As Regional Lead for Sales Development at our Boston office, Ashley Buck is a key part of Tines’ revenue and talent engine. Read on to learn more about Ashley’s day-to-day at Tines, what she loves most about managing her team, and her top tips for personal and professional growth.
Can you tell us a little more about yourself and what you like to do in your free time?
I’m still early into my post-grad exploration of finding new hobbies and a life outside of school. I played soccer in college, but now I lean pretty heavily on working out and running purely for enjoyment instead of training.
Outside of that, I love spending time with my friends and family in the city as much as possible. I grew up in Colorado, so I try to get back there a decent amount.
What does a typical workday or week look like for you at Tines?
It depends on the day of the week, the time of year, and where we are in the fiscal quarter.
Typically, I do a lot of analytical and team evaluation on the messaging my team produces and how they’re communicating with prospects and potential customers. I also do a lot of coaching, motivation, and career development. I really enjoy having those one-on-one interactions with my team to help them be as successful in their roles as they can be.
The most rewarding part of my job as a manager is seeing my team’s personal growth. Outside of the numbers, I love seeing qualitative success in their ability to refine their skills and get better at other things.
Having them realize their own progress is pretty cool, too. It’s easy for me to say, ‘Look at this improvement, look where we’ve gotten better.’ But them recognizing it and feeling that sense of accomplishment and pride in their performance is really special.
Tines has given me the opportunity to explore from all angles, engage with multiple teams, and try out things without worrying about failure.
I think that’s how I ended up moving into a leadership and managerial role - I was given that opportunity to shadow and pursue new things while I was still a sales development representative (SDR).
What's the coolest thing you've worked on to date?
I’ve worked on a lot of cool projects, so it’s hard to narrow it down!
One cool thing that my coworker and I did while I was still an SDR was improving our team’s approach to outbound sales. Tines is unique in that a lot of our customers are inbound - we have such a great product that a lot of people come to us from using it. Of course, part of the SDR role is finding people cold, and we wanted to make that process more exciting and motivating.
So we started putting more time and effort into it. Everybody got to align with their account executives and choose 10 ‘white whales’, or big logos, that would be really awesome to have a company win in.
We spent an afternoon printing out each logo and taping them on the wall under everyone’s headshot so we could visualize our approach. I think that was a fun, inspiring cultural experience. It’s also held us accountable and helped us aspire for bigger goals, bigger logos, and overall greater company success. The results are still coming in, but we’ve definitely gotten some cool meetings out of it.
What advice would you give to someone just starting out at Tines?
For anyone who’s on my team, my advice is to be as naturally curious as possible. Our company is in a really special place right now - there’s opportunity to learn and grow exponentially.
Make an effort to understand the fundamentals and all the processes behind the scenes. Being curious and asking questions about things that interest you and why things are the way they are helps you understand where you can add value and fill gaps.
Especially in sales, you have to be decently competitive and want to outbest yourself to be one of the top performers. No matter what it is that drives you, it’s important to have some kind of internal motivation.
Once you’ve succeeded at something, move the goalposts. Don’t just want to perform - want to overperform.
That’s something I always told myself when I came in, and I think that’s what got me into a leadership position. It also gave me the opportunity to explore, grow my career, and improve myself as a person. When your personal growth aligns with your job, it probably means you’re at the right place and with the right people.
What's your favorite thing about the Tines platform? Any tips?
Since I didn’t come from a computer science or security background, the coolest thing to me is that Tines can be used universally for anything.
We have people using it for their fantasy football leagues - they’ve set up reminders to sub out players who are injured. We also had a cool story last Christmas where people used Tines to sync a timer to turn on their lights and start playing Christmas music.
We use our own product here at Tines for internal forms submissions and other processes, but outside of our bread and butter, it can be used for pretty much anything.
Anything else to add?
It’s so easily thrown out when you’re talking about work, but it’s important to highlight how amazing our culture is. That’s definitely part of the reason I’m here, and it’s what got me interested in the role originally.
They say the culture makes the place - we’ve got the culture, so the company is a really good place to be in, and I think that will continue into the future. I’m really excited to see where we end up in 5 to 10 years.
Tines does a really good job of finding people who want to work hard and see results.
Our recruiting team does a really good job of hand-picking people who can fit in with the culture and help shape it.
I was lucky enough to stumble across Tines on LinkedIn. That was amazing since there are so many sales development jobs across the world. Now, I just tell any of my friends that are graduating or people I know that are looking for jobs to check out Tines.
In my role as an SDR, some of the prospects I’ve interacted with have seen our job openings and reached out to me to talk about joining our team. That’s when I was like, ‘Wow, our product must be really cool if the people who are evaluating it for use are also interested in working here.’
Tines is hiring! Find out more about our open roles in the US and Ireland.