TL;DR: DevRel teams can drive better business results by adopting shared metrics and processes with marketing and sales while maintaining developer trust. Success requires moving from opposition to partnership, focusing on strategic engagement, and proving business value using language stakeholders understand.
In our webinar entitled “How DevRel, Marketing, and Sales Can (and should) Work Together”, we explored one of the most critical challenges facing technical organizations today: creating effective alignment between developer relations, marketing, and sales teams. Our conversation with Dave Neary (Ampere Computing) and Kurtis Kemple (Slack) revealed practical strategies for breaking down silos and building collaborative relationships that drive business results.
Why Do DevRel, Marketing, and Sales Teams Struggle to Work Together?
While DevRel, marketing, and sales teams often share similar goals, they traditionally approach them from different angles. This creates natural friction points that can hinder organizational effectiveness.
Dave emphasized that the key difference lies in what each team is ultimately selling. While marketing and sales focus on the product itself, DevRel teams are asking developers to invest their time in building something on top of that product. This fundamental difference requires a relationship-building approach that prioritizes trust and credibility over traditional sales tactics.
FAQ: What is the main difference between DevRel and traditional marketing/sales approaches? DevRel focuses on asking developers to invest their time in building on top of a product, rather than selling the product directly. This requires a relationship-building approach that prioritizes trust and credibility over traditional sales tactics.
How Does DevRel Team Maturity Evolve Over Time?
Understanding how DevRel teams mature in their relationships with other departments can help organizations avoid common pitfalls and accelerate alignment.
Kurtis outlined three distinct phases of DevRel maturity:
Opposition Phase: Teams define themselves in opposition to marketing and sales, creating parallel processes and metrics instead of collaborating.
Understanding Phase: Teams begin to recognize they’re doing similar work—content calendars, event strategies, sales enablement—and start adopting similar metrics and processes while still working independently.
Partnership Phase: Teams move beyond parallel work to genuine collaboration, contributing to shared systems and gaining early visibility into company-wide campaigns and strategies.
If they already have a content calendar, how can DevRel actually just contribute to that existing system instead of having one of our own as well, even if they’re in perfect alignment. —Kurtis Kemple
FAQ: What are the three phases of DevRel maturity?
Opposition Phase: Defining DevRel in opposition to marketing/sales, creating parallel processes
Understanding Phase: Recognizing similarities and adopting shared metrics while working independently
Partnership Phase: True collaboration through shared systems and early involvement in planning
What High-Value DevRel Areas Do Marketing and Sales Teams Miss?
Marketing and sales teams frequently underestimate the strategic value DevRel brings beyond external community engagement. Two areas consistently demonstrate high impact:
Internal Enablement
DevRel teams are uniquely positioned to train solution architects, technical account managers, and even account executives on how platforms and tools actually work. This meta-enablement creates a multiplier effect across the organization.
As Kurtis noted: “You can literally help everyone better understand how your platform works, how your tools work, where to find those best practices, where to get answers.”
FAQ: What is meta-enablement in DevRel? Meta-enablement refers to DevRel teams training internal stakeholders (solution architects, account executives, customer success managers) on how platforms and tools work, creating a multiplier effect across the organization.
Product Feedback Loops
Developer advocates gather grassroots feedback from developers actually using products in real-world scenarios. This creates opportunities for product improvement that traditional market research might miss.
You get the grassroots feedback from developers who are trying to do things with your product… that’s an opportunity for you to help make the product better. —Dave Neary
How Can DevRel Teams Integrate Without Losing Authenticity?
One of the biggest concerns DevRel professionals have about aligning with marketing and sales is maintaining the authentic, education-first approach that makes them effective with developer audiences.
The key is adopting practices that improve effectiveness without compromising core values. Kurtis shared several strategies his team has implemented:
Strategic Engagement: Being more intentional about when and where to engage rather than trying to be everywhere at once. With millions of developers using platforms at any given time, strategic focus becomes essential.
Content Delegation: Not every piece of content needs to be written by senior developer advocates. Basic 100-200 level content can often be delegated or outsourced, allowing experts to focus on content that only their expertise can produce.
Question-First Conversations: Adopting the sales practice of starting conversations with questions rather than explanations helps build better relationships and understand real needs.
Good salespeople just listen to you for a long time, then they talk to you. —Kurtis Kemple
Dave emphasized maintaining transparency as the foundation of trust:
My responsibility as developer relations is: I want to ensure that you have awareness of what our product or project can do for you so that you are happy using it. —Dave Neary [39:53]
FAQ: How can DevRel teams prove business value without compromising authenticity?
By adopting existing business metrics that align with DevRel activities (like sales opportunities influenced) while maintaining transparent, developer-first communication. Focus on making developers successful rather than pushing products.
How Should DevRel Teams Communicate Business Value?
Successful DevRel leaders learn to communicate impact using metrics and language that other departments already understand and trust.
Rather than inventing new metrics, Kurtis advocates for tying DevRel activities directly to existing business objectives:
I adopt the metrics that make the most sense for whatever audience that that is. But I make sure that I can very clearly articulate the actual tactics that we do that affect that part of the business. —Kurtis Kemple
This approach includes proving concrete business impact—like demonstrating how DevRel contributed to over $30 million in sales opportunities—using data that sales leadership already tracks and values.
FAQ: What metrics should DevRel teams focus on? Rather than creating new metrics, successful DevRel teams tie their activities to existing business metrics that stakeholders already understand and trust, such as sales opportunities, customer retention, and product adoption rates.
Building Growth-Oriented DevRel Programs
As DevRel teams mature, they can move from following other departments’ lead to actually driving cross-functional initiatives. Kurtis draws parallels between DevRel and growth teams, noting that both functions affect many areas they don’t directly own.
This evolution positions DevRel leaders to own the entire developer function within organizations, with marketing and sales becoming stakeholders rather than the other way around.
FAQ: How does DevRel relate to growth teams? Both DevRel and growth teams affect many areas they don’t directly own, requiring cross-functional influence and strategic buy-in. Growth team methodologies can help DevRel leaders develop better horizontal leadership skills.
What’s the Future of Cross-Functional DevRel?
Both experts predict that DevRel will continue evolving into its own distinct function, similar to how marketing developed over the past 25 years. Dave anticipates seeing more Chief Developer Officers as organizations recognize developers as a critical audience requiring dedicated expertise.
The rise of AI will likely accelerate this trend, as it erases traditional product differentiation and makes community and developer experience even more crucial competitive advantages.
AI is about to like erase differentiation in a lot of ways… only the people who are either extremely novel, and how they use it or build really strong communities and platforms around the thing that’s relatively novel that they build will succeed. —Kurtis Kemple
Conclusion
Building effective alignment between DevRel, marketing, and sales requires moving beyond artificial barriers to embrace collaborative approaches that leverage each team’s unique strengths. The most successful organizations treat these functions as complementary rather than competitive, creating systems where developer trust and business results reinforce each other.
Success comes from adopting shared processes and metrics while maintaining the authentic, developer-first approach that makes DevRel effective. As the technical landscape continues evolving, organizations that master this balance will have significant advantages in attracting and retaining developer communities.
For companies looking to improve their cross-functional effectiveness, the path forward is clear: start with building trust, embrace shared systems, and focus on proving business value using language all stakeholders understand.
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