Octopus Group makes several management team promotions to gear for further growth after successful year

Octopus Group, the Brand to Sales agency for B2B, has made a number of promotions and a key hire to its senior management team (SMT).

Following its acquisition by Publicis Groupe in February, Octopus has seen 30%+ growth in 2021 in terms of both revenues and employees, fuelled by some landmark customer wins across technology, energy, financial services and industrial B2B segments and has decided to re-structure its senior management team in order to improve the client experience and support further significant growth in 2022.

The promotions are:

• Toby Brown, a Client Director running Octopus’ fintech and sustainability teams, is being promoted to Head of PR and will oversee all aspects of the practice’s operations, with a focus on future innovation
• Natasha Szczerb, also a Client Director, is being promoted to Head of Client Strategy where she will work in partnership with key client leads to further strengthen Octopus’ strategic consultancy
• Kirstie Orpen is promoted to Client Director and joins Octopus’ Senior Management Team, where she will run several of its Marketing Services teams
• Nicola Pestell, a board director and Performance Marketing Director, takes on the role of Growth Director where she will focus on building out high growth specialist services such as media, digital build and martech, and overseeing Octopus’ management mentoring programme
• Lisa Barber, a Client Director, becomes Client Operations Manager and will oversee an update of Octopus’ client processes and systems to improve efficiency, including the implementation of a new agency management system  
• Chris Ashley-Manns joins Octopus as Strategy Director to build out the agency’s strategy services, in particular in the rapidly growing ABM segment. Chris joins from B2B website personalisation platform Webeo, where he was CMO

Pete Hendrick, Managing Director at Octopus Group, comments: “2021 has been a great year, fuelled in part by Octopus joining Publicis Groupe to supercharge its B2B offering. We’ve grown significantly and we have an excellent senior management team, but it became clear during our 2022 planning that in order to continue to evolve as an agency, we needed to realign our management to directly support our strategic growth drivers.

“We regularly review our succession plan and love to see people progressing through the ranks, so this is an exciting time for us.”