We differentiate ourselves by our holistic approach to solutions, our Value Delivery Model founded on 4 levels of Leadership, our Culture of seeking Excellence with Grace, and our pioneering effort in developing specialist communities.
ABOUT THE ROLE
The Inside Capture Manager will support DivIHN's growth across the SLED and Federal markets.
This individual will work closely with business development, executive leadership, technical subject matter experts, delivery personnel, recruiting, pricing, contracts, finance, and external teaming partners. The position will be responsible for helping manage opportunities across the full business development lifecycle, including:
- Opportunity identification and qualification
- Capture planning
- Customer and competitive research
- Teaming and solution development
- Proposal planning and development
- Formal reviews
- Proposal submission and follow-up
- Post-submission capture activities
- Lessons learned
- Bid material management
The successful candidate must understand the differences between business development, capture, and proposal management and know what activities, decisions, and deliverables are required at each stage. This role requires someone who can lead independently, maintain urgency, create order, hold contributors accountable, and keep leadership fully informed.
KEY RESPONSIBILITIES
Opportunity Qualification & Capture
- Review, qualify, and prioritize Federal and SLED opportunities.
- Develop Gate Zero assessments and Bid/No-Bid recommendations.
- Maintain an accurate opportunity pipeline and ensure qualified opportunities move into capture.
- Develop and manage capture plans, schedules, action items, decision gates, risks, and dependencies.
- Coordinate customer and competitive research, teaming, staffing strategies, solution development, and past-performance selection.
- Identify customer priorities, pain points, evaluation drivers, and likely acquisition strategies.
- Develop win themes, discriminators, value propositions, and competitive positioning.
- Identify capability, staffing, past-performance, certification, vehicle, and partnership gaps and recommend solutions.
- Support and maintain strategic vendor and teaming relationships.
Proposal Management
- Execute and improve DivIHN's standard Proposal Lifecycle.
- Own assigned proposals from solicitation release through final disposition.
- Analyze solicitations for requirements, evaluation criteria, instructions, attachments, certifications, and submission requirements.
- Develop compliance matrices, annotated outlines, schedules, responsibility assignments, and review plans.
- Coordinate technical, management, staffing, recruiting, pricing, contracts, finance, executive, and partner inputs.
- Lead proposal kickoffs, working sessions, status meetings, and formal reviews.
- Hold contributors accountable for deadlines and quality.
- Manage Pink, Red, Gold, and final quality reviews and ensure comments are resolved.
- Monitor amendments and customer questions and incorporate resulting changes.
- Ensure final proposals are compliant, accurate, persuasive, professionally presented, and timely.
Solution and Narrative Development
- Work with technical and business leaders to shape compelling, customer-focused solutions.
- Translate technical concepts into clear and persuasive proposal language.
- Ensure proposals tell a cohesive story connecting customer challenges, DivIHN's solution, differentiators, and measurable benefits.
- Challenge generic or weak content and drive improvements that strengthen DivIHN's probability of win.
Process Discipline and Continuous Improvement
- Maintain compliance with DiviHN's standard Proposal Lifecycle and maintain current solution development information repositories.
- Conduct post-submission reviews and capture lessons learned.
- Continuously improve DivIHN's capture and proposal operating model, tools, and practices
Performance Expectations
- The Inside Capture Manager is expected to operate with ownership, urgency, discipline, and limited supervision. Success means:
- Opportunities are properly qualified and capture activities happen at the right time.
- Leadership has clear visibility into status, risks, decisions, and next actions.
- Contributors understand their responsibilities and meet commitments.
- Risks and gaps are identified early with recommended solutions.
- Proposals are compliant, compelling, differentiated, and submitted on time.
- DivIHN's capture and proposal capability becomes increasingly repeatable, efficient, and scalable.
Experience and Qualifications
Required QualificationsBachelor's degree in Business, Information Technology, Marketing, or related field.
- 7+ years of Federal and/or SLED capture, proposal management, business development, or government contracting experience.
- 5+ years sourcing and managing government proposals through final disposition.
- Demonstrated performance converting opportunities into awarded contracts.
- Experience developing and maintaining strategic teaming and vendor relationships.
- Strong understanding of Federal and SLED procurement and capture lifecycles.
- Experience developing capture plans, compliance matrices, proposal schedules, and managing cross-functional proposal teams.
- Strong knowledge of IT services and solutions.
- Experience leading on-shore and off-shore team members.
- Superior written and verbal English skills.
- Strong ability to multi-task across multiple pursuits and deadlines. .
Preferred Qualifications
- APMP certification and/or Shipley Capture or Proposal training.
- Experience supporting an SBA 8(a), small business, or mid-tier government contractor.
- Familiarity with major Federal contract vehicles and market-intelligence tools such as SAM.gov, GovWin, and BidPrime.
- Experience with State of Illinois procurement.
Leadership and Culture
The ideal candidate will be proactive, organized, self-directed, and comfortable taking ownership. This individual must demonstrate sound judgment, professional maturity, persistence, and personal accountability. The successful candidate must know when to act independently and when to elevate a decision. The person should be willing to challenge incomplete work, weak assumptions, and unrealistic timelines while remaining respectful and constructive.
DivIHN promotes a culture of Seeking Excellence with Grace. Our values include honesty, commitment, excellence, relationships, service, and grace. We seek someone who will pursue high standards, hold others accountable, build trust, and treat colleagues, clients, and partners with professionalism and respect.
Location
This is a U.S.-based position located in the Chicago metropolitan area. The successful candidate will be expected to work closely with DivIHN leadership, business development personnel, technical teams, customers, and industry partners. The role may require periodic attendance at in-person meetings, conferences, networking events, proposal sessions, and customer engagements. Candidates must be legally authorized to work in the United States. DivIHN is not offering relocation assistance for this position.
Compensation
DivIHN will offer a competitive compensation package, including performance-based incentives.
The Opportunity
This is an opportunity to help strengthen and operate DivIHN's capture and proposal capability across the SLED and Federal markets. We are not looking for someone who will merely administer proposals. We are looking for someone who understands the process, anticipates what comes next, drives the team, shapes the solution, strengthens the narrative, maintains discipline, improves the system, and consistently brings solutions forward. Success will be measured not only by the proposals submitted, but also by the quality of the process, the strength of the solutions, the accountability of the team, and the continued improvement of DivIHN's ability to compete and win.