Commercial Manager

Key accountabilities

Process ownership and velocity

• Own the end-to-end RFQ and RFP process from intake to outcome capture, including the tier routing rules, service levels and escalation paths.

• Guarantee published response service levels by tier, and manage capacity, workload allocation and backlog to sustain them.

• Maintain the process, capability and data-flow model in Blue Dolphin so the capability is documented, auditable and improvable.

Qualification and portfolio discipline

• Apply and enforce bid/no-bid qualification, protecting CB's pursuit capacity from work it cannot win or should not want.

• Lead Gate 1, 2 and 3 reviews for RFP pursuits and Tier 3 bids, ensuring each pursuit has a named sponsor, win themes and a resourced plan.

Pricing and margin governance

• Develop and maintain segmented pricing guidance by product category, velocity class, customer tier and competitive exposure, in partnership with Finance and the Pricing Analyst.

• Enforce price floors and the delegation of authority; investigate and reduce margin leakage between quoted and realized margin.

• Work with Supplier & Brand Management to improve cost position on competitive bids through Special Pricing Agreements and volume aggregation before conceding margin.

Service and program commercialization

• Build and maintain activity-based cost-to-serve models for each CB program and MRO solution, with Finance.

• Build defensible customer value cases from customer baseline data, and set service pricing within the corridor between cost-to-serve and quantified value.

• Design commercial structures for multi-year agreements - term, escalation, tariff pass-through, rebates, gainshare, performance regimes, scope-change mechanisms and exit provisions.

Proposal quality and compliance

• Own the proposal content library covering all CB programs, MRO solutions and technical support offerings, keeping it current and evidence-backed.

• Ensure every formal submission is fully compliant with tender requirements; zero disqualifications on technicalities is the standard.

• Run colour-team reviews on significant pursuits and hold the quality bar on what leaves the building.

Intelligence and learning

• Own the win/loss repository, including data completeness, reason code integrity and competitive price observation capture.

• Pursue customer debriefs on significant losses and wins, and convert them into coded, comparable records.

• Deliver the monthly commercial performance review and the quarterly competitive landscape briefing to the executive.

Leadership and capability building

• Lead, coach and develop the bid desk team; build depth so the capability does not depend on any individual.

• Establish and maintain internal service levels with SBM, Account Managers, program owners and Finance, and manage those interlocks actively.

• Drive the technology and automation roadmap for the capability in partnership with IT, sequencing process discipline ahead of automation.

Handover and realization

• Ensure structured handover of won contracts to program delivery and order management, with the value baseline, obligations and price books intact.

• Track realized revenue and margin against what was quoted, and feed the variance back into pricing guidance.

Performance measures for the role

• Quote turnaround time against SLA by tier - median and 90th percentile

• Win rate on bid opportunities, by count and by value, RFQ and RFP tracked separately

• Realized margin versus quoted margin (margin leakage)

• Contract value won and service attach rate on multi-year agreements

• Cost per quote and quotes processed per analyst

• Win/loss data completeness and reason code integrity

• Compliance rate on formal tenders - target zero disqualifications

• Line automation rate - proportion of lines resolved without manual intervention

Qualifications

Education

• Bachelor's degree in business, engineering, supply chain or a related discipline. An MBA or equivalent is an asset but not a substitute for distribution experience.

• Professional certification in one or more of: APMP (proposal management), pricing management, CPSM/SCMP, Lean Six Sigma, or PMP. Willingness to obtain APMP within the first year is expected if not already held.

Experience - required

• Seven or more years in commercial, pricing, bid management, contract or business development roles, with at least three in a leadership or process-ownership capacity.

• Demonstrated ownership of a bid or proposal function in industrial distribution, MRO, manufacturing, engineered products or industrial services.

• Proven track record constructing and winning multi-year agreements combining product supply with services, including their commercial structures.

• Hands-on experience building cost models and pricing decisions from them - not merely applying a margin percentage supplied by someone else.

• Experience operating within an ERP-based quoting environment and improving it.

• Evidence of having improved a measurable commercial outcome: cycle time, win rate, margin, or cost per bid.

Experience - preferred

• Familiarity with bearings, mechanical power transmission, motors and drives, fluid power, or adjacent industrial product categories.

• Experience with public sector, mining, utility or large-enterprise formal tender processes.

• Exposure to value-based or gainshare service pricing and the measurement discipline it requires.

• Experience implementing pricing or CPQ technology.

• Bilingual English/French, given CB's national footprint.

Technical skills

• Advanced financial modelling: margin architecture, activity-based cost-to-serve, multi-year contract economics, sensitivity analysis.

• Strong data fluency - able to interrogate large item and transaction datasets directly rather than waiting for reports.

• ERP and CRM competence, ideally NetSuite; CRM/marketing automation exposure, ideally HubSpot.

• Business intelligence and dashboard construction.

• Process modelling and improvement methodology; comfort working within an enterprise architecture discipline.

• Practical fluency with AI-assisted tooling for document handling, matching and drafting, alongside sound judgement about where it must not be trusted.