Strategic Pursuit Manager

Summary

Join CannonDesign as a Strategic Pursuit Manager and become a key player in our Brand, Marketing, and Business Development team. This role blends project management with high-stakes proposal development, requiring strategic thinking, exceptional organizational skills, and creativity. You will work with multi-functional teams to pursue ambitious targets, anticipating roadblocks and managing deadlines. Success involves developing pursuit strategies, facilitating strategy sessions, managing budgets, collaborating with content teams, and leading presentation efforts. The position requires a bachelor's degree, 8+ years of experience in proposal management for a professional services firm, and strong proficiency in various software applications. CannonDesign offers a competitive salary, comprehensive benefits, and opportunities for professional growth.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in business, marketing, communications or a related field required
• Minimum of 8 years of related work experience required
• Related experience working in a proposal management role for a professional services firm required
• Strong proficiency with InDesign, Word, Excel and PowerPoint
• Excellent time and project management skills
• Able to manage up, down and across large and dynamic teams to resolve conflicts and maintain progress
• Able to “own the process” and earn trust among creative thinkers and strong personalities, including external partners
• Strong attention to detail in every phase of the pursuit to maintain cohesion, accuracy and compliance, and avoid errors/gaps that weaken proposal impact
• Excellent communication skills, including the ability to facilitate collaboration that creates clarity and alignment across the entire team
• Strategic thinker able to translate a multitude of activities into plans, goals and role assignments with measures to ensure implementation

Responsibilities

• Work with pursuit teams to develop pursuit strategies, including partnering with opportunity leaders and pursuit strategists to drive capture planning efforts, providing business intelligence on clients, competitors and CannonDesign
• Facilitate and participate in strategy sessions and workshops related to assigned large/mega-scale strategic pursuits. This includes driving the established agenda, guiding a creative brainstorming process, challenging and testing ideas, developing pertinent action items and assignments, and documenting the intelligence, outcomes and next steps
• Bring discipline and rigor to the Go/No Go process and capture management planning phase
• Establish and manage pursuit budgets and costs for all strategic pursuits within your purview
• Partner with proposal content team, Subject Matter Experts and Pursuit Strategists to ensure messaging is translated into a compelling narrative with thematic graphic representation throughout the proposal, interview and other related deliverables
• Collaborate with technical staff for proposal content and write/review/edit original content for clarity, compliance and key messages
• Manage BMBD production team to meet deadlines and create compelling, compliant and high-quality proposals, interviews and other collateral, as needed
• Lead the pursuit team on presentation phase, including presentation coaching
• Work with Opportunity Leader to ensure win/loss debriefs are completed and captured — and leverage lessons learned to inform future pursuits
• Coach and mentor marketing specialists and senior marketing specialists across regions in proposal management and production
• Develop strong, in-depth knowledge of the firm’s portfolio, personnel and brand (to understand how we express ourselves visually and verbally) to connect with clients and differentiate ourselves in the marketplace
• Develop subject matter expertise (across markets, typologies, services, technology or other) that adds value to our marketing initiatives and pursuit activities
• Work with National Marketing Pursuits Leader and Regional Marketing Team Leaders to influence training and ongoing development of Marketing Specialists
• Provide peer review and oversight for accuracy and quality of content
• Self-review all work for accuracy and quality of content
• Work with Opportunity Leaders to accurately document progress through the Strategic Pursuit Process in Salesforce
• Work with our Marketing Content Manager to preserve custom proposal content for use on future pursuits
• Establish, improve and model marketing best practices
• Up to 25% travel expected
• May participate in external marketing activities

Preferred Qualifications

• Related experience working in the Architecture, Engineering and/or Construction industry preferred
• Familiarity with Deltek CRM Vision, Salesforce and Miro is a plus

Benefits

• The salary range for this position is $90,000 to $107,100 annually
• Employees may be eligible for discretionary bonuses
• We offer a full benefit package including medical, dental and vision coverage and flexible spending account options and voluntary insurances
• We have paid time off, flex-time schedules, remote work options and a 401k plan and employee perk programs