LONDON — Independent B2B technology agency Octopus Group has created a new board-level role, hiring B2B marketing specialist Nicola Pestell as director of marketing services.

Pestell joined Octopus this week from technology marketing agency Really B2B, where she had been a director for the past eight years.

The move comes three months after co-founder Sandy Purewal left the agency to start a new venture outside the communications industry.

Nicola’s brief is to lead on demand generation, digital marketing and sales enablement as part of the agency’s “Brand to Sales” approach for clients including SSE Enterprise, Paysafe, Blackberry, SAP, Currencycloud, Travelex, Red Hat and Marketo.

Octopus Group CEO Jon Lonsdale told the Holmes Report that Pestell was joining the board at a pivotal time for the agency: “We’ve brought together the digital work and demand generation work, some of which Sandy was running before he moved on, into one role. A big feature of last year was the growth of our strategic marketing and digital services, and we’re also doing a lot more technology consulting, advising clients on which tools to use and how to manage their own platforms, so Nicola's focus will be to grow those newer parts of the business.”

He added: “Nicola has as much experience as we have, and has deep knowledge of tech B2B marketing. Her previous agency, which she built up to almost the same size as Octopus, do everything we do except the PR part, so she’s really excited about the potential of extending her experience into communications.”

Pestell said: “I’ve watched as Octopus Group has developed a really strong brand in the B2B and technology marketing community over the last few years, so I’m looking forward to helping the agency build on this. Being able to offer B2B CMOs a tightly integrated solution for driving both brand awareness and sales across different channels is a genuine USP and I’ll be working hard to get this message out.”