How Databricks Sells to Dozens of Industries Without Building a Single Vertical Product

The “Industry Imperatives” Framework That Replaced Personas and ICP as Their Core GTM Strategy

From a SaaStr AI Annual session with Madelyn Mullen (Sr. Industry Solutions Manager – Digital Natives, Databricks) and Samantha Sawyer (Principal Industry Marketing Manager, Databricks).

Most B2B companies start the same way when they think about going vertical: they build personas. Maybe they do ICP work. Both are good. Neither is enough.

Databricks runs one of the more sophisticated industry go-to-market motions in B2B. They sell primarily to CDOs, CTOs, and CIOs across dozens of verticals — and they’re now pushing into lines of business like marketing and security. But they don’t build a separate product for retail, or financial services, or healthcare.

Instead, they use something they call imperatives. And if you’re a B2B company selling a horizontal platform into multiple industries, this framework is worth stealing.

Personas + ICP = Necessary But Not Sufficient

If you ask most marketing teams how they think about customers, you’ll get two answers:

Personas. Who’s the buyer? What does a CPO care about? What keeps a CISO up at night? Useful for messaging. Not enough to close deals.

Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Which accounts have the right TAM, growth trajectory, and fit? Useful for targeting. Still not enough.

Here’s why: both of these are about you — your product’s fit, your market opportunity. Neither one forces you to speak the language of the human sitting across the table from you. And that human doesn’t care about your TAM model. They care about the strategic priorities their CEO just laid out on the last earnings call.

What Is an Imperative?

An imperative is a theme-based opportunity that sits at the intersection of three things:

Customer priorities— what your buyers actually care about right now, what they’re held accountable for, what’s in their OKRs Industry trends— what’s happening in their world (agents, tariffs, regulation, consolidation, whatever is moving their market) Your capabilities— where your product delivers differentiated value against those priorities

The key word is intersection. Customer priorities alone and you’re just parroting back their problems without connecting to your product. Industry trends alone and you’re writing thought leadership nobody acts on. Your capabilities alone and you’re doing a product demo.

Imperatives force you to find the overlap. That’s where deals happen.

The Databricks Retail Example

Here’s how this looks in practice. Databricks’ retail industry imperatives break into three themes:

Personalization and monetization of the customer experience Improving employee productivity Supply chain optimization

Each imperative then maps down to:

Business priorities — the specific strategic goals a retail exec is held accountable for. Under “employee productivity,” that might split into employee lifecycle goals vs. employee productivity goals. Why split them? Because they might live in different buying centers. One lands in HR. One lands in operations. Different buyers, different conversations, different content.

Use cases — the specific applications of your product that ladder up to those priorities. There could be dozens under a single imperative. You don’t sell all of them. You keep them in your pocket and pull the right one based on the conversation.

Customer references, metrics, and value assessments — the proof. Real-world results from clients who acted on that imperative with your product.

Databricks lays all of this out on a single “placemat” — a one-page map that sales teams use in conversations and that gets brought directly into executive briefings (minus some of the enablement detail).

You Don’t Need to Build Per-Industry Products

This is the part that trips up most horizontal B2B companies. The instinct is: “If we’re going to sell to retail, we need retail features.” No.

Your product differentiation stays the same. What changes is the entry point of the conversation. You’re starting from their world — their priorities, their language, their industry pressures — and then connecting that back to your capabilities.

As Mullen put it: you’re not trying to fit your capabilities into square pegs and round holes. You’re coming at it from the customer’s mind, thinking about their problems first, then showing how your product maps to what they already care about.

For product teams, this means: if there’s something in the product that particularly resonates with financial services or healthcare or retail, surface that to the industry marketing and sales teams. But don’t go build “Databricks for Retail.” That doesn’t scale.

SMB vs. Enterprise Imperatives Are Different

One of the audience questions came from a founder selling construction tech to SMBs who was getting pulled into enterprise deals. The answer: you can’t use the same imperatives across segments.

An SMB construction company and a global construction enterprise have fundamentally different strategic priorities. The humans you’re talking to have different problems, different budgets, different decision-making processes. Your pricing, packaging, and sales motion will be different — and your imperatives need to be different too.

If you’re crossing segments, do the work to build separate imperative maps. The shortcut everyone wants doesn’t exist. The only real shortcut Mullen has seen: a champion who moves from one segment to another and gives you the inside view.

The “Always On” Problem

The hardest part of imperatives isn’t building them. It’s keeping them ready.

You might invest heavily in supply chain optimization content because tariffs are in the news. Great. But what happens when the next trend hits and your buyers are suddenly focused on something else? Where’s that content? Where’s that story?

Imperatives need to be “always on” — meaning the content, the differentiators, the customer proof, the sales enablement all need to be available before the conversation happens. You don’t know what’s going to be top of mind for the executive you’re meeting next Tuesday.

At Databricks, they’re still working toward the ideal state where everything is ready a quarter before sales needs it. Most companies won’t get there quickly. But even partial coverage is better than going in with a generic pitch.

Sequencing Your Industry GTM

You don’t have to do everything at once. Databricks thinks about sequencing in two dimensions:

Which industries first? Look at your pipeline data. Where are opportunities coming from? Which industries close fastest? Where are you losing? Cross-reference revenue potential with your current penetration and win rates. Take a bet, then revise.

One nuance: your sales org’s vertical names don’t need to match your marketing team’s industry definitions. Different teams may need different levels of granularity based on their maturity. That’s fine. Don’t let naming conventions slow you down.

Which channels first? Maybe the imperative messaging flows through your website and digital channels first, then your executive team and sellers take it into direct conversations, then you reinforce it at events. There’s a natural sequence from digital to human to in-person.

How to Start If You’re Small

You don’t need 7,000+ employees like Databricks to use this framework. A few practical starting points:

Pick one industry and go deep for a month or a quarter. Use AI tools to build a point of view on the imperatives in that vertical. What are the top 3 strategic priorities for a VP-level buyer in that space? What industry trends are driving those priorities? How does your product map?

Build one placemat. Three imperatives across the top. Business priorities underneath each. Your product differentiators mapped to those priorities. Customer proof points at the bottom. Use it in every high-level conversation for that industry. See what sticks.