About Phaedon, LLC
At Phaedon, we are revolutionizing how companies engage with their audiences and are passionate about sparking participation to drive growth for both our clients and our employees. Phaedon (formerly the commercial marketing group of ICF Next) is now an independent agency with a breadth of capabilities that go beyond our competitors and redefine traditional industry archetypes. We have a history of delivering game-changing results for notable brands across marketing communications, loyalty technology and services, and business transformation to bring intelligent imagination to solve our clients’ biggest business and brand challenges. And every role at Phaedon has an integral part to play in fulfilling this vision.
Here’s your chance to join our award-winning agency, Phaedon. We’re changemakers, a community of mission driven creatives, marketers, strategists, and technologists. We’re currently hiring for a Proposal Manager in our Minneapolis or Chicago office. Our Proposal Manager will be a key liaison across internal experts, our sales team, and presentation design specialists to determine and present a compelling response strategy to RFIs, RFPs, client briefs, custom proposals and pitches.
Essential Duties/Responsibilities:
- Develop, coordinate, and prepare responses to RFIs, RFPs, client briefs, custom proposals and pitches for potential clients.
- Develop strong relationships with internal experts, our sales team, and presentation design specialists to determine and present a compelling response strategy.
- Manage the proposal process, including review and analyze requirements, develop and manage to a calendar, facilitate strategy and solutioning development, and act as the primary project manager guiding pursuit of a new opportunity from start to finish.
- In partnership with our experts, develop persuasive content that demonstrates that we understand the client’s needs and why they should select Phaedon.
- Adapt answers to standard and non-standard questions to fit sales strategies and highlight our differentiators.
- Meet all deadlines for on-time quality delivery of RFI/RFP responses, pitches, and proposals to customers.
- Provide proposal assistance, guidance, coaching, review, and advice to account teams managing their own RFP responses.
- Support Business Development Knowledge Management efforts to maintain proposal content database and proposal archive for future re-use.
- Continually hone and improve the proposal development process.
Basic Qualifications:
- Bachelor’s degree or equivalent work experience in a relevant field such as Marketing, Communications, Journalism, Liberal Arts, English (or related)
- 5+ years of commercial proposal management experience
Professional Skills:
- The desire to work in a dynamic, team-oriented business development environment
- A willingness to learn and adopt a new proposal process
- High emotional IQ and ability to flex and adapt to meet and anticipate the unique needs of each individual team and opportunity
- Strong persuasive writing, editing skills, and verbal communication skills
- Ability to tactfully lead without authority and with a positive attitude
- Ability to stay calm under pressure
- Experience managing multiple projects simultaneously
- Strong time management skills to adhere to often tight deadlines
- Ability to foster relationships with professionals at various levels within the company
- Strong interpersonal skills, including the ability to work with people at all levels as well as within cross-functional teams
- Demonstrated experience coordinating activities of a proposal team and ensure that tasks are completed by: scheduling and facilitating team meetings, communicating action steps to team
- Demonstrated experience meeting deadlines and ensuring the team has what they need to meet theirs
- Demonstrated experience managing a proposal to schedule and ensuring the client and team understand what is expected of them
- The ability to identify and resolve or mitigate areas needing clarification, dependencies, risks, and issues
- The ability to be a proactive self-starter, working independently to move proposals and tasks forward to completion
- The ability to work in a collaborative team environment
- Impressive organization skills
- Experience at marketing agencies and/or consulting firms a plus
- Membership in APMP a plus
- Advanced skills in PowerPoint
- Experience using Microsoft Teams and/or SharePoint a plus