From Culinary School to Tech Sales Director with Bri Haralson

Episode Information

Show Notes

Bri Haralson wanted to be a chef. Sixteen years later she’s the Director of SLED at Cribl, one of the most connected people in the Southwest public sector tech community, and about to step into her next leadership role.

Nobody mapped this out. That’s kind of the point.

Bri grew up in Arizona, one of the rare native Arizonans. She started college for culinary studies at Northern Arizona University, transferred to Scottsdale Culinary, and then got a conversation that changed everything. Her restaurant manager pulled her aside and told her she wasn’t Mary Poppins — meaning she was confident, aggressive in a good way, and built for something beyond the kitchen. She didn’t fully understand it at the time. She went out, talked to people, and landed her first job as a sales training and hiring manager at a startup consulting company during the B2B SEO boom. She had never done it before. She acted as if. Within three years she had helped companies go from zero to seven figures and built sales floors from nothing to 75+ people. She started her career in leadership.

From there she took a step back into an individual contributor BDR role — 120 cold calls a day — specifically so she could practice what she had been teaching. She was promoted to first-line leadership within two months. She went on to field sales, won Sales MVP, joined Gartner as one of their youngest field sales reps, and eventually found her home in SLED (state, local, and education) where she has been for 13 of her 16 years in the industry. She calls it her civic duty without civic pay.

WHAT BRI HARALSON DOES NOW:
Bri is the Director of SLED at Cribl, supporting state, local, and higher education clients in the West. She is also Secretary of SIM Nevada, Central VP of InfraGuard Arizona, and the founder of PubSec Tech — a community organization she built to connect public sector technology professionals across the Southwest without the vendor pitches.

KEY INSIGHTS FROM THIS CONVERSATION:

Do the work, but make it intentional
Bri is direct: do the work is both the best and worst advice she has ever received. The problem is when people interpret it as heads-down isolation. “The work needs to be intentional and meaningful and you need to have influence over what you’re doing. It’s the extra time — the off the field time — that is really where the work is.”

Sales is project management
“Being an account executive is almost like being a project manager. Like a quarterback — you think he just throws the ball to the person that makes the touchdown. But it takes a lot. They’re running the plays, they’re building the trust with their team.” Bri runs her accounts like a business, coordinating engineers, services, and marketing toward the client’s outcome.

Always Be Recruiting
Forget ABC — Always Be Closing. Bri lives by ABR. “Always be recruiting. Recruiting for your next job, recruiting for your next hire. Every conversation that we have, every LinkedIn engagement — that is all building up for something in the future.” She believes if you build relationships intentionally over time, you never have to look for your next job. It finds you.

Burnout is about misalignment, not volume
Bri manages three board-level volunteer roles on top of a full-time director job and three kids. She doesn’t feel burned out. “The moment you start working for people who either don’t lift you up or where it feels exhausting — that’s the stuff I’m not going to do.” The burnout she has experienced in her career came from environments that weren’t aligned with her values, not from being busy.

Lead without the title
After not getting a leadership role at her previous company, Bri leaned into her volunteer organizations. Looking back: “That was the right decision. It really forced me to step up and look at the things that I was doing and grow as a leader myself. I don’t think I was ready.” She now coaches anyone who wants leadership experience to get into an external organization — because leading volunteers is harder than leading employees. There’s no chain of command. You actually have to lead.

TOPICS COVERED:
• Culinary school to tech sales: an unplanned career start
• The restaurant manager who saw something she didn’t see yet
• Starting a career in leadership before ever selling
• 120 cold calls a day and the BDR experience
• Field sales, Gartner, and the SLED market
• Why public sector feels like civic duty
• Sales as project management and the quarterback analogy
• Intentional work vs. heads-down work
• Decentralized command and learning to delegate
• Burnout, overextension, and how she pulled back
• Micromanaging vs. constant communication
• Always Be Recruiting
• Being a young woman in a male-dominated industry
• Work-life balance vs. mission alignment
• Introversion in sales and how she recharges
• SIM Nevada, InfraGuard, and PubSec Tech
• Not getting the leadership role and why it helped
• Book recommendations: Extreme Ownership and Recoding America
• Taking the risk and applying even when you don’t check every box

WHO THIS EPISODE IS FOR:
• Tech sales professionals looking to move into leadership
• Anyone in or considering the public sector space
• People who feel burned out and don’t know why
• Women in tech navigating male-dominated environments
• Professionals who want to build leadership skills without a title
• Anyone who has been passed over for a role and is figuring out the next move

CONNECT WITH BRI HARALSON:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/briharalson/

ABOUT CAREER DOWNLOADS:
Career Downloads explores technology careers through conversations with professionals who share their journeys, lessons learned, and practical advice. Hosted by Manuel Martinez, each episode exposes listeners to different technology roles and helps them manage their own careers more successfully. New episodes release every Tuesday.

Connect with Career Downloads:
Website: https://careerdownloads.com
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/career-downloads
YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@careerdownloads
TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@careerdownloads
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/careerdownloads
FaceBook https://www.facebook.com/people/Career-Downloads/61561144531249

TranscriptManuel Martinez: Welcome everyone. My name is Manuel Martinez and this is another episode of Career Downloads. For each episode I basically hit the refresh button, bring on a different guest. For today’s episode I have with me Bri Haralson. I’m excited because I’ve met her, like we followed each other on LinkedIn for a little while. Eventually we got to meet in person for the first time through a SIM event, which I’ve talked about quite a bit in the past about that organization. I was just very interested in a lot of the work that she’s done. She’s also very involved in, you know, organizations like SIM and seems like she’s very much willing to kind of help out in leadership roles within these different organizations to kind of, you know, help give back or, you know, uplift the community, whatever that might be. So it’s going to be a lot of good insights that I think we’re going to get out of this one. And with that, I’ll go ahead and introduce Bri.

Bri Haralson: Hi, thanks for having me.

Manuel Martinez: I appreciate you spending the time to kind of come down here because I know that you’re not from Vegas. You’re based out of Arizona.

Bri Haralson: Yeah, but I’m out here often. I feel like Vegas is my second home.

Manuel Martinez: And that was… It took me a little while because you’re here all the time that I was like, “Oh, she’s here in Vegas.” And you’re like, when I asked you, can you come on? And you’re like, “Yeah, of course.” You’re like, “But I’m out of Arizona, so it might take me a little bit.” And I was like, “Really?”

Bri Haralson: Yeah, a lot of people actually think that I’m local because I am out here so much. It actually started when I was a kid, my parents liked to gamble. And so I’d come out here a lot, like five times a year, and it really kind of became my second home. And then once I got into my career, I’ve always supported Nevada, specifically here in Las Vegas. So spending maybe two to four days out of a month here. So yeah.

Manuel Martinez: So if you don’t mind telling us a little bit about what your current role is and kind of some of the roles and responsibilities that you have as part of what it is that you do.

Bri Haralson: So I’ve actually been in tech sales for 16 years, so a little bit different than an actual technical practitioner. So with that, I sell technical tools to state, local, and higher education clients. Again, I’ve been doing that for 16 years with 13 of those years dedicated solely to supporting