Program Guide
Get a clear look inside the 16-week GrowthX experience, including how coaching works, what your team will work on, how GrowthX Go supports execution, and what founders should expect to accomplish.
THE GROWTHX SYSTEM
One-on-One Coaching
Dedicated coaching for the work that moves revenue forward.
You are paired with a dedicated coach who helps remove execution barriers and keep your GTM work focused. Our coaches are seasoned operators with deep B2B sales and startup experience, and every session follows a structured rhythm.
Sessions are scheduled during the first week of the program, with direct access to your coach’s calendar when real-time guidance would help you move faster.
Small Group Coaching
Peer learning with founders doing the same hard work.
You are grouped into small pods with peers who share a common coach. The format creates accountability, collaboration, and real-time learning as you see what works, what does not, and what patterns emerge across multiple companies.
Each pod follows the same structured rhythm as one-on-one coaching, so every week ends with concrete progress toward revenue.
Masterclasses
A shared foundation for stronger GTM execution.
Founders come together for cohort-wide masterclasses that create a shared foundation in the core GTM decisions every B2B founder needs to understand.
The goal is not to sit through content. The goal is to make the coaching work more focused, connected, and useful.
GrowthX Go
AI that keeps GTM work moving during the program and after it ends.
During the program, Go becomes the home for your GTM work: buyer signal, ICP decisions, messaging, outreach, pipeline context, coach feedback, and next actions.
After the program, that context stays with you, so you don’t graduate back to a blank page. It becomes an agile sales playbook that helps new hires ramp faster, supports expansion into new markets, and keeps your GTM work evolving.
Calendar and milestones
GTM Pillar One
Ready Now Buyer
Defining your ideal customer used to provide an edge. If you knew exactly which companies and titles to target, you were ahead of most B2B teams.
Now, thanks to AI, anyone can do that. Simply targeting the “right type” of company is no longer special. It’s no longer enough to find companies that fit your ICP.
During this coaching section, you will not only define your ICP, you will identify which segment buyers inside your ICP are actually ready to act. We’ve named that segment your Ready Now Buyer.
Your Ready Now Buyer is experiencing a current, specific trigger that makes buying relevant now. ICP tells you who belongs in the market. RNB tells you who’s ready within it.
By the end of this pillar, you will have:
- A Current State Download. A structured assessment of your go-to-market resources including people, process, collateral, and technology, forming the baseline from which every future decision is measured.
- A Documented ICP and Ready Now Buyer. Validated using internal data, external research, and customer conversations, sharpened to prioritize buyers enticed by your current value, not your future roadmap.
- A Buyer Readiness Signal Rubric. Account-level and contact-level signals weighted into a composite scoring system that answers: “Who do I focus on first?”
- Conversational Framework. A structured methodology for customer conversations that diagnose before they prescribe.
GTM Pillar Two
Earn the Meeting
With a validated Ready Now Buyer and the right conversational tools to engage them, you move from simply knowing who your buyer is to consistently reaching and converting them.
Most early-stage go-to-market efforts fail for a predictable reason. Founders confuse activity with progress. They generate conversations without clear learning goals. They collect data without a hypothesis. They tweak messaging without a disciplined way to test what is actually changing buyer behavior. The result is motion, but not momentum.
During this coaching section, the work is about replacing improvisation with structured evidence. When you define what progress looks like, anchor it to a clearly articulated Ready Now Buyer, and use every conversation as a deliberate experiment, your go-to-market motion becomes directional instead of reactive. You stop guessing what might work and start accumulating proof about what does.
By the end of this pillar, you will have:
- Defined Market Milestones. Measurable outcomes that demonstrate learning or earning and the checkpoints that keep your go-to-market motion accountable and directed.
- A Customer and Data Acquisition Strategy. Aligned to your Market Milestones and Ready Now Buyer, using your CRM as a living laboratory, not a static database.
- Validated UVPs and USPs. Multiple versions tested with real prospects, with GrowthX Go supporting rapid refinement until you converge on the messaging that actually resonates.
- A Market Message Map. How your Ready Now Buyer perceives value, which messages land, and which proof points drive trust.
GTM Pillar Three
Meetings that Convert
Many founders can generate meetings once the targeting and messaging sharpen. The real constraint shows up immediately after.
Conversations feel positive but drift. Next steps are vague. Pipeline builds unevenly. Activity increases but revenue lags. The issue is rarely effort. It is structure.
This coaching section is about transforming a calendar full of conversations into a system that produces momentum. Every meeting should either advance a real opportunity or produce a clear learning outcome that sharpens your approach. If neither happens, the meeting was noise.
Here, we move from earning attention to engineering outcomes.
By the end of this pillar, you will have:
- A Documented Campaign Strategy and Tracker. Focused outreach campaigns with defined goals, tactics, and learning metrics that sharpen your playbook.
- A Repeatable Conversion Process. A structured approach to every sales conversation that moves prospects through diagnosis, fit confirmation, and clear next steps.
- Pipeline Stability and Predictability. A recurring rhythm that prevents feast-or-famine cycles and ensures a consistent flow of qualified opportunities.
GTM Pillar Four
Revenue Management
Revenue Management isn’t a phase, it’s the discipline that’s been building since week one. In the final weeks, we formalize it: translating everything you’ve learned into a system that makes growth predictable rather than accidental.
During this coaching section, you’ll define a stage-based pipeline aligned to your buyer journey, instrument your CRM to surface the metrics that matter, and build the review cadence that turns deal data into process improvement and forecast accuracy.
By the end of this pillar, you will have:
- A Stage-Based Sales Pipeline. Measurable entrance and exit criteria tied to customer actions, not internal feelings.
- A Pipeline Review Framework. A consistent cadence for reviewing deals, diagnosing bottlenecks, and converting insight into action.
- A Performance Baseline. Stage-by-stage conversion benchmarks and funnel math that enable forecasting accuracy and early detection of revenue volatility.
- Must-Track Fields and Data Discipline. The specific fields required for every deal, including deal source and closed-lost reason.
Frequently Asked Questions
All of your questions answered.
Is GrowthX an accelerator?
No. While we sometime use the term “accelerator” to describe portions of our work, we are structurally and operationally distinct from traditional startup accelerators.
We operate a professionally developed sales curriculum specifically focused on B2B go-to-market execution. Rather than relying primarily on ad hoc mentorship models, we deliver structured, execution-focused sales coaching led by expert sales professionals who are assigned specifically to work directly alongside founding teams throughout the 16-week program.
Why is the program cohort-based?
The core of the GrowthX experience is 1:1 coaching. We run the program in cohorts because outcomes improve when founders also work in small pods. This is because founders often learn most when they are listening to someone else work through a challenge.
When a founder is deep inside their own company, they are an expert in the facts, but that expertise can make it easy to miss important details, skip over assumptions, or avoid asking the question that feels too obvious. In a pod, founders can see patterns more clearly because they are not emotionally attached to every fact.
They notice what others miss. They ask the “basic” question that unlocks the real issue. And when one founder has an aha moment, others often recognize the same pattern in their own business. That shared learning is not a substitute for individual coaching. It makes the individual coaching sharper, richer, and more useful.
Is the program virtual or in-person?
The program is mostly virtual, so founders can participate without relocating or disrupting the day-to-day work of building their companies.
That said, this is a Golisano Institute program, and the cohort comes together a few times in person for workshops at both the Buffalo and Rochester campuses.Every masterclass is recorded and available on-demand via the GrowthX platform immediately after the session. Founders receive access to both the video and the transcript, so they can revisit the content and use the transcript with their own LLMs to support the work they are doing in the program.
Coaching sessions are also recorded, with privacy carefully respected. Recordings and transcripts from 1:1 coaching sessions are shared only with that company.
Small-group coaching sessions are recorded as well, and those videos and transcripts are shared only with the participating teams in that group.
Is GrowthX a good fit for my stage?
Fit is less about your company’s age, stage, or funding status and more about whether you already have a repeatable sales motion.
GrowthX is built for founders who have something to sell, and need help turning sales work into a more focused, repeatable path to revenue growth.
GrowthX is especially useful when you are asking questions like:
- Are we pursuing the right buyers?
- Is our messaging earning enough attention?
- Why aren’t we converting more outbound to meetings and/or more meetings to sales?
- Is our pipeline disciplined enough to support growth?
- Can we make revenue more repeatable?
You’re a good fit if you’re trying to move from scattered sales activity to repeatable revenue.
You’re not a good fit if you just want more leads, want GrowthX to sell for you, or you’re just looking for help with your investor deck and investor intros.
How do you use AI?
AI is a powerful accelerator, but it is not a replacement for sales judgment.
Most large language models were trained on broad internet content, not on a coherent profession of early-stage B2B sales. That's why they often produce polished but generic sales output: better-sounding emails, longer target lists, and more activity that still misses the real buyer, the real urgency, and the real reason someone would take a meeting now.
GrowthX helps you use AI differently.
GrowthX Go is our AI platform founders use to put the GrowthX methodology into practice during and after the program.
It helps founders stay organized around the core GTM work. Founders use it to prepare for coaching, sharpen outreach, think through sales conversations, and keep track of the decisions they are making as their market understanding improves.
GrowthX Go is not a replacement for human coaching. It's a way to make the coaching more useful, the work more consistent, and the founder’s GTM system easier to carry forward.
Will companies have the opportunity to work with Golisano Institute students?
Yes. One of the unique strengths of this program is the opportunity for participating companies to work with Golisano Institute students who are specifically trained to support go-to-market work.
Through the GrowthX Studio Foundations program, we create an organized and thoughtful way for founders and students to engage throughout the cohort. Students may be available for project-based work, internships, and, where there is a strong fit, full-time opportunities.
The goal is to give companies access to trained student talent that can become a force multiplier for their go-to-market efforts, while giving students meaningful exposure to real companies, real revenue challenges, and practical startup experiences.
Is the coaching personalized?
Yes, it’s highly personalized, but not in the way most programs claim.
Most “customization” means light-touch advice layered on top of a fixed curriculum. That tends to break down for B2B sales because the real work is messy, situational, and happens inside live deals. Here’s how ours actually works:
1) 1:1 coaching is the core. Each company is paired with a dedicated sales coach. That’s where the real personalization happens, in the context of your actual pipeline, your deals, your buyers, your constraints. Not hypotheticals.
2) Your live deals drive the work. We’re not asking you to step out of your business to learn. You bring real conversations, stuck deals, pricing decisions, messaging challenges, and we work them in real time. The output is forward motion in your pipeline, not just insight.
3) The “curriculum” is a forcing function, not a script. We do have a structured progression because early-stage B2B sales problems are more similar than founders think. But it’s applied differently depending on your stage, motion, and market. A pre-revenue founder and a $3M ARR founder will both work on pipeline, but in very different ways.
4) Small group pods create additional signal. You get pattern recognition and pressure-testing of your thinking without the echo chamber of your own market.
Where it’s not personalized (by design): We don’t customize around avoiding the hard parts of founder-led sales. If you’re looking to outsource or shortcut the work of building a repeatable motion, we’re not a good fit.
What is the time commitment?
You should plan on 3 to 5 hours per week for the program itself. That includes roughly 1 to 2 hours of scheduled coaching sessions, plus structured work connected to the GrowthX experience.
The larger commitment is the actual work of sales. Founders see real revenue results by applying the work in the market: researching buyers, testing messaging, earning meetings, running sales conversations, following up, and managing pipeline. That part is harder to quantify because it depends on your company, your market, and how aggressively you are working to grow revenue.
You can also request additional time with your coach when it would be useful. We ask that you use that access thoughtfully: come prepared, share context in advance, and make sure the time is focused on work where your coach can add real value.
Click here to access our Program Guide to see how the program time is structured each week, and the outcomes you can expect.
Can multiple team members participate?
Yes. If accepted into the program, it’s not any one person, it’s anyone on your team (including advisors and Board members) that you would like to include.
What can I expect to achieve?
The goal of sales is more customers, higher revenue, and efficient sales cycles.
The specific outcomes vary based on your growth objectives, your level of maturity when you enter the program, and the variables in your sales process (e.g. are you selling into an enterprise with 12-18 month sales cycles).
Click here to see examples of what our alumni have achieved.
Does GrowthX have an industry or sector focus?
No. We have helped 650+ B2B founders across 25+ industries, because while your product and market may be unique, the path to product market fit is not.
Industry background has never been a barrier to revenue growth. What matters most is your willingness to do the work and apply a systematic approach to learning and selling.
Do you replace our sales team or advisor?
No. We make them better. Your coach supports you and your team with practical tools, guided practice, and weekly accountability.
We complement whatever talent you have in place by helping everyone use the same frameworks, language, and process.
Can we join if we are pre-revenue?
Yes. Many founders join before they have revenue (but you must have a sellable product). Early revenue is often a false positive of product market fit, so we care more about your willingness to learn, talk to customers, and do the work required to build repeatable sales.
Does GrowthX take equity?
No. GrowthX does not take equity. You keep full ownership of your company (and protect your cap table).
Our work is focused on helping you grow revenue in a capital efficient way so you can fund your business on your terms.
Will GrowthX help me find investors?
GrowthX is not a fundraising program, and we do not run performative demo days. We help founders become more investor-ready by sharpening their market focus, improving sales execution, and creating stronger evidence of revenue progress.
Investors know GrowthX and often pay close attention to companies going through the program, but the primary work is building the traction and judgment that make investor conversations stronger.
With your permission, our investors can join coaching calls, receive updates, and stay close to your journey. We also help you translate your traction into a compelling fundraising narrative, including how to use the playbooks we build together inside your data room. We’re also happy to make investor introductions.
Can potential or current investors join the program with us?
Yes. With your permission, investors are welcome to join coaching calls, receive updates, and watch your progress throughout the program. Many do.
They know our focus on systematic revenue growth helps them de risk their decisions and support stronger portfolio companies.
Can someone sponsor the cost for me?
Yes. Many of our founders have their program fee partially or fully covered by an accelerator they graduated from, a local economic development agency or foundation, or one of their investors.
Feel free to introduce your potential sponsor and we’ll help you secure the funding to participate.
Will I need to increase marketing or sales spend?
Just the opposite! The first thing we usually do is save you money. Many founders overspend on stage irrelevant tools that are built for companies with product market fit and a repeatable sales playbook. Buying those tools too early is almost always a waste of time and budget.
We have never asked a founder to spend money on website updates, sales automation tools, or digital ads, and it has never stood in the way of real revenue progress.
Ready to turn product momentum
into revenue growth?
Work with GrowthX to build the buyer focus, coaching cadence, and revenue execution system your company or ecosystem needs.