As a company owner for over a years, I depend on software program and automation to streamline operations and deliver outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it most definitely captured my attention Is GoHighLevel a MLM.
The idea was appealing– an all-in-one client management platform with marketing, sales, and solution devices incorporated together. As an entrepreneur constantly looking to streamline and scale my organization, it felt like a dream happened theoretically. That wouldn’t desire a solitary service that does it all?
However in this extensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my devastating journey of trying (and falling short) to switch over to this prominent brand-new software application. You’ll learn:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own business requirements, with any luck you can pick up from my agonizing blunders and pumped up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this checklist of ideal CRMs rather. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and project management choice to GoHighLevel, after that here are a few we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context concerning my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly depending on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my client administration and automation demands.
I located Keap user-friendly to make use of and it took care of every little thing I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to help small companies keep their customers while adding brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, making sure leads and customers get the appropriate messages at the right time. Usage website and social networks forms to streamline lead follow-up, and handle your growth with simple appointment scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and settlement handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, local business can conserve 10 hours weekly and boost income by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no bank card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a thorough customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation option customized for small businesses and business owners. We value Keap’s focus on improving sales processes and supporting consumer partnerships via effective automation tools. The system’s all-in-one strategy incorporates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it particularly appealing for businesses looking to settle their technology stack.
Generally, it just worked dependably with very little difficulty or maintenance needed. My open and click-through prices were excellent (like 35% fantastic). Automations ran efficiently with no concerns.
So why in the world was I lured to uproot my whole functional foundation from a system that worked to attempt something unproven and untried?
In knowledge I can confess I got seduced by the siren telephone call of “shiny object syndrome”. You understand the feeling: when everybody’s discussing a brand-new tool that will certainly revolutionize your service … The turf commonly looks greener on the other side, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel could decrease friction points that I would certainly learned to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I stood up to in the beginning, however a couple of even more irritations led me to believe possibly it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I decided to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, investing dramatically more than the $97/month starter cost.
This had not been a choice I ignored. I understood switching systems was going to need migrating all my Keap data and basically restoring my entire technology framework from the ground up using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Right here’s a review of just a few of the initiative required:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer documents
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer profiles, notes, and job data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels throughout once more
- Learning an entirely international UX and interface design
Done in, I spent around 30-40 tiresome hours of configuration job transitioning everything over– as well as taking care of shed efficiency during the switch.
However eventually, it was a calculated financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would settle with GoHighLevel giving a better long-term service for my service, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It only took me concerning a month of hands-on use to realize I had made a huge error. The issues began accumulating quickly, till it got to a point I needed to reduce my losses and change back to Keap completely.
Let’s walk through the nightmarish issues I experienced.
Safety And Security Issues & Many Vermin
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to thoroughly recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding brand-new email clients, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending occasion reminders, managing subscription expirations and a lot more.
Whatever seemed to be functioning fine … until suddenly it wasn’t. One morning, I woke up to find 171 totally unnecessary e-mails had actually been sent to individuals that should NOT have received them. This occurred 3 days in a row, with a different set of 160 people every day.
I hysterically attempted troubleshooting and rebuilding the automation from the ground up. However the trouble lingered.
When I seriously connected to their assistance group, they vaguely declared “web server concerns” were to blame. However this description didn’t make any feeling, considering that the errors continued happening each morning like clockwork unconnected to any downtime.
In my mind, this huge failure was totally undesirable and simply really did not benefit my service. I have countless get in touches with counting on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be completely unreliable, just how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and delicate customer information to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface only intensified these problems …
Discouraging UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt steep and challenging.
Simple jobs like editing and enhancing workflows involved excavating with food selection systems that were all over the place. Secret setups were unexplainably scattered in absolutely various sections. Relocating between functions really felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll inform you what I suggest by speaking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to manage total, specific, and product arrangements. Yet for some crazy factor, the links to access each of these core setups were expanded on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As somebody who values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously irritated me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a sleek product all set for prime-time usage. Their priorities appeared focused on cramming in every feature under the sun, with inadequate functionality as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I soon understood the affordable price tag came with pricey compromises …
Misleading Pricing Is GoHighLevel a MLM
Among GoHighLevel’s greatest selling factors is the affordable price for accessibility to so many features. But I swiftly learned this inexpensive base expense was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed users with sporadic costs for core capability. Unexpectedly my bank card declarations had vague $10 charges from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you obtain billed every single time you send an e-mail with their servers. So for high volume users, this added up to hundreds of dollars in unanticipated prices.
Between these per-email charges and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel registration wound up setting you back significantly greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was appealing, yet just not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully supported email open rates plunge nearly overnight after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience interaction regularly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantly to a useless 9% open rate.
Regardless of just how much I maximized my sending out methods or tried every fixing trick, I might barely push open rates back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards Is GoHighLevel a MLM.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails suddenly had horrible interaction. The only point I might believe that would certainly be creating this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so dependent on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability concerns, concealed fees, damaged features, and horrible interface, I had actually ultimately reached my restriction …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my firm to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a substantial blunder. The disadvantages dramatically exceeded any benefits.
No software program is perfect, but the large quantity of troubles was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software application boils down to count on. If I can’t trust it to deal with crucial features effectively or believe a supplier has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to walk away– even after investing substantial time, money, and effort moving.
So I made the challenging phone call to turn around program and return back to Keap entirely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I picked up from this fiasco.
Trick Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a pricey ill fortune. But in knowledge, it instructed me a few vital lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Don’t distress what’s working unless something is definitively far better across the board. Adjustment brings risk.
- Vet asserts extensively. Marketing hype around brand-new software program often obscures bigger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is crucial.
- Choose simpleness over features. Well-designed devices should make your job life easier, not much more complex and messy.
- Openness builds depend on. Nontransparent pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape troubles ruins count on.
- Seek impartial evaluations. Satisfied support evaluates indicate much less if excessive issues imply poor total functionality.
- Excellence is impossible. No solitary solution can completely fulfill every one-of-a-kind business demand. Find the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over transformation. Step-by-step enhancements typically outweigh risky wholesale reinvention of what already works penalty.
In short, I discovered to be more unconvinced of “also excellent to be real” marketing claims and less lured by the allure of shiny brand-new objects. The tools you make use of daily should earn depend on through openness and performance, not slick advertising.