Manager: Commercial Bid - Bayobab

Mission/ Core Purpose of the Job

Responsible for the management of the various elements involved in the submission and response of bids for large RFPs or RFQs for both internal and external customers. This entails collating responses from sales, solution design, commercial, and product as well as support structures like finance, legal, technology etc.

He or She will also be responsible for contributing towards the establishment and implementation of a central repository and centre of excellence to serve as a basis and a foundation towards the standardization of solution offerings. This thereby entails overseeing the sourcing of price books from internal opco’s and external 3rd party suppliers through official RFP/RFQ and or RFI process.

Further, the role will develop and define initiatives to assist in the strategic positioning of connectivity services to maximize revenues from the group's fixed network capacity and connectivity, as well as other assets including satellite as well as provide bid management support for all proposals issued to customers.

Key Performance Areas: Core, essential responsibilities/outputs of the position (KPA’s)

The Manager: Bid Management role will be accountable for achieving the following objectives:

• Develop the strategy and operating model in order to support the coordination of inputs from the different business units in order to respond efficiently and effectively to bid requests.

• Coordinate inputs from relevant internal and external stakeholders regarding the content of bids including contract management, legal, financial, systems engineering, networks, IT, and product groups.
• Lead and initiate the establishment of a rapid task team in order to vet or qualify incoming bids as well as manage the final submissions from a quality and completeness perspective before responding to customers in order to ensure full compliance with the terms of customer RFP / RFI.
• Establish and make use of standard templates to manage bids, produce solution designs and bid documents while coordinating inputs from the account teams, systems engineers and commercial/legal/finance teams.
• Manage a central repository as well as maintain this regularly in order to ensure the successful conversion of customer specific bids into standardized offerings in order to ensure a quicker call to cash
• Ensure clear communication and integration between the different business units following successful bids leading into the post-sales teams such as SLA, technical planning teams as well as postmortems and investigations into unsuccessful bids in order to take away key learnings and areas for improvement
• Full integration of quality management processes within the Systems Engineering and their effective deployment on a day-to-day basis.
• Provide regular reports and management of dashboards reflecting bid performance based on statistical analysis which can be used as meaningful data and intelligence for sales and supporting teams
• Foster cross-functional collaboration between internal and external stakeholders as well as ensure the implementation and adherence of OLA’s between the different functions
• Assess the competitor and operator landscape in order to understand the offerings available in the market in an attempt to distinguish, differentiate and position offerings more deliberately and effectively based on price, value and network availability and performance.

Role Deliverables

• Operating framework and process for bid management
• Qualification, coordination and management of bids
• Establish and maintain central repository of bids as well as internal and external OLA’s
• Contribute towards to drive to accelerate revenue by supporting internal and external sales
• Regular market analysis and price benchmarking in order understand competitive landscape
• Constant engagement with supporting functions in order to ensure full compliance to group policies in respect to tax, legal, risk, finance etc

Role Dependencies

• Bayobab Fibreco, Presales, Product, Planning, Technical and Finance teams
• Bayobab OpCo and Group Enterprise demand management teams

Job Requirements (Education, Experience and Competencies)

Education:

• Minimum 4-year Academic Degree (Commerce, Engineering or Business Science)
• Post graduate qualification MBA/Masters (Commerce, Engineering, Science) preferred
• English, French and Arabic (as advantage)

Experience:

• 5+ years relevant cost modelling and pricing experience in the fixed line international telecommunication industry preferably in carrier business with a good technical understanding as well.

Competencies:

• Able to work effectively with multiple stakeholders in a multi-cultural environment
• Strong analytical skills to adequately anticipate demand & provide recommendations for decision making
• A working knowledge of business practices
• Knowledge of risk management and business development
• Ability to identify key issues in a situation and to think creatively and strategically in facing internal and external challenges
• Strong computer literacy (Particularly Excel / Word /PowerPoint / Visio as well as Salesforce)
• Understanding the connectivity infrastructure wholesales landscape with a focus on emerging markets.
• Ability to adapt to changing requirements of business and staff members
• Excellent Interpersonal skills