Proposals Manager (Remote)

Everest Clinical Research (“Everest”) is a full-service contract research organization (CRO) providing a broad range of expertise-based clinical research services to worldwide pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical device industries. We serve some of the best-known companies and work with many of the most advanced drugs, biologics, and medical devices in development today.Everest has been an independent CRO since 2004 with a strong foundation as a statistical and data management center of excellence. Building on this foundation, Everest has successfully developed and established itself as a full-service CRO, including clinical operations. Everest’s headquarters are located in Markham Ontario, Canada with additional locations in: Bridgewater, New Jersey; Shanghai, China; Taipei, Taiwan; and multiple offices in Europe.Everest is known in the industry for its high quality deliverables, superior customer service, and flexibility in meeting clients’ needs. A dynamic organization with an entrepreneurial origin, Everest continues to experience exceptional growth and great success.Quality is our backbone, customer-focus is our tradition, flexibility is our strength…that’s us…that’s Everest.To drive continued success in this exciting clinical research field, we are seeking committed, skilled, and customer-focused individuals to join our winning team as a Contracts and Proposals Manager for our Toronto/Markham, Ontario, Canada on-site location, or remotely from a home-based office anywhere in Canada in accordance with our Work from Home policy.

Contracts and Proposals Manager:

The Contracts and Proposals Manager owns the end-to-end intake and delivery of project/opportunity proposals, enabling responsive and customer focused solutions, driving cross functional collaboration, input and review, and ensuring organizational goals and strategies are reflected. This role interacts closely with both external customers and internal stakeholders to analyze clinical research protocols and opportunity and client requirements and then to drive and develop on-time, high quality, functionally and technically sound proposals comprising of project/opportunity budgets, written proposals, responses to Request for Information questionnaires, and ongoing iterations of budgets and contracts through to contract finalization.

The Contracts and Proposals Manager acts as a central bid leader to plan, notify, coordinate and follow up with internal Everest solutions teams and external parties such as clients and third-party vendors to provide customized and proposal specific budgets, responses, and delivery strategies as input to the proposal development process. This role also supports the coordination and execution of bid defense meetings, project contracting, transition of key information to project delivery teams (project handover), and may also support development of change orders to existing won opportunities in support of the Project Management department. This role will also support capability building for the proposals/contracts and business development function at Everest, support operational metrics reporting, and maintenance of centralized pipeline/opportunity and contracts tracking software and related processes.

Key Accountabilities:

• Plans, organizes and implements the proposal delivery process from Request For Information (RFI) and Request for Proposal (RFP) or general request receipt through proposal delivery and handover to the project delivery team.
• Proposals may support biometrics-only services (e.g., clinical data management, biostatistics and programming) and full-service opportunities spanning Phases I-IV that involve all services required to execute on a clinical study, including clinical project management and clinical operations, IWRS/IRT, ePRO/eDiary, pharmacovigilance, PK/PD analysis, Data Safety Monitoring Committee (DMC) or Data Safety Monitoring Board (DSMB), medical writing, regulatory submissions and other study-specific services.
• Interfaces with internal (Everest) and external (prospective and existing clients) stakeholders to facilitate completion of strategic, effective, and high quality proposals and bid defense activities to optimize alignment and continue Everest’s tradition of achieving high project win rates.
• Receives and analyzes RFIs and RFPs received to ensure appropriate Everest senior leadership, project management, and functional delivery leaders are engaged in the proposal delivery process.
  Plans the key proposal delivery timelines against the requested proposal delivery milestones from the RFP or Sponsor, taking into account internal and third party solutioning, quoting and quality review activities. Ensures key external deadlines (e.g., submission of questions, proposal submission, bid defense, etc.) are proactively managed or negotiated for on-time delivery.
• Identifies potential barriers or risks for completion and implements mitigation strategies. Escalates to management when deliverables are at risk based on committed timelines.
• Establishes key estimating parameters required for budget and proposal development obtained from the RFP/RFI or client (will request if key parameters are missing).
• Obtains third party quotes as needed.
• Acts as a central point of contract and bid manager for the timely collection of information from various sources, schedules and obtains information from functional leaders and relevant advisors to gather intelligence, customized solutions to meet requirements, and project-specific strategies.
• Reviews input gathered from Everest contributors to ensure consistency of messages and tone.
• Prepares draft budgets where feasible on behalf of functional teams for review, prepares proposal documents (Microsoft Word) by modifying proposal text, budgets, and cover letters.
• May be required to map and present budgets in client-requested bid grids/formats and perform internal checks to ensure accuracy of mappings prior to internal Everest bid review.
• Consistently produces and writes high quality, customized proposal text across all deliverables. Ensures proposal text and budgets match requirements from the RFP, determine key selling messages with input from others, highlight key assumptions and approaches where required.
• Proofreads, edits, rewrites, and reviews budgetary sections of materials to ensure readability and consistency of content, budget figures, messages and tone of written communications.
• Suggests and implements pricing and proposal strategies to improve quality of proposal while maximizing project rates and effort coverage for the work to be delivered.
• Supports preparations, scheduling and timely coordination for bid defense meetings, works with bid defense leaders to plan bid preparation, agenda, customized content, and ensures key questions raised by the Sponsor are covered in the bid defense.
• Supports generation of new project contracts, and change order contracts working closely with the project management team to update scope, budgets, and change order amendment templates.
  Participates in weekly proposal pipeline work planning and prioritization meetings.
  Contributes to Proposal and RFI text libraries to provide text for future use and adaptation.
• Supports development and upkeep of proposal development and opportunity status and metrics information in centralized web-based tracking systems.
• Documents information and coordinates the scheduling and delivery of project hand-over meetings to the assigned project delivery team, ensuring client requirements, project risks and strategic background/importance is articulated fully to enable successful study start up.
• Supports peer reviews of other proposals and budgets generated by Everest teams.
• Participates in building new departmental capabilities (e.g., estimating models, RFI library refresh, team member profiles, build 3rd party vendor relationships, identify and source new 3rd party vendors, etc.) working closely with Everest senior leadership and business development/proposals and contracts leaders.

Qualifications and Experience:

• Bachelors’ degree in health, physical/biological/chemistry sciences, pharmaceutical sciences, or business fields with substantial experience in the subject matter.
• 6 years or more in related proposal writing and/or clinical research budget analysis roles in contract research environments.
• Hands-on experience for the development of clinical trial services budgets, their key estimating factors that drive costing, and effective quality check processes.
• Ability to identify important scope elements and questions when reviewing a study protocol and any accompanying RFP information and parameters.
• Strong customer-facing communication and coordination skills – responsive, high quality, customer-focused, strategic.
• High quality written communications for proposal writing – good logical orientation, succinct but information business writing, attention to detail for formatting, structure, tone, and quantitative data.
• Demonstrated experience and ability to persevere and meet tight proposal/submission timelines on an occasional basis.
• Ability to discern and recommend pricing strategies and approaches based on information gathered independently on a prospective client, as well as information gathered during interactions with the client.
• Ability to support development of well-planned and effective bid defense PowerPoint presentations, taking input from functional leaders and subject matter advisors.