Overview
International Defense Tender & Strategic Accounts Manager Jobs in Seoul, South Korea at Taihan Textile Co Ltd
Title: International Defense Tender & Strategic Accounts Manager
Company: Taihan Textile Co Ltd
Location: Seoul, South Korea
Position Summary
We are seeking a commercially sharp and operationally disciplined manager to lead overseas defense, government procurement, and strategic customer development. This role is responsible for managing foreign tenders, coordinating international partners, controlling submission documents, and ensuring that customer communication is precise, timely, and commercially sound.
The successful candidate must be able to understand procurement requirements, extract action items from customer discussions, manage internal stakeholders, and drive tender preparation from initial opportunity review through final submission. This is not a simple sales support role. It requires judgment, detail control, ownership, and the ability to operate across sales, technical, production, finance, legal, and external partner teams.
Key Responsibilities1. Overseas Tender Management
- Review foreign government and institutional procurement opportunities.
- Analyze tender documents, submission requirements, deadlines, eligibility criteria, pricing structure, certifications, local-content requirements, and documentation procedures.
- Build and maintain a tender action matrix covering required documents, responsible owners, source materials, deadlines, legalization/apostille requirements, submission format, and completion status.
- Coordinate internal departments and external partners to ensure documents are prepared accurately and on time.
- Identify ambiguities, missing information, commercial risks, and compliance gaps early.
- Manage reverse auction, competitive bidding, quotation, and tender submission processes with clear internal decision thresholds.
2. Customer and Partner Communication
- Serve as the primary or senior-controlled point of contact for overseas customers, agents, distributors, and strategic partners.
- Draft, review, and send professional English communication with precision and commercial awareness.
- Distinguish between confirmed requirements, informal comments, possible future requirements, and negotiation signals.
- Convert customer calls, meetings, and emails into accurate summaries, action items, ownership tables, and next-step plans.
- Ensure that customer communication is documented, traceable, and internally aligned.
3. Strategic Account Development
- Support development of overseas defense, military textile, tactical fabric, body armor, helmet, camouflage, and related procurement opportunities.
- Assess customer needs, competitive positioning, pricing expectations, and decision-making process.
- Coordinate with internal product, R&D, production, and quality teams to match customer requirements with company capability.
- Develop account plans for strategic international customers and government-related opportunities.
- Maintain awareness of competitor offerings, market pricing, and procurement trends.
4. Internal Coordination and Process Control
- Act as the operational controller for overseas business opportunities requiring cross-functional execution.
- Coordinate Sales, Military Sales, R&D, Production, Finance, Legal/Admin, and external partners.
- Ensure internal meetings are action-oriented, with defined owners, deadlines, and deliverables.
- Escalate unresolved issues promptly and clearly.
- Maintain organized records of submissions, correspondence, certifications, brochures, company documents, past performance references, and partner materials.
5. Commercial and Risk Assessment
- Support bid/no-bid decisions by assessing strategic value, feasibility, margin potential, execution burden, customer credibility, and reputational risk.
- Identify risks related to pricing, delivery, certification, documentation, local-content requirements, payment terms, partner dependency, and foreign-government procurement rules.
- Recommend whether opportunities should proceed, be delayed, require partner support, or be declined.
Required Qualifications
- 5+ years of experience in international B2B sales, government procurement, defense business, tender management, strategic accounts, or overseas project management.
- Strong business-level English writing and speaking ability.
- Demonstrated experience managing complex documentation-driven projects.
- Ability to read procurement documents, customer emails, meeting notes, and technical requirements with high attention to nuance.
- Strong ability to translate discussions into action items, owners, deadlines, and execution plans.
- Experience coordinating multiple internal departments and external partners.
- Strong judgment under ambiguity.
- High ownership mentality and ability to operate without constant supervision.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with defense, military, tactical products, technical textiles, body armor, helmets, ballistic protection, camouflage, or government supply.
- Experience with foreign government tenders, public procurement, reverse auctions, bid submissions, or international certification requirements.
- Familiarity with apostille/legalization processes, corporate documentation, financial statements, factory capability materials, references, and past performance packages.
- Experience working with overseas agents, distributors, or strategic partners.
- Korean-English bilingual capability preferred.
- Spanish or other foreign language ability is a plus, but not required.
Required CompetenciesCritical Thinking and Language Precision
Must be able to identify what was actually said, what was implied, what was not confirmed, and what requires follow-up.
Tender Discipline
Must understand that tender execution depends on document control, deadline control, ownership control, and submission accuracy.
Commercial Judgment
Must understand pricing structures, bid floors, reverse auctions, customer leverage, competitive positioning, and opportunity cost.
Communication Control
Must be able to communicate externally without creating confusion, overcommitting, misrepresenting requirements, or damaging credibility.
Cross-Functional Execution
Must be able to extract information from internal teams, assign responsibilities, follow up, and escalate when needed.
Ownership
Must not wait passively for instructions. Must identify gaps, propose next steps, and drive execution.
Example Deliverables
The candidate should be able to independently produce:
- Tender requirement summary
- Bid/no-bid recommendation
- Submission document checklist
- Action item matrix
- Customer meeting minutes
- Customer follow-up email
- Internal issue escalation memo
- Partner coordination plan
- Past performance package
- Corporate submission package
- Competitive pricing summary
- Tender risk assessment
- Final submission readiness checklist
Performance Expectations
Within the first 90 days, the candidate should be able to:
- Take control of active overseas tender opportunities.
- Build a centralized tracker for all current overseas opportunities.
- Standardize meeting minutes, action-item tracking, and customer follow-up templates.
- Create a reusable corporate tender-document package.
- Identify gaps in company certifications, references, brochures, and capability materials.
- Establish a clear internal process for foreign tender review, approval, document preparation, and submission.
- Reduce executive-level intervention in basic customer communication and document tracking.
