As a firm owner for over a decade, I rely on software program and automation to improve procedures and deliver results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it definitely captured my interest Can You Sell Products on GoHighLevel.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one client administration platform with marketing, sales, and service devices incorporated together. As a business owner constantly looking to streamline and scale my business, it appeared like a desire come to life theoretically. Who wouldn’t want a single option that does it all?
Yet in this thorough GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my devastating journey of trying (and failing) to switch to this popular new software application. You’ll discover:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your own organization needs, with any luck you can pick up from my excruciating blunders and pumped up expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this list of ideal CRMs instead. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and task administration choice to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Switching Over from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context concerning my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly depending on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer monitoring and automation requirements.
I located Keap user-friendly to utilize and it handled everything I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to assist small companies keep their customers while adding new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, guaranteeing leads and customers receive the appropriate messages at the right time. Usage website and social media sites types to streamline lead follow-up, and handle your growth with simple visit scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and settlement handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, small businesses can save 10 hours per week and rise income by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no credit card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides an extensive customer relationship monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation solution tailored for local business and business owners. We value Keap’s concentrate on simplifying sales processes and supporting consumer connections with effective automation tools. The system’s all-in-one technique integrates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job administration, making it particularly eye-catching for services looking to combine their technology stack.
Essentially, it just functioned dependably with very little difficulty or maintenance required. My open and click-through prices were fantastic (like 35% terrific). Automations ran smoothly without concerns.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my whole operational structure from a system that worked to attempt something unverified and untried?
In hindsight I can confess I got attracted by the alarm telephone call of “shiny things syndrome”. You recognize the sensation: when everybody’s discussing a new device that will certainly revolutionize your company … The lawn commonly looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel may reduce rubbing points that I would certainly learned to endure throughout the years with Keap.
I stood up to in the beginning, yet a couple of more stress led me to think possibly it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I decided to take the plunge. I signed up for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending substantially more than the $97/month starter price.
This wasn’t a decision I ignored. I recognized changing platforms was mosting likely to call for moving all my Keap data and essentially restoring my whole technology infrastructure from the ground up utilizing all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Here’s an introduction of simply several of the effort required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Moving client accounts, notes, and job data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promos, and sales funnels throughout again
- Learning a totally international UX and interface style
Done in, I spent around 30-40 laborious hours of setup job transitioning everything over– not to mention dealing with lost productivity throughout the button.
But eventually, it was a calculated investment I agreed to make. I figured some short-term pain would repay with GoHighLevel giving a much better lasting option for my organization, Dripify. Oh just how wrong I was …
It just took me about a month of hands-on use to recognize I had made a large blunder. The issues started accumulating quickly, until it reached a point I needed to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap completely.
Let’s walk through the horrible problems I experienced.
Safety Issues & Many Bugs
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to carefully recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding new e-mail clients, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending event tips, taking care of subscription expirations and far more.
Every little thing appeared to be working fine … up until unexpectedly it wasn’t. One morning, I awoke to find 171 completely irrelevant e-mails had been sent to customers who must NOT have gotten them. This took place 3 days in a row, with a different set of 160 individuals daily.
I hysterically tried troubleshooting and rebuilding the automation from scratch. But the trouble persisted.
When I seriously reached out to their support group, they vaguely asserted “server concerns” were to blame. But this description didn’t make any sense, given that the errors proceeded occurring each early morning like clockwork unassociated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this massive failure was totally unacceptable and simply didn’t benefit my organization. I have hundreds of contacts relying upon my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be absolutely unreliable, just how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and delicate customer information to their technology?
The unintuitive user interface just worsened these concerns …
Discouraging UX
Coming from Keap where everything was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt steep and challenging.
Basic jobs like editing workflows involved digging via menu systems that were all over the place. Key setups were unexplainably spread in entirely different sections. Relocating between functions felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll tell you what I indicate by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different settings panels to handle total, specific, and item arrangements. Yet for some insane reason, the links to access each of these core settings were spread out on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As somebody who values tidy, thoughtful style, this seriously upset me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a polished product ready for prime-time use. Their concerns appeared concentrated on packing in every feature under the sun, with bad functionality as a second thought.
And talking features, I soon realized the low price tag included costly compromises …
Deceptive Pricing Can You Sell Products on GoHighLevel
One of GoHighLevel’s biggest marketing factors is the economical cost for access to a lot of features. Yet I swiftly learned this affordable base price was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with sporadic charges for core functionality. Unexpectedly my credit card statements had vague $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you obtain billed whenever you send out an email via their servers. So for high volume customers, this added up to numerous dollars in unexpected expenses.
In between these per-email charges and paying additional for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel membership wound up setting you back significantly greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was appealing, however just not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously nurtured email open rates plummet almost over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market interaction regularly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantly to a pitiful 9% open rate.
No matter just how much I optimized my sending out practices or attempted every repairing technique, I can hardly push open rates back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks Can You Sell Products on GoHighLevel.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails instantly had awful involvement. The only point I could assume that would be causing this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so dependent on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability problems, hidden charges, busted features, and terrible interface, I had finally reached my limit …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I understood I had made a big mistake. The cons considerably outweighed any advantages.
No software application is ideal, yet the large volume of issues was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software comes down to depend on. If I can not trust it to manage critical functions properly or believe a vendor has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– even after spending substantial time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the challenging contact us to turn around course and return back to Keap completely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I picked up from this debacle.
Key Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly ill fortune. Yet in knowledge, it showed me a few crucial lessons:
- Adhere to what works. Do not disturb what’s working unless something is definitively far better across the board. Modification brings risk.
- Vet claims completely. Marketing hype around brand-new software application usually covers larger underlying imperfections. Deep due persistance is important.
- Choose simplicity over features. Properly designed devices need to make your job life simpler, not extra complex and messy.
- Openness constructs depend on. Nontransparent pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert issues damages trust fund.
- Look for objective reviews. Delighted assistance assesses imply less if excessive concerns suggest bad general functionality.
- Perfection is impossible. No single solution can completely meet every unique service requirement. Find the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over transformation. Incremental improvements commonly surpass high-risk wholesale reinvention of what already works penalty.
Basically, I discovered to be a lot more skeptical of “as well excellent to be real” marketing claims and much less tempted by the attraction of glossy new objects. The tools you use daily need to gain trust with openness and performance, not glossy advertising.