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 experi...