 – $105,000 per year. (Please note, salaries vary within the range based on factors including, but not limited to, experience, skills, education, and certifications.)

• Manage, coach, and develop a team of Proposal Development Specialists, including workload distribution and prioritization across an active bid volume of approximately 800 proposals annually.
• Establish onboarding, training, and quality-review processes for proposal staff, including guidance on scoping judgment for non-standard requests.
• Own hiring and performance management for the proposal team as it scales.

Proposal Process & Quality Ownership:

• Design and maintain CBSET’s proposal templates, pricing tools, and approval workflows, working closely with Marketing & Revenue Ops on tooling and Salesforce/CRM integration.
• Set and enforce standards for proposal accuracy, consistency, and turnaround time; define and track the metrics that measure them.
• Serve as the escalation point for complex, high-value, or ambiguous scoping and pricing decisions that fall outside standard templates.
• Carry certain amount of proposal drafting load, commensurate with other manager duties.
• Partner with Commercial Operations leadership to maintain and refine CBSET’s pricing models and cost structures as service lines and capacity assumptions evolve.
• Validate that proposals for complex or strategic studies (e.g., advanced therapy, cell therapy, orthopedic programs) reflect accurate scientific and operational scoping, coordinating with Technical Sales and scientific staff as needed.
• Identify recurring pricing or scoping issues and recommend process or template changes to resolve them systematically.

Cross-Functional Partnership:

• Work directly with Key Account Executives and Business Development Executives to align proposal turnaround with deal urgency and account strategy.
• Partner with the Director of Strategic Accounts & Client Growth on reporting proposal pipeline status, win/loss trends, and turnaround performance.
• Provide input to leadership on how proposal volume and complexity trends should inform future headcount and capacity planning.

Required:

• Bachelor’s degree in life sciences, biomedical engineering, business, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.
• 5+ years of experience in proposal development, sales operations, or commercial operations, including at least 2 years in a people-management or team-lead capacity.
• Experience in a CRO, pharmaceutical, medical device, or broader life sciences environment strongly preferred.
• Demonstrated ability to build or mature a process from an ad hoc or individual-contributor state into a managed, standardized function.
• Strong quantitative fluency with pricing models and cost structures.
• Proficiency with Microsoft 365 applications (Excel, Word, Dynamics/Power Apps) and CRM platforms (Salesforce preferred).

Preferred:

• Fam…