Five questions with Blake Coolidge, Head of GTM Initiatives

As a sales and go-to-market leader at Tines, Blake Coolidge is on a mission to expand how IT customers use automation to solve real business problems, from reducing end-user friction to unlocking more value from their existing tech stack. Read on to learn more about Blake, including what he gets up to outside of work, what excites him most about his latest career move, and his advice for anyone just starting out at Tines.

Can you tell us a little more about yourself and what you like to do in your free time? 

Well, we’ve had some big life changes recently. I just moved to North Carolina, and my wife and I had our first child. So right now it’s enjoying the chaos. But outside of that, I love to explore new things around us.

Outdoor activities, bar games, sporting events, concerts, restaurants - my wife and I love to do as many activities together as possible.

What does a typical workday or week look like for you at Tines? 

I just started a new role this year, leading the go-to-market efforts to sell to IT Ops teams. Security is our bread-and-butter, and our roots began there from Eoin and TK’s practitioner days, but we’ve always been unopinionated about how customers use the product. Organically, about a quarter of our customers started using Tines for non-security use cases, with most of those being in IT Operations.

We have some amazing customers, like Intercom, Jamf, and Mars, who began automating things like user access requests, employee offboarding, and patch management. This year, I’ll be quadrupling down on the efforts to ensure our IT customers continue their successes and to find new customers who want to alleviate their repetitive work.

It’s great because it’s a full company effort from go-to-market to product to post-sales and our team is:

• Testing and refining messaging tailored for IT personas

• Expanding the Tines library and IT support docs

• Collaborating with product on IT-specific roadmap needs

• Equipping sales with IT-focused enablement and plays

• Partnering with customer success to deepen IT adoption

What I’m most excited about is shifting our go-to-market focus from technical solutions to business outcomes. It’s not about connecting system A to B, or developing a single workflow. 

We have to think about our value to a company — how can we help them save money, mitigate risk, reduce friction, and support new initiatives that drive revenue? Mapping Tines to those outcomes will be a huge value-add to our customer base.

What's the coolest thing you've worked on to date? 

My previous role was leading our Sales Development team, and the goal was to be the pipeline and talent engine for Tines. The talent engine piece of that mission statement is particularly exciting for me. We want to bring in awesome people, make them successful prospectors, and ultimately train them up so they can go be successful in their next role at Tines.

Whatever it is our people want to do, we want to support them.

Since I’ve been here, we’ve had 14 XDRs who were promoted into another role. Most of them became Account Executives, but this year, we’ve seen our first non-sales moves. We had someone move into an XDR leadership position, two people moved into partnership roles, and one is moving into customer success. It’s really exciting, watching this team go on to blossom and crush their next position at Tines.

What advice would you give to someone just starting out at Tines? 

I previously worked at a larger company, which was amazing — but they were huge, like 70,000+ people. One of the coolest things about working for Tines is the impact you can have. While our growth rates are excellent right now, we’re not a big company, and there’s so much work to be done.

Each individual person can have a tremendous impact on the company, especially because of our culture. Leadership is very transparent and accessible with our priorities. If you need to make a decision or you want to work on a project, you’re just a Slack away from anyone. People are always very willing to collaborate.

My advice would be to dig into some of the thorniest problems you’re hearing about. Because of our size, there may be no one coming to swoop in and fix that problem. It could just be you. And if you’re able to dig in and help solve the problem, the world’s your oyster here at Tines.

What's your favorite thing about the Tines platform? Any tips? 

I’m not a technical person - I won’t lie and say I’ve built a bunch of automated workflows. For me, I think the groundbreaking product release we had this last year was Workbench.

I use AI tools in my day-to-day work. ChatGPT, for me, was super useful for putting together project plans and things like that. But ChatGPT didn’t have any access to our internal data - it didn’t know who was on my team, or have any context into account information. It was pretty limited as far as what I could use it for. I’m also conscious that you don’t want to share sensitive information outside of our four walls.

Being able to engage in that chat interface with Workbench but securely interact with our core tools and systems has really sped up my workflow.

Our lead routing processes are built in Tines, and I’ve used Workbench to find context when I needed to engage with an XDR around a specific account. Let’s say we hear about a press release from Acme, Inc. that mentions their security leader is looking to prioritize automation. I’ll want to figure out who on our team is working with that account. 

Previously, I would’ve had to go into multiple tools to look up the owner, pull in the note I found, and send a Slack to that employee. All that can be done within Workbench by simply asking it to pull the article, find the employee, and send it in Slack, using that chat interface.

Anything to add? 

Just want to shout out this incredible team. I genuinely love being here and collaborating with my team mates (who we call Tinos). It’s the best environment. It’s far exceeded my expectations from when I joined, and it only keeps getting better as we grow. I love being a part of it.

If you’ve clicked around the website and you like the brand, I’d encourage you to reach out to any employee. I’m so confident that, no matter who you speak to, you’ll want to be part of this exceptional company.