Five minutes with George Sanders
Meet our Head of Growth for UK & Europe, George Sanders.
Meet George Sanders, our new Head of Growth for the UK & Europe. With a relentless push for customer-centricity, George will be instrumental in making sure Fox Agency continues to grow, by finding the right prospects and ensuring we’re always striving to excite and delight our current clients. Let’s hear more about this exciting new role from George himself.
Congratulations on your new role at Fox Agency! Please tell us about your career journey so far?
Upsettingly for everyone involved, I was born a salesperson. Although I was, by my mum’s own admission, a frightfully ugly baby, as soon as my wrinkly pink eyes opened there was the definitive ominous twinkle. My dad was a salesman and it’s assumed I inherited the condition from him. This blossomed initially as a (mercifully) short career as a recruiter, but it was joining B2B marketing agency Earnest in 2013 where I cut my agency sales teeth and found my passion for the role.
I started out there in client services, working with the likes of Google, Vodafone, and Samsung, and scrambled my way up the greasy corporate pole to Client Director across some unusually fun and ambitious accounts. But it was when I started leading on proposals and pitches for new prospects that I became hooked on those sweet, intoxicating, electric vapors from the neon-glow-through-cigarette-smoke of new business.
As New Business Director I established the agency’s new business function and helped professionalise and optimise how we qualified, responded to, and excited our prospects, through streamlined processes, tools, and team training.
Then, streamlining our go-to-market efforts further, I brought our marketing and existing client growth functions into the role too as Head of Growth. Here I championed customer-centricity and market-orientation as key philosophies to ensure we understood our customers better than anyone else, stayed ahead of the market, and were able to provide them with the most accurate, relevant and future-proof responses.
After 11 good years I left Earnest (along with my hairline) to try something new, dipping my toe into the world of Big Agency, working at WPP creative agency VML. However, being used to the pace, freedom and focus of smaller agencies – and genuinely (honestly) missing the strategy and authenticity of B2B – I realised it wasn’t for me.
And that’s when I found Fox Agency, where my knowledge of the B2B enterprise tech market, experience pitching across different size organisations and to brands of all sizes, and their remarkable tolerance for my humour made me the ideal fit.
What excited you about the role with Fox Agency?
The people. The people, again (but in bold).
An agency is only as good as its people: the people are the product. When you have great people, you do great work, which makes happy clients, which leads to more work. And Fox Agency clearly and enthusiastically invest in every person who works here.
From the very first conversations with the team, it was clear that kindness, ambition, and fun are the common threads that connect all the people across teams. They were refreshingly open and honest about their ambitions, challenges, what they’re looking for ideally, and importantly what’s not right for them, which was the perfect mirror for how I like to run new business: transparency, helpfulness, and trying to be a good egg.
And as it’s my job to sell the people – their experience, expertise, and enthusiasm – it’s a relief to know I can believe in what I’m selling.
What does your new role as Head of Growth for the UK & EU involve?
Ah, let’s be honest, Head of Growth is a made-up job title (although technically all job titles are made-up) but really it’s as straightforward as: growing the agency and growing our clients.
It’s my role to ensure that sales, marketing and organic client growth are working as an effective and efficient engine – each gear powering the next. Relevant, consistent and unignorable marketing that brings in quality leads. An efficient and empathetic new business process that finds the right prospects, delights them, and excites the agency team. And an approach to client growth that puts solving customer problems at the very heart of everything we do.
And a key part of the role across all three elements is a relentless push for customer-centricity; to always be asking ‘Is what we’re doing about them? Their objectives, their ambitions, their anxieties?’ And if we’re doing that right, then we’re doing what our clients and prospects want from us, and we’re helping them hit targets, look good, and win delicious awards and promotions. That’s the good stuff.
What has been your biggest professional achievement to date?
Well, you’ve done me dirty here and unmasked me in front of all my new pals. The truth is I don’t actually achieve anything myself. My role is basically helping everyone else do the amazing things that make the B2B world a little more interesting. At best maybe I’m a shepherd (but probably not good enough in the mornings to be one) so maybe more like a cheerleader (if there’s a market for chubby bald ones).
My biggest achievements have therefore probably been the brilliant things my teams have accomplished – client relationships that have developed into real friendships, strategies that have helped B2B brands turn corners and get ahead in the market, creative ideas that have genuinely resonated emotionally with audiences, and working cultures where people have felt included and supported and burning to do better B2B.
Saying that, there are some very generous testimonials at the bottom of my LinkedIn page – so actually probably them. Yeah, go on, my achievement has been working with the best.
(Might have stretched the five minutes there).
