As a company owner for over a years, I rely on software and automation to streamline operations and provide outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it certainly caught my attention GoHighLevel For Bookkeepers.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one client monitoring platform with marketing, sales, and solution tools incorporated with each other. As a business owner constantly looking to streamline and scale my service, it looked like a dream happened theoretically. Who would not want a single service that does it all?
Yet in this thorough GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my tragic journey of trying (and stopping working) to switch over to this prominent new software application. You’ll learn:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own company needs, with any luck you can pick up from my painful blunders and pumped up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this checklist of finest CRMs instead. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and job management choice to GoHighLevel, after that below are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching Over from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context regarding my previous setup. For over 5 years I had actually been gladly relying on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer monitoring and automation demands.
I located Keap user-friendly to use and it managed whatever I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to assist small businesses keep their customers while including new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, ensuring leads and customers receive the appropriate messages at the right time. Use site and social networks kinds to improve lead follow-up, and handle your growth with easy consultation organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and repayment handling, maximizing your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours per week and increase earnings by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no charge card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses a comprehensive consumer connection management (CRM) and marketing automation remedy tailored for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on enhancing sales procedures and supporting client relationships through powerful automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one approach integrates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it specifically appealing for companies looking to settle their technology stack.
Essentially, it just worked reliably with minimal fuss or maintenance needed. My open and click-through prices were great (like 35% excellent). Automations ran smoothly with no issues.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my whole operational foundation from a system that functioned to try something unverified and untried?
In hindsight I can confess I got attracted by the alarm call of “glossy object disorder”. You know the sensation: when everyone’s talking about a new device that will certainly reinvent your business … The grass frequently looks greener on the other side, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel may lower rubbing factors that I would certainly discovered to endure for many years with Keap.
I withstood in the beginning, but a few even more irritations led me to think possibly it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I made a decision to start. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing substantially greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This wasn’t a decision I took lightly. I understood switching over platforms was going to call for moving all my Keap data and basically rebuilding my whole tech framework from scratch utilizing all of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Right here’s an introduction of just several of the effort required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email customer records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Moving customer accounts, notes, and project data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Establishing landing pages, promos, and sales funnels around again
- Learning a completely foreign UX and interface design
All in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of setup job transitioning whatever over– in addition to handling shed performance throughout the switch.
However ultimately, it was a calculated investment I was willing to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would settle with GoHighLevel offering a better lasting remedy for my company, Dripify. Oh how incorrect I was …
It only took me about a month of hands-on use to understand I had actually made a huge mistake. The problems started piling up swiftly, up until it got to a factor I had to cut my losses and change back to Keap completely.
Allow’s go through the horrible issues I experienced.
Safety Issues & Many Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to carefully recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding brand-new email subscribers, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending occasion tips, managing subscription expiries and a lot more.
Every little thing appeared to be working penalty … till all of a sudden it wasn’t. One early morning, I awoke to discover 171 entirely unnecessary e-mails had been sent out to customers who should NOT have actually received them. This happened 3 days in a row, with a different set of 160 people every day.
I anxiously attempted fixing and restoring the automation from scratch. However the issue lingered.
When I desperately reached out to their assistance team, they slightly asserted “server problems” were to blame. However this description really did not make any type of sense, since the errors continued taking place each morning like clockwork unrelated to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this huge failing was entirely undesirable and just really did not benefit my service. I have countless contacts relying upon my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be completely unreliable, just how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and delicate customer information to their technology?
The unintuitive user interface only compounded these problems …
Aggravating UX
Originating from Keap where every little thing was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt steep and complicated.
Easy jobs like editing workflows involved excavating with food selection systems that were all over the place. Secret setups were unexplainably spread in absolutely different sections. Relocating between functions really felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I imply by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate setups panels to handle overall, individual, and product arrangements. Yet for some insane factor, the links to gain access to each of these core setups were spread out on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As a person who values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously annoyed me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress instead of a refined item ready for prime-time usage. Their top priorities seemed concentrated on packing in every feature imaginable, with inadequate usability as an afterthought.
And talking features, I soon recognized the low price tag featured pricey concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel For Bookkeepers
Among GoHighLevel’s largest marketing points is the inexpensive rate for accessibility to so many features. However I promptly discovered this low-cost base price was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with occasional fees for core capability. All of a sudden my charge card statements had obscure $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you get billed every single time you send out an e-mail with their servers. So for high quantity customers, this added up to hundreds of bucks in unforeseen expenses.
Between these per-email costs and paying additional for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “cost effective” GoHighLevel registration wound up setting you back substantially MORE than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was tempting, but simply not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly supported email open prices plummet practically over night after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my audience involvement consistently struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantaneously to a worthless 9% open price.
Regardless of how much I optimized my sending out practices or tried every repairing technique, I could hardly nudge open prices back into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous benchmarks GoHighLevel For Bookkeepers.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails instantly had terrible involvement. The only point I could assume that would certainly be creating this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so dependent on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability problems, concealed costs, broken features, and dreadful user interface, I had lastly reached my restriction …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had made a significant blunder. The disadvantages substantially surpassed any type of benefits.
No software application is excellent, however the sheer volume of problems was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software boils down to count on. If I can not trust it to take care of essential features properly or think a vendor has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to walk away– even after investing significant time, money, and initiative migrating.
So I made the challenging contact us to turn around program and return back to Keap completely simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I learned from this fiasco.
Secret Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a pricey misadventure. However in hindsight, it showed me a few vital lessons:
- Stay with what jobs. Don’t distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively much better across the board. Change brings risk.
- Vet claims extensively. Marketing buzz around brand-new software application usually obscures bigger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is crucial.
- Select simpleness over features. Properly designed tools ought to make your work life easier, not a lot more challenging and unpleasant.
- Transparency builds trust fund. Opaque pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert issues destroys depend on.
- Seek objective reviews. Happy support reviews imply much less if excessive issues indicate inadequate general functionality.
- Excellence is difficult. No single remedy can flawlessly meet every unique organization need. Find the least-bad fit.
- Development over transformation. Incremental renovations typically outweigh dangerous wholesale reinvention of what currently functions penalty.
Basically, I found out to be more cynical of “too good to be real” marketing claims and much less lured by the appeal of glossy new items. The devices you utilize daily need to gain trust fund via openness and performance, not slick advertising.