Commercial Manager

Canadian Bearings

• $100K — $120K *
Business Services
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • Bachelor's degree in business, engineering, supply chain, or a related field; MBA is a plus.
  • Professional certification in APMP, pricing management, CPSM/SCMP, Lean Six Sigma, or PMP preferred.
  • Minimum seven years in commercial, pricing, bid management, or business development, with three years in a leadership role.
  • Proven experience in ownership of the bid function in industrial distribution or related sectors.
  • Hands-on experience in building cost models and making pricing decisions based on them.

Responsibilities

  • Own the end-to-end RFQ and RFP process including service levels and escalation paths.
  • Manage capacity and workload allocation while ensuring published response service levels are achieved.
  • Develop segmented pricing guidance in collaboration with Finance and conduct margin governance.
  • Build effective cost-to-serve models for each program in partnership with Finance.
  • Maintain the proposal content library and ensure compliance with tender requirements across submissions.
  • Own the win/loss repository and pursue customer debriefs to enhance future pursuits.
  • Lead the bid desk team, fostering talent and establishing internal service levels.

Benefits

  • Professional development opportunities including support for obtaining APMP certification.
  • Access to advanced financial modeling and business intelligence tools.
  • Collaboration with a diverse team across various departments like Finance and IT.
  • Potential for remote work or flexible scheduling to accommodate a diverse workforce.
Full Job Description
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.

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