As a firm owner for over a years, I depend on software program and automation to improve procedures and deliver outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it certainly caught my interest GoHighLevel For Accountants.
The idea was enticing– an all-in-one client management system with marketing, sales, and service devices integrated together. As an entrepreneur always seeking to simplify and scale my business, it felt like a dream become a reality on paper. Who wouldn’t want a single solution that does it all?
However in this thorough GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my tragic trip of trying (and stopping working) to change to this prominent new software application. You’ll learn:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your own service needs, ideally you can learn from my painful mistakes and pumped up expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this listing of best CRMs instead. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and job administration option to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching Over from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context concerning my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had actually been happily relying on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my client administration and automation demands.
I found Keap user-friendly to make use of and it handled every little thing I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to aid small businesses maintain their clients while adding brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, making sure leads and clients receive the ideal messages at the correct time. Usage site and social networks types to streamline lead follow-up, and manage your growth with easy appointment organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and settlement handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours weekly and rise revenue by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no bank card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a detailed client connection administration (CRM) and marketing automation option customized for small companies and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on enhancing sales processes and supporting client relationships through effective automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one strategy integrates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job management, making it especially appealing for companies wanting to settle their technology pile.
For the most part, it just worked reliably with marginal difficulty or maintenance needed. My open and click-through prices were excellent (like 35% terrific). Automations ran smoothly without any concerns.
So why in the world was I tempted to uproot my whole functional foundation from a system that worked to attempt something unproven and untested?
In hindsight I can confess I obtained seduced by the alarm telephone call of “glossy object syndrome”. You recognize the feeling: when everybody’s talking about a new device that will transform your organization … The lawn typically looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel might lower rubbing points that I ‘d discovered to endure throughout the years with Keap.
I stood up to at first, yet a few more aggravations led me to think maybe it was time for an adjustment.
The Investment: Migrating My Company to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I made a decision to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, investing considerably greater than the $97/month starter price.
This wasn’t a choice I took lightly. I recognized switching platforms was mosting likely to call for migrating all my Keap information and basically rebuilding my whole tech infrastructure from square one using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Below’s an introduction of simply some of the effort required:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail client records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer profiles, notes, and project information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Establishing landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels all over again
- Learning a completely international UX and user interface design
Done in, I spent around 30-40 laborious hours of configuration job transitioning every little thing over– not to mention taking care of lost efficiency during the switch.
However ultimately, it was a computed investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term pain would certainly repay with GoHighLevel supplying a much better long-term service for my service, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It only took me regarding a month of hands-on use to realize I had actually made a large blunder. The problems began piling up quickly, till it got to a point I needed to cut my losses and switch back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s go through the nightmarish issues I ran into.
Safety And Security Issues & Several Bugs
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to diligently recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding brand-new e-mail subscribers, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out event reminders, handling membership expirations and much more.
Whatever seemed to be functioning fine … till suddenly it had not been. One morning, I awoke to locate 171 entirely unimportant emails had actually been sent to individuals who ought to NOT have actually obtained them. This happened three days straight, with a different batch of 160 people each day.
I frantically tried fixing and restoring the automation from scratch. However the problem persisted.
When I seriously reached out to their support team, they slightly declared “server problems” were to blame. But this description really did not make any type of sense, since the errors continued taking place each early morning like clockwork unconnected to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this large failure was completely undesirable and just really did not help my service. I have thousands of get in touches with relying on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be completely unreliable, exactly how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer data to their innovation?
The unintuitive interface just worsened these concerns …
Irritating UX
Coming from Keap where everything was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt high and challenging.
Straightforward tasks like editing and enhancing workflows included digging through food selection systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably scattered in entirely different areas. Moving between functions really felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I imply by speaking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate settings panels to manage general, private, and product configurations. Yet for some insane reason, the links to gain access to each of these core setups were expanded on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As someone that values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously irritated me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress instead of a refined product all set for prime-time use. Their priorities appeared focused on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with inadequate use as a second thought.
And talking features, I soon recognized the affordable price tag featured costly compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel For Accountants
One of GoHighLevel’s greatest marketing points is the affordable rate for accessibility to a lot of features. Yet I quickly learned this affordable base cost was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed users with erratic fees for core capability. All of a sudden my charge card declarations had obscure $10 costs from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you obtain billed every time you send out an email with their web servers. So for high volume users, this amounted to numerous bucks in unforeseen prices.
Between these per-email costs and paying extra for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “cost effective” GoHighLevel registration ended up costing considerably greater than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was appealing, however just not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully nurtured email open rates drop virtually overnight after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market engagement consistently struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked promptly to a worthless 9% open rate.
Despite just how much I maximized my sending methods or attempted every troubleshooting technique, I could hardly nudge open prices back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel For Accountants.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails unexpectedly had terrible engagement. The only point I could assume that would certainly be creating this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so depending on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability concerns, concealed fees, broken features, and terrible interface, I had ultimately reached my restriction …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my firm to GoHighLevel, I understood I had made a huge error. The disadvantages drastically exceeded any advantages.
No software program is ideal, but the large quantity of problems was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to trust. If I can not trust it to take care of essential functions capably or believe a vendor has my best interests in mind, after that it’s time to leave– even after spending substantial time, money, and initiative moving.
So I made the hard call to turn around course and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s discover what I learned from this debacle.
Trick Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as an expensive accident. However in hindsight, it taught me a few crucial lessons:
- Stay with what jobs. Do not disturb what’s working unless something is definitively much better across the board. Adjustment brings danger.
- Vet claims completely. Marketing hype around brand-new software application often covers bigger underlying defects. Deep due persistance is vital.
- Select simplicity over features. Well-designed devices ought to make your job life simpler, not more complicated and untidy.
- Openness constructs count on. Opaque pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape troubles destroys count on.
- Seek honest testimonials. Happy support examines suggest less if excessive concerns suggest poor overall use.
- Excellence is impossible. No single service can completely satisfy every special business need. Find the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over transformation. Step-by-step enhancements typically surpass dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already functions penalty.
Simply put, I learned to be much more doubtful of “too good to be true” marketing insurance claims and much less attracted by the attraction of shiny new things. The devices you use daily must earn trust via openness and efficiency, not glossy advertising.